Ranked choice gives voters more control
Thank you for printing Rob Richie’s piece, “Blame our voting rules, not social media” (Wednesday), about ranked choice voting.
Every election we always hear people making the argument: “No! You can’t vote for Candidate Angel, he’s not viable. A vote for Candidate Angel is really a vote for Candidate Evil. You have to vote for Candidate Mudhen, that’s the only way to defeat Evil.”
With ranked choice voting, this argument is totally invalid. I can put Candidate Angel at the top of my list and still put Candidate Evil at the bottom. When no one can be intimidated out of voting for the candidate they believe in because he has good ideas, we might find that Candidate Angel is electable after all. We might gradually enter a world in which good ideas are more “viable” than lots of cash.
In today’s election system, primary elections are dominated by party extremists who are more likely to vote in primaries. With the closed primary system, this means that party extremists make sure only a fellow extremist can get on the general election ballot. This leaves no one but extremists to vote for, puts more extremists in office and turns governing into 24/7 bile-spewing instead of getting the people’s business done. With ranked choice voting, unless the candidate at the very bottom of your ballot is elected, then your vote actually counted for something, and the candidate you elected actually had at least some of your support.
In today’s elections, if your guy lost, your vote was meaningless, and you are being represented by someone you didn’t want. When people see there is a much greater chance of their vote meaning something, turnout might actually go up. TOM HORSLEY,
DELRAY BEACH Editor’s note: In a rankedchoice system, voters don’t vote for a single candidate; they list several in order of preference. Ballots are first counted with the voters’ top choices. If a candidate gets more than 50 percent, that’s the winner. Otherwise, the last candidate on the list is eliminated, those votes redistributed to the remaining candidates, and the process repeats until someone gets a majority.