Beware the ranked-choice voting Trojan horse
In the last hours of the 2024 Colorado legislative session, a group of county clerks crafted an amendment to Senate Bill 24-210 to temper the rush-to-judgment of a November ballot initiative that would impose statewide ranked-choice voting. They were concerned about public confusion over RCV, added costs, errors, and long delays in tabulating results...
This initiative is an RCV hybrid, a so-called “final-four plurality” with two phases. Party primaries for governor, other statewide executive offices, state legislature, and congress would be eliminated. Instead, candidates for those posts would run in a single open primary, regardless of party affiliation, with the four that get the most votes for each post advancing to the general election, the second phase, that would employ ranked-choice voting. On a grid-style ballot, rather than voting for just one candidate you’d vote for one or more candidates ranked in order of your preference (1, 2, 3, 4). A candidate that gets a majority of that vote for any position wins election immediately. If no candidate gets a majority, a second-round tabulation eliminates the candidate that got the fewest votes in the first round. The votes of the people who voted for that losing candidate as their first choice are then redistributed to the candidate they had selected as their second choice. If that doesn’t produce a majority winner the process continues in the same manner for as many rounds as necessary to produce a majority winner.
Are your eyes glazing over yet? I’ll be voting against it.
RCV formats differ from state to state, and some are even worse. Like another where you’re forced to rank all the candidates in numerical order. If you fail to do so - either by accident or design, perhaps because you despise a candidate or a particular political party - your ballot can be trashed...
Leading the RCV initiative in Colorado and nationally is Unite America, a group that feigns bipartisanship but is dominated and funded by deep-pocket Democrats like Charles Wheelen and Kathryn Mordoch...
RCV is vulnerable to organized electoral manipulation, gaming the system...
... it’s no coincidence that its support here is overwhelmingly from those on the left who would love to make our now Democrat one-party state even more so. At least 10 Republican states have already revoked or banned it.
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