This smells like real reform: ranked voting

Krist Novoselic, the former bass player for Nirvana, is now chairman of the board at FairVote, a national organization focused on fundamental structural reform of American elections. Seriously.

He has written a piece for Salon.com that makes a good case for ranked voting – a system in which primary voters don’t vote solely for their favorite candidate, they rank the candidates. Those rankings, cumulatively, then eliminate the need for a run-off election – something that doesn’t exist in Michigan but is common across the nation.

The “ranked choice voting” system, already used in many cities (including Ferndale), has proven to be cheaper and some say it reduces the rancor in campaigns.

Here’s taste of Novoselic’s argument:

“Ranked choice voting accomplishes the goals of runoff elections in a single election. A candidate wins when reaching a threshold of votes (generally 50 percent). Rather than requiring voters to come back to the polls to either vote for their first choice candidates again or vote for a second or later choice who made the runoff, RCV simply asks voters to indicate both their first-choice and their second and later choices on the same ballot.
“Used for nearly all elections in nations like Australia and Ireland — and for mayoral elections in London — RCV has a history of extensive use in the United States, where it was invented in 1870. With the rise of optical voting equipment, RCV has become an increasingly popular election reform. Voters in more than a dozen cities have approved ranked choice voting, typically by landslide margins, for elections for citywide offices, including Memphis, Minneapolis, St. Paul, Berkeley, Oakland, San Francisco, Portland (Maine), Sarasota, Santa Fe, Ferndale (Michigan), and Takoma Park (Maryland).

“Arkansas, Louisiana, and South Carolina use ranked choice voting for military and overseas voters to guarantee their ability to participate in their runoff elections. Recently, a federal court order declared that Alabama must use ranked choice ballots for overseas voters to ensure that they can participate fully in the upcoming congressional district one special election Republican primary runoffs.
“Voters have to get used to understanding the results of a close RCV election, but exit surveys show they like to rank candidates. And there’s no doubt that RCV has a powerful impact. Mike Brennan, the mayor of Portland (ME) is a veteran politician who had run many times before winning Portland’s first RCV election in 2011. A recent interview he gave is fascinating for his insights about how RCV changed his campaign. Mayor Brennan reached out to far more voters, cut back on negative attacks and turnout ultimately soared. Of the 18 offices elected by RCV in Oakland (CA), 16 had more votes than their predecessor.”