Concerns

Submitted By: dwieb1@gmail.com – Click to email about this post

I was wrong to say there would be multiple ballots in ranked choice voting. There was a segment on Fox 12 news this morning simulating the method with candy. Simpler to follow than the explanation I saw earlier, it showed how ballots would be recounted – after eliminating a candidate with the lowest votes – using the second choice from ballots that were counted for the eliminated candidate. Rinse and repeat until one candidate has a majority of votes. So the counting process would be more difficult, but there would be only one ballot.

So I offer a much simpler example: Suppose there were 3 candidates for president and each voter was tasked with choosing from Harris, Trump, and RFK Jr.
Also for simplicity suppose there were only 1000 voters. If the first count showed 499 votes for Harris, 498 votes for Trump, and 3 votes for RFK Jr. then the process would eliminate RFK Jr. and count the second choice from those 3 ballots. That second choice could very well be for Trump, and the result would be 499 votes for Harris, and 501 votes for Trump. Trump would be declared the winner.

While that’s unlikely here in Oregon, the point is adding all this complexity leaves us vulnerable to political manipulation well beyond our understanding. We don’t need this. What we do need is more public forums to better understand what our politicians are doing and why.