Democratic Primary voting should ALL be ranked-choice.

[TygrBright]

The Party should require it.

We implemented ranked-choice voting for local offices in our last municipal election and it was very effective. I admit I had some doubts, but it was much less difficult to implement than was initially feared.

It was particularly helpful in the case of a mayoral candidate who dropped out between the early voting and the final election. The next choice on each voter's ballot just moved up one choice level in the tallying process.

It sounds complicated, but the commission in charge of implementing it hired a PR firm to do some excellent resources- videos and booklets- to explain it, and held community meetings for people to ask questions and play a game version of the election to try it out.

As the process morphs from the days when people cared enough to attend Party meetings, participate in local, district, and state Party process, and do much of the vetting and early whittling-down of candidate slates that way, to the era when no one wants to have to do much more than look at media on their deevice screens and then cast a vote, we're going to have larger and larger candidate fields.

Ranked-choice voting is incredibly helpful, effective and, yes, transparent (if implemented, tallied, and reported properly) to winnow a field and make sure that everyone's voice is heard.

It would also help somewhat with the problem of people getting SO attached and SO passionate about one particular candidate that they get disgusted or turned off from the process if that candidate loses early or drops out.

In our last mayoral race I was able to look at a 5-candidate field and think not "which ONE do I have to throw all my energy and my vote into" but "Which one do I like BEST? And next-best? Who is my last choice?"

It gave me a very different perspective on the candidates and the election itself, and I think it resulted in the election of a mayor who had considerably more interest and support going into their first term, because while the winner might only have been 37% of the voters' first choice, they were more than fifty percent of the other voters' second choice and thirty-some percent of the other voters' third choice.

Ranked-choice voting would reduce intra-party rancor and division, provide a more effective and transparent way to reflect Democratic voters' preferences and concerns, and I really believe it would give our eventual nominee a much stronger, more united push behind them in the general election.

Just sayin'...

opinionatedly,
Bright