Then you really won’t like this.
Port Chester (NY) recently elected a Hispanic to town council using a cumulative voting remedy. This widely criticized plan gives 6 votes to each voter. The voter is free to cast all 6 for one person, or spread the six among different candidates. It is designed to remedy a Section 2 violation under the voting rights act. If you don’t care for cumulative voting, you’ll really hate something the Brennan Center for Justice has come up with and wanted to see implemented in Port Chester. It’s called “choice voting.” The Brennan Center describes it thusly :
“Under choice voting, voters rank candidates in descending order of preference. Candidates who receive high rankings from a sufficient number of minority voters can still gain representation on multi-member legislative districts even if white voters support other candidates.”
That’s just what we need voters to do in the booth: make top 10 lists to bind us all. Keep in mind that these very bad ideas won’t go away just because most people recognize them as bad ideas. A well funded industry exists whose raison d’etre is to generate more bad ideas, without any of the normal market forces which otherwise exist to eradicate bad ideas.
Just linked to this from FREE REPUBLIC. Count me as one woman who is thrilled to see you taking on these voting issues. Will be checking back often.
Not a HISPANIC!?! What next???
You feel to explain why this is a “bad” idea, or undercut any of the reasons they have provided for why they are proposing it.
Anonymous, if it is not self-evident to you why “choice voting” is a bad idea, then not amount of explanation will convince you. I would advise you only that if the law can be manipulated to “get me” then it can be manipulated to “get you.” In time, it will be. This is why we have the rule of law and not the rule of men. You could learn much beginning with Sir Thomas Moore, moving on to the founders (Hamilton, John Jay, and Madison) with the Federalist Papers, and then jumping to the twentieth century with James Buchanan (The Logical Foundation of Constitutional Liberty) and the F. A. Hayek (the Constitution of Liberty). Don’t fret, however. You are one of many millions who lack a proper education.
I don’t get why you’re against cumulative voting – all it did was give voters additional options with the same number of votes they had before. Isn’t that free market politics?
Also, “choice voting” seems to be the single transferable vote system advocated by the likes of John Stuart Mill and used in many places around the world, such as all city elections in Scotland and Ireland.
Winner take all is hardly part of our Constitution and hardly embodies the spirit of the Federalist Papers that expressed concern about one faction dominating other factions.
EDITOR NOTE: Winner take all might not be in the Constitution, but going back to the first elections in the Jamestown Colony, it has been in our legal DNA. Most Americans would cringe at the idea we should turn to Scotland or Ireland for an example to replace ours. Been there. Done that. We kind of did it the other way around. No going back now.
The blame for promoting Instant Runoff Voting falls mainly to the national non profit FairVote.org but the Brennan Center did intervene on their behalf. The City of Port Chester was forced to make a change, and the City chose Cumulative voting.
Now, here’s the $million question:
Did Luis Morano win because of Cumulative voting or the $100-per-voter spent on voter education.
$100 per voter is a hefty amount. Consider that a NY SBE member had told me that NY spends about $9 per registered voter per year in net annual election expenditures.
Could bullet voting have achieved the same result? If so, that would be simpler.
Whether you dislike Cumulative Voting or not, Instant Runoff Voting is much much worse. Cumulative votes can be added up at the polls. IRV cannot – it is not additive. With IRV you can hurt your preferred choice by voting for them. IRV is complex to count, costly to administer, and results are not intuitive. Instant Runoff Voting is a misnomer, it does not provide the same results as a traditional runoff, voters make their choices before they know who would be “in” the final runoff, and it is so complex that it would be hard to detect error or fraud.