Take Back Elections Looks at Various Voting Methods

Take Back Elections is examining the best voting methods to provide more fairness in our elections. We have been studying and examining these following:

• First Past the Post (FPP)/ Plurality. We have added FPP with Majority (51% or another number required!) to look at with run-off later.
• Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) or Instant Run-off Voting (IRV)
• Range or Score Voting
• Approval – a less expressive, simpler version of Range or Score

There are other possible methods. We feel any method MUST be able to be hand-countable! Thus our second meeting was a very brief over-view of these popular methods, with a focus on a hand-count demonstration.

We focused on Ranked Choice Voting in this meeting with an eye to the ability to hand-count. We easily found the difficulty and challenge of counting RCV in a 20-ballot, multi-race demonstration count. We point out that RCV cannot be hand-counted at the poll or precinct levels because if there is no way to know if there is a 51% clear winner in the first choice run-off unless you have all the ballots together and counted for a given race. Even in local races, ballots could never be hand-counted at a poll for a final hand tally, per poll, before the ballots leave any poll. This is a security feature, an onsite poll hand-count.

There will be another group meeting before a final recommendation for a specific method of voting is decided.

Please give us your comments and ideas below the blog! Sign up for our working groups! Donate, if you can, for our long-term work and see if you live in a ballot initiative state and sign up to help us out in that or another state on the state teams page!

Many thanks!!!!

Monta Welch

Take Back Elections.org

https://takebackelections.org/conference-call-videos/