SUMMARY
- Ranked Choice Voting is a method for conducting an election
- A candidate has to have more than 50% of the vote to win
- Voting with Ranked Choice Voting is as easy as putting a few choices in your order of preference
- Increased competition for your vote means candidates will have to try to make themselves appealing to more voters in order to get elected which makes it harder for extremists to win elections
- Candidates that have to campaign on a more broad platform will be more likely to work with other legislators to find better solutions to complex problems
- Extremists from either party will have less of an effect on who gets elected and what they can do once in office
WHAT IT IS
Ranked Choice Voting is a method for conducting an election. Instead of voting for one candidate, you list multiple candidates in your order of preference. Also called “Instant run-off” elections, if no candidate has more than 50% of the vote after the first ballot count, the ballots are processed a second time or third time until one candidate has more than 50% of the total vote. In each recount of the ballots, the bottom candidate is deleted from the field. Anyone that had listed that candidate as their first choice has their votes go to their second choice.
You might be thinking that you just want to vote and how the count is done isn’t important to you. If you can list your three favorite ice cream flavors then you can vote with Ranked Choice Voting, it really isn’t any harder than that.
WHY RANKED CHOICE VOTING IS GOOD FOR NEW JERSEY
As our two legacy political parties have become more extreme and much less willing to solve problems by compromising to find good, long term solutions. As a result, our government has become less efficient and much less effective at improving our quality of life. We pay taxes to fund our government whose job it is to make our lives better but if the people we elect can’t solve problems because they are too worried about keeping their very inflexible party leadership happy, then we are paying taxes and getting practically nothing in return.
Ranked Choice Voting is an elections method that enables more candidates to participate which means it increases competition for your votes. When there is more competition, candidates have to present a platform that is more broad and appealing in order to attract more votes. Candidates from either party that can only speak to their most extreme voters will be much less likely to get elected.
As we elect less extreme candidates to state and local government offices, we should expect that doing what is best for the State of New Jersey will become more important than doing what is right for either political party. Political parties will continue to be an important part of the democratic systems of New Jersey but party insiders won’t have as much control over who we elect.
STATUS OF RANKED CHOICE VOTING IN NEW JERSEY
- NJ S1712 carried over from previous legislative sessions, February 28, 2022
- Would apply Ranked Choice Voting methods to all state-level and federal elections conducted in New Jersey
- First introduced in New Jersey during 2018/2019 legislative session
- Currently stalled in committee
- https://www.billtrack50.com/billdetail/1454782
- NJ A4744, last introduced during 2020/2021 legislative session, September 24, 2020
- Applies to certain local level elections
- Uses alternative term “Instant run-off” in place of Ranked Choice Voting, means the same thing
- https://www.njleg.state.nj.us/bill-search/2020/A4744
- Hoboken, NJ passed RCV trigger law (Requires statewide RCV law in order for Hoboken law to become active/legal), December, 2021
- A new bill expected to be introduced permitting RCV in municipal and school board elections, similar to NJ A4744 above
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