This article in Aspen, Colorado’s daily newspaper of February 19 explains that although the city will definitely use Ranked-Choice Voting this year for its own elections, the City Council must decide between two different versions.
This article in Aspen, Colorado’s daily newspaper of February 19 explains that although the city will definitely use Ranked-Choice Voting this year for its own elections, the City Council must decide between two different versions.
Talk about two horrible ways of counting votes. There are well understood ways of counting ranked votes in multi-member races. They are even used in the USA.
In putting IRV on the ballot two years ago, the city council made it clear it was establishing a majoritarian system. The debate has been interesting, to say the least. The gist of the difference is whether the new system should come as close to _duplicating__ the previous runoff system or __Improve it.
I suspect you, like me, would prefer that they use the single transferable vote method of proportional representation. But with a majoritarian system, holding two consecutive IRV elections with the same ballot (excluding the winner after electing the first seat) is the system FairVote is recommending.
There’s a separate decision about whether to do “top two” IRV (eliminate all but top two after first round, like a traditional runoff) or “sequential IRV” (eliminate the last-place candidate one at a time). FairVote is recommending the latter system.
I prefer “sequential IRV” simply because the possibility of the margin between 2nd and 3rd place to be close enough that 3rd could overtake 2nd after dropping the last place finisher once or twice.
ex. 1979 Birmingham Mayoral election
Richard Arrington, Jr: 31,521 votes (43.9%, runoff)
Frank Parsons: 12,135 votes (16.9%, runoff)
John Katopodis: 12,038 votes (16.8%)
David Vann, incumbent: 11,450 votes (15.9%)
Larry Langford: 2,856 votes (4%)
Don Black: 1,771 votes (2.4%)
Oliver: 69 votes (0.1%)