Bill would let voters rank candidates
3/24/2008 - 5:03pm
It’s the individualist’s classic election dilemma: Do you vote for the third-party candidate you love at the risk of hurting the major-party candidate you sort-of like?
A bill introduced today aims to make those worries obsolete.
House Bill 1378, by Rep. John Kefalas, D-Fort Collins, and Sen. Ken Gordon, D-Denver, would take the first steps in allowing voters to rank candidates on a ballot in order of preference. The bill would direct the secretary of state to conduct a ranked voting pilot project in 2009 or 2010 in several cities and counties across the state.
In that pilot project, voters would be able to rank candidates on the ballot in the order of preference. In a scenario where multiple candidates are running for a single seat, votes for the candidate with the least support would be re-apportioned to the remaining candidates and so on until one candidate has received a majority of the votes.
“That way you can vote for your first choice without worrying that you’ll be electing your last choice,” Gordon said.
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Instant Runoff Voting
I very much appreciate the courage of Senator Gordon and Representative Kefalas in introducing this legislation, as I expect it will encounter significant resistance from both Republicans and Democrats interested more in preserving their own monopoly on power than in empowering the people and enhancing our democracy. It will be interesting to see who supports and who opposes this legislation. It doesn't get any simpler than this, but I expect there will be several attempts to confuse the issue, particularly after the "controversy" over something a simple as paper ballots.