Alaska will try something completely new in the fall election

Glad to see AK going this route. Ending party primaries would help even more. There are several threads on ranked-choice voting. Here is one.

https://bbs.clutchfans.net/threads/voting-done-right.294504/#post-12069665

 

I’m interested in this as well

 

We've had Ranked Choice in Minneapolis and St. Paul for a few years. It only applies to city elections. So far I think it's been a mixed bag and was one reason why our current Mayor Jacob Frey survived even though he did a piss poor job following the George Floyd Protests.

 

He won by 11%. If not for ranked voting, it would probably be a bigger win (he was leading by 19pt in the poll - same poll that showed he has 44% of the 1st choice) and he probably was unlikely to even be at a risk of losing.

 

I stand corrected. I hadn't seen an in detail results breakdown and from what I had heard previously was that it was closer.

 

Hoping this works out. This would effectively weaken the dominance of the 2 party system, over time, and pull us back from the fringes.

 

Very interesting, @T_Man. Thanks for posting it. I’ll be watching to see how this works. Senator Murkowski appears to have represented her state well. We’ll see how that’s reflected in the election with this new system.

My personal preference would be making voting and registering to vote in this country as easy as possible, with a national holiday for congressional and presidential elections. There is no logical reason, since there is no credible evidence of voter fraud of any significance, for not allowing widespread voting by mail, drive by voting, as well as being able to register to vote at any time during the year up until a few days before an election. In short, instead of the arcane efforts of the Republican Party to prevent voting, make voting as easy as possible for all parties.

I would also like to see real reform making redistricting as fair and non-partisan as possible. With modern technology married to highly sophisticated software, drawing districts that marginalize entire ethnic groups and, among other things, enable political parties with a minority of the total vote to dominate state legislatures, we have seen “small d” democratic representation warped to such an extent that it is barely worthy of the name, in my opinion.

 

RCV and eliminating closed primaries are pretty much the only way for America to get its **** back together. Glad Alaska is leading the way.

 

I hope it's helpful too. But I don't think we'll break the duopoly so long as we have winner-take-all elections. And, even if we broke the duopoly, politics will still always be politics.

 

One purpose of the system, approved by voters in 2020, was to weed out extremists by making it harder for candidates to be elected simply by appealing to the hard-liners of their party’s base.


It worked splendidly.

• Sen. Lisa Murkowski, a relatively moderate mainstream Republican, won reelection in November by defeating a MAGA fundamentalist trying to avenge Murkowski’s vote punishing President Trump for the Jan. 6 insurrection.
  
  
• The state’s sole House seat was captured by Mary Peltola, a relatively moderate mainstream Democrat, who thwarted a comeback bid by the far-right pugilist (as willfully ignorant as i want to be) Sarah Palin.

the effort to promote consensus and elevate a less performative, more problem-solving approach to politics sets a good example.

More places should try it.

https://www.latimes.com/politics/st...ice-voting-solution-to-political-polarization​