Dan Walters, the Sacramento Bee’s veteran political columnist, has this story about the 2013 Los Angeles Mayoral election. He says that the two front-runners are ducking the hard issues and concentrating on negative campaigning. This suggests that if the city had Ranked-Choice Voting, the campaign would be more useful to the voters. There is also a hint that if Los Angeles had partisan city elections, in which candidates were nominees of political parties that actually took stands on the tough issues and placed these stands in the party platforms, that the campaign might also be better.
Los Angeles elects its mayor with a non-partisan two-round system.
Dan Walters made no suggestions whatsoever about the electoral system, nor did he hint that if candidates were nominees of political parties that they would take stands on the tough issues, and not engage in negative campaigning.
Everyone agreed that Bob Kiss, who was elected mayor of Burlington, VT under IRV was a really nice guy. But when a particular issue confronted the city, he floundered. This led Burlington voters to repeal IRV.
When Aspen used IRV for its mayoral election, it did not stop negative campaigning.
IRV does not protect elected candidates from scandal. Ask Ross Mirkarimi, or the supervisor that voters elected despite his not living in the city.
Walters is complaining that the mayoral candidates don’t favor the sales tax increasing, yet opponents of the sales tax increase note that it will do very little to address the structural deficit of the city or its unfunded pension liabilities. It is the opponents who are taking the tough stand, rather than just kicking the issue down the road.
Read between the lines of the Walters column.
#2 I think I would need hallucinogens to read what you are reading in that column.