RCV CALL TO ACTION

Ranked Choice Voting CALL TO ACTION

Not just anybody can get elected in New Jersey.  To be a winning candidate it takes a certain quality that is probably different from what you’d expect.  Experience, problem solving skills, and a local connection to the community are things you might guess a candidate needs but, most of all, to be a winning candidate in New Jersey you have to prove you can play ball.  Not in the sports sense of the words but in the cooperation sense of the words.  You have to prove you understand how the system of influence works and signal that you are ok with it and that you won’t challenge the people that benefit from it.  If you can prove you know how to play ball, you’re in the club.

As a voter, are you ok with that?  You might not get the best candidates to choose from but at least the candidates you’re electing won’t challenge the status quo!   

The status quo in New Jersey, according to USnews.com, is that we are #49 in the country for fiscal stability and #41 for infrastructure, two important contributors to overall quality of life.  Of the best states in which to retire, according to a newly released report from WalletHub.com, New Jersey is #49 due to our high cost of living and high state taxes. The website TruthInAccounting.org ranks New Jersey dead last in the country for overall fiscal health.

If you’ve ever wondered why waiting for politicians in New Jersey to solve problems is like the movie ‘Groundhog Day’, where the same exact day plays out over and over again, it’s because the people we elect don’t represent us, they represent the political machine that requires them to obey it or risk being ejected from it.  Truth be told, we don’t exactly elect people in New Jersey, not in the democratic sense anyway.  In New Jersey we rubber stamp candidates that have been selected by our local political committee leaders and then put into a neat and easily found line of the ballot colloquially known as “The County Line”.  

Don’t take my word for it, here’s an example of how the system controls who runs and who doesn’t; https://hudsonreporter.com/2021/04/19/chiaravalloti-ends-re-election-bid/.  

In order to have elections where voters of both parties can choose a candidate that they might actually want, we need a new system for electing people that can adequately process more than just two candidates.  That system is called Ranked Choice Voting and it is as easy as putting a few choices in your order of preference, that’s it, election officials do the rest.

Ranked Choice Voting uses multiple rounds of tabulation to process your selections so that you can vote first for the person that you really want to win without having to worry about wasting your vote.  Explaining it with words makes it sound much more complicated than it really is so just click the image below to see a short video about how Ranked Choice Voting works.

CALL TO ACTION

This CALL TO ACTION is in support of the Municipal and School Board Voting Options Act.  Introduced by Senators Andrew Zwicker and Linda Greenstein and Assemblyman Daniel Benson on December 5, 2022, this bill (S3369 in the Senate, A5039 in the General Assembly) will enable local governments to conduct Mayor, Council/Committee, and School Board elections via Ranked Choice Voting should their local voters approve such a change via referendum.

To help this legislation to pass we must;

As support for this legislation grows, we’ll publish a new CALL TO ACTION to help it exit committee and be brought to a vote.  Thank you for the time/effort you may invest in this effort!

New Jersey is worth fixing!

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Bart Cocchiola

Exec. Director, NJCDR

www.PTTP.buzz