Name your top three favorite movies. continue. wait.
I think it’s a great pick. My works include “West Side Story” (the remake, not the original), “Clue”, and “12 Angry Men.”
Alabama politicians don’t believe we can do that. They don’t believe that we can do something as simple as ordering things depending on how much we like them.
Well, not really. Why else would they ban ranked choice voting?
Ranked choice voting, also known as instant runoff voting, is a system in which voters rank candidates from their first preference to their last preference.
When it comes to vote counting, the candidate with the least number of first-choice votes is eliminated first. Then, everyone who chose that candidate as their first choice will vote for their second choice.
Eliminate the least popular candidates still on the list, wash, rinse, and repeat. If a voter’s first and second choices are eliminated, the vote goes to their third choice, and so on. The election ends when a candidate receives more than 50% of her votes.
that’s it. It’s so simple that you can explain it like this: within 2 minutes.
But Gov. Kay Ivey says this simple system is “confusing voters.” That’s why she had to sign a bill banning local governments from using ranked-choice voting.
If you ask Rep. Mark Shirley, R-Mobile, this is “the kind of vote that is very confusing and difficult and difficult to explain.” That’s why he had to sponsor the bill in the state Legislature this past session.
If you ask Sen. Arthur Orr, R-Decatur, it’s “very confusing.” Well, at least I know that Orr is sincere. Because he doesn’t understand ranked choice voting himself, even though he supports a bill that would ban ranked choice voting.
On the Senate floor, Orr said that election officials in ranked-choice elections “consider the value of the numbers — third place is not as good as first place — they add it all up, and then out of that… It will lead to the final candidates.”
Sure, I think election officials can do that, but it’s definitely not ranked choice voting. Orr’s explanation, if anything, resembles an almost entirely theoretical one. border counting systemnot a ranked choice.
Is ranked choice voting really that complicated? Seems like a no-brainer to me. But I’m just a guy and I made the mistake of getting a political science degree after all. Perhaps John Q. The public has more sympathy for Sen. Orr.
Well, ranked-choice voting is already used in elections in Alaska and Maine, and in local elections in New York City and many other municipalities. If you want to see if Ivey is right, just look at how voters in those areas are doing.
according to 2024 report A study of recent elections in New York City by the voting reform group FairVote found that the error rate in ranked elections is about the same as the error rate in regular elections. Apparently, in New York, the system isn’t all that “confusing voters.”
And for me personally? Unlike some people, I don’t believe New York City voters are any smarter than voters here in Alabama.
But perhaps Governor Ivey, Representative Shirley, and Senator Orr think differently.
Of course, this system isn’t just confusing to the average Alabamian. It also limits “the ability to directly elect the next candidate.” [your] choice. ” So says Governor Ivey. But is that so?
Now, how capable are you of electing the candidate of your choice right now?
As you know, Alabama is full of ruby red and sapphire blue districts. Indeed, if the incumbent can win the next primary (though that is not necessarily certain), he will almost advance to re-election.
And primaries aren’t necessarily the most democratic process. For example, voter turnout in the 2022 Alabama primary was approximately 23.4 percent. Voter turnout in the primary runoff fell to just 12.8%.
In most cases here in Alabama, 23.4 percent or 12.8 percent of voters will actually choose everyone else’s representatives, rather than the 38.6 percent who voted in the general election.
Ranked choice voting would allow voters to actually have a choice in the general election. Instead of deciding whether to offer moral support to a doomed candidate or co-sign a guaranteed victory for a five-time incumbent, we rank six candidates and, thanks to your vote, give him You might be able to let the third most popular candidate win the election.
In my opinion, allowing more people to vote on who actually represents them is a good thing.
In other words, ranked-choice voting doesn’t make Alabama politics unrecognizable. Even with ranked-choice voting, districts full of liberals would still elect liberals. Conservatives will be elected even in constituencies where there are many conservatives.
But we may not elect the same liberals or conservatives as last election, and that’s unlikely to happen to politicians here in the Yellowhammer State.
That must be why 74 members of the state House of Representatives voted to ban ranked-choice voting, and the state Senate also voted unanimously to ban it.
Unless, of course, the politicians you vote for or against every few years despise you enough to think you can’t rank candidates.
You know, one possibility is that Alabama politicians aren’t lying, they’re just disrespecting the voters they’re supposed to represent. They think that come election day, they won’t be able to rank the candidates instead of just choosing them.
Another possibility is that you’re so scared that they can protect the Democratic-Republican duopoly by telling you to your face that you’re too stupid to understand ranked-choice voting. That’s what they think.
I’m not sure which option I prefer.
But from now on, every time you name your favorite movie or watch a video ranking the best episodes of “Frasier,” you’ll wonder what Alabama politicians are thinking about their supposed voters. I’m trying to remember exactly. We encourage you to do the same.
