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Portland enters ‘uncharted territory’ with first-in-nation City Council election system
(www.oregonlive.com)
this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2024
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politics
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This title is click bait, and wrong. Ranked Choice Voting is used, and has been in use, across the country for years - including in city councils.
In particular, city councils in St Paul and Minneapolis used Ranked Choice for elections in 2023.
Are the reporters just bad at their jobs, or is it just click bait hinging on the specifics of the "version" of Ranked Choice Voting? What's so different about their "version" of RCV that makes it so deserving of the alarmist title?
The article is paywalled.
It looks like the difference between the RCV elections you linked and the Portland one is that the Portland election has 3 seats available per district race instead of 1. There are at least 3 ways that could be managed:
Do a standard RCV elimination, but stop once you have 3 candidates left.
Do a standard RCV elimination until you have a majority candidate. That candidate gets one of the seats. Then remove that candidate, reassign their votes, and continue elimination until you have a new majority candidate. Repeat.
Do a standard RCV elimination until you have a majority candidate. That candidate gets one of the seats. Then restart the RCV count for the second seat with voters’ 1st choices, but the first seat winner removed from the running. Repeat for the third seat.
Edit: It’s none of the above! 😂 It’s a combination of 2 & 3 known as Single Transferrable Vote. The article (archived) doesn’t at all explain how counting works, but this video does.
Ah. STV isn't particularly complex to understand, either at voting or calculation time. It's a decent choice for multi-winner elections, which it sounds like the Portland election is.