Is Ranked Choice voting coming soon to Albuquerque?

With Albuquerque City Council having taken a sizable step leftward in the last election it is only a matter of time before the bad policies start moving forward through Council. Next up is “Ranked Choice Voting,” a confusing voting system that would, if adopted, make election night results a thing of the past as a complicated series of calculations would need to be made in order to decide the winner in a race of three or more people.

Legislation is to be heard in a committee on Monday, March 9. This is NOT final passage. We’ll keep you posted on that. You can find the text here.  As Trent England and Jason Snead write:

Ranked choice voting tabulation starts by eliminating the least popular candidate, which really means eliminating the votes (first-place rankings) for that candidate. If affected voters ranked other candidates, their votes are shifted to their second-place rankings, and this repeats until a winner clinches a “majority.” But here is the kicker: along the way, if voters run out of rankings before the final round of tabulation, their ballots are eliminated from the final results. It’s as if those people never voted—all to make it appear that the winner has majority support. Their votes simply disappear from the final results.

With ranked choice voting, your right to vote does not include the right to have your vote count for an unpopular candidate. Nor does it include the right to timely and reliable election results.

Although Santa Fe has had ranked choice voting for eight years, the Santa Fe New Mexican headline says it all. You can read the entire article by clicking on it as well.