Take Back Elections Looks at Various Voting Methods (Meeting #2)
Meeting #2
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