#ranked choice

Holly Otterbein at Axios:

Democratic politicians and activists are quietly lobbying to upend the way the party picks its presidential nominee by urging the use of ranked-choice voting.

It's a tool that drew national attention when it propelled New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani to a decisive primary win.

Driving the news: Democratic National Committee chair Ken Martin and other top party officials have met privately with advocates who are pushing for the voting method to be expanded for the 2028 presidential primaries, three sources tell Axios.

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), Joe Biden pollster Celinda Lake, the nonprofit FairVote Action and other Democrats pitched the idea at a late October meeting, the sources said.

Zoom in: Supporters of the change — which would allow voters to rank candidates in order of preference — told those at a DNC breakfast gathering in D.C. that it would strengthen and unite the party.

They said it would prevent people's votes from being "wasted" after presidential candidates drop out, and encourage coalition-building among contenders — an attention-grabbing pitch in light of the party's divisive primaries in 2016 and 2020.

The idea has gotten a mixed response within the DNC. "I'm totally open to ranked-choice voting," one committee member said.

A second DNC member was more skeptical: "We should follow the lead of the states. They know better."

Critics say it would increase waiting times at the polls and be a logistical quagmire. Others argue it would lengthen the primary, for better or worse.

For the DNC to approve the use of ranked-choice voting in primaries, it would need the support of the powerful rules and bylaws committee and a majority of the 450-member body. State parties also would need to OK it, and many states would need to amend their election laws.

Ranked-choice voting to come to the 2028 Democratic Presidential primaries?

On Monday Stephen Colbert conducted a joint interview with NYC mayoral candidates Zohran Mamdani and Brad Lander. It was more of a substantive but cordial discussion than a debate.

The election is TODAY (Tuesday). Polls are open until 9 PM EDT. You must be a registered Democratic voter for this primary. Information on polling places and other election info can be found at...

vote.nyc

How funny it would be if Labour gets rid of the FPTP system because of pressure from Farage and his gammons, but instead of helping them win the next election it actually ends up helping the Greens instead.

It's no secret that US politics is racially polarized, and that in particular, the former Confederacy has an intense history of disenfranchising Black* voters and in response Black people overwhelmingly supporting whichever major party isn't currently in favor of that. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 attempted to resolve this and similar discrimination against other groups by requiring majority-minority districts under certain circumstances. It requires that, when there is a large racial minority in a particular state and a strong racial polarization of voters, that state must be Gerrymandered proportionally to its racial makeup to ensure that the minority can't be completely blocked out of representation. In practice, what this means is that, say, Louisiana, which is about 1/3 Black and entitled to 6 House seats, must draw its House districts in a way that is nearly mathematically guaranteed to always elect 4 white Republicans and 2 Black Democrats. It was ordered to do this exact thing in 2023... and then today, the Supreme Court overturned that court order on the grounds that racial Gerrymandering is unconstitutional.

I have no doubt that some Justices ruled in this way because they're racists and/or Republican partisans trying to gain an advantage for "their side". But they're still right that that is what the law requires and that it would otherwise be unconstitutional. What this is really showing is a tension between two different laws about how to contort fairness out of a deeply unfait election system. The solution is to think bigger.

Almost every seat in both houses of the US Congress is elected by first-past-the-post voting for a single winner. A few states have "jungle primaries" or their close relative top-two runoff elections for general elections and/or special elections (filling vacancies), which can be a mild improvement, but the two real standout exceptions are Maine and Alaska, which use instant runoff, the most popular (and easiest to explain) form of ranked-choice voting. Instead of picking one candidate, you rank them from best to worst. This weeds out

Instant runoff doesn't solve Gerrymandering, though... unless you have multi-member districts. And indeed, there is a bill in the current House that addresses this exact problem by introducing single transferrable vote -- a system for instant runoff with multiple winners -- for all elections to the House and Senate and requiring that all states with multiple representatives elect them in multi-member districts of 3 to 5 members. (States with two representatives, like my home state of NH, will have a single two-member district, and when a state only elects one representative, single transferrable vote is the same thing as instant runoff.)

This will not pass the current Congress, and it will not be signed by the current anti-democracy regime. This is a wonderful solution to mutiple chronic problems that threatens to make the government work better and represent people more fairly, and Republicans hate that, while Democrats and independents usually support it. So consider this one of the most important things to nag your elected officials and candidates about and to put near the top of the post-Trump to-do list to slam the fucking door shut behind his sorry ass when it's kicked out one way or another.

-----