On April 27, the Vermont legislature passed HB 744, which lets Burlington use ranked choice voting for its own elections. The voters of Burlington had passed the ballot measure in March this year, for ranked choice voting. But the measure couldn’t be implemented until the legislature approved the idea.
http://ballot-access.org/2019/05/19/two-utah-cities-will-use-ranked-choice-voting-in-municipal-elections-this-year/
rotted rcv
Richard, I think ranked choice has to be implemented properly for it to be successful. The system needs to accommodate more than two candidates. But not too many. Also, the ballot needs to be designed right. As a native of Upstate New York I’m interested in this development. Do you think the system being implemented in Burlington will be popular?
Yes, as a general rule, when a jurisdiction switches to ranked choice voting, that jurisdiction continues using it. Burlington is a rare exception to that rule. It had ranked choice voting in the past, and then repealed it, but now it is coming back.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Burlington_mayoral_election
2009 Extremist elected via RCV – mandate from Hell >>> 2010 RCV repeal.
ZERO learned. 2022 RCV zombie corpse revived.
Condorcet = RCV done right.
Bizarrely, the new law applies to the city council, while the old law applied to mayor. It has long been Vermont policy that a candidate who receives 40% of the vote is elected without a runoff. It would be trivial to raise that to 50%.
The reason that the legislature is involved is that the Burlington charter is part of Vermont statute. Vermont does not have municipal home rule.
This was a common practice in New England. The legislature might grant a charter to build a turnpike or canal or railroad. They might also do this for a city to provide various services.
It appears that the practice in Vermont is to hold a referendum and then the legislature to grant the change.
In 2022, 8 city councillors were elected by ward. 3 candidates were unopposed, and three were two candidate races.
One of the two three-person races had a 78%-17%-5% result as the third candidate secured 72 votes compared to the winner’s 1208 votes.
So there was only one ward where it mattered, where the top two finished with 47.2% and 47.1% of the vote. Since the winner had 40% no runoff was held.
The 795-793 margin did end up in court. 5 mail ballots were rejected. Vermont had passed a law requiring that an election official give a voter an opportunity to cure a defective mail ballot. If the ballot was received 5 days before election day the voter would be contacted by mail. Afterwards, the election official would make a “good faith” effort to contact the voter. Some voters might have a phone number or email address. In one case, there was a phone number, but the voter did not have an answering machine.
In a small city like Burlington there is no reason that the ballot could not have been hand delivered to the voter.
The referendum was in 2021, not 2022. The original proposal would hzve provided RCV for all city and school board elections. The referendum would have been in November 2020. The mayor vetoed that bill.
The version that only applied to city council elections was then drafted, and voted on in March 2021. Ironically that was coincident with a mayoral election where the mayor received 40% of the vote, but not a majority.
There is a great disparity in voter turnout among the wards. At the 2022 election, turnout among the wards relative to the average turnout was:
156%, 137%, 128%, 95%, 93%, 84%, 58%, and 49%.
If Burlington was really interested in OMOV, they would use STV from a city-wide electorate. They could elect 6 in alternating elections.