"New Ballot Initiative Proposes Bringing Ranked-Choice Voting And Open Primaries To D.C."

[Anonymous]

RCV in the primary should be sufficient.

[Anonymous]

This is ridiculous.

[Anonymous]

What utter shitbags

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:What utter shitbags

I agree. We really need RCV to get a sensible, reasonable Council in place. The status quo keeps us beholden to immoderate politics.

[Anonymous]

Ahh yes, liberals using black folks as punching bags to remain in power.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:What utter shitbags

I agree. We really need RCV to get a sensible, reasonable Council in place. The status quo keeps us beholden to immoderate politics.

The irony is that the DC Democratic Party is doing the National Democratic Party no favors here. Like them or loathe them, the current DC Council is a liability to Democrats in the rest of the country. RCV and/or open primaries would make that problem go away fairly quickly.

[Anonymous]

There's a reason why the incumbent politicians loathe this proposal so much: it's a direct threat to them. DC has a long track record of fractured opposition to unpopular electeds. That would translate to incumbents losing with RCV. There's a very real chance the DC Council will look different if this passes. Which is why I look forward to voting for it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:There's a reason why the incumbent politicians loathe this proposal so much: it's a direct threat to them. DC has a long track record of fractured opposition to unpopular electeds. That would translate to incumbents losing with RCV. There's a very real chance the DC Council will look different if this passes. Which is why I look forward to voting for it.

Brianne Nadeau should be absolutely terrified of RCV.

[Anonymous]

Can someone give an example (maybe using SC) of how a past election would have turned out if RCV had been used? Talk to me like I’m 10yo. I generally understand the concept, but don’t see how things would be wildly different sometimes.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Can someone give an example (maybe using SC) of how a past election would have turned out if RCV had been used? Talk to me like I’m 10yo. I generally understand the concept, but don’t see how things would be wildly different sometimes.

Dc not SC!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Can someone give an example (maybe using SC) of how a past election would have turned out if RCV had been used? Talk to me like I’m 10yo. I generally understand the concept, but don’t see how things would be wildly different sometimes.

m

It’s impossible to know for sure since we have no information about how voters would have ranked the different candidates. However I think what happened in Ward 3 illustrates why the city needs RCV. The 2022 Ward 3 Council election was highly competitive, with a dozen or so candidates. In the end, three candidates - Duncan, Bergman and the 18 y/o whose name escapes me - had drop out at the last second to prevent the election of Goulet. Had they not done so, it’s highly probable that Goulet would have been elected despite a majority of the ward not wanting him as their council-member. With an RCV election, you likely would have had the same outcome - Frumin elected - but without the need for candidates to drop out and be accused by the loser of having manipulated the outcome. Others can probably speak better to whether RCV would have changed the outcome of the election in Ward 1, though it seems likely.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Can someone give an example (maybe using SC) of how a past election would have turned out if RCV had been used? Talk to me like I’m 10yo. I generally understand the concept, but don’t see how things would be wildly different sometimes.

Trump probably doesn't get the nomination if all of the state primaries used RCV to assign delegates. This is because he had about a 1/3 share of the Republican primary voters locked up, and the field split the remaining 2/3. Now, imagine primary voters having the option to rank their preferred candidates. If they were given 2 choices, there likely would've been a lot more Kasich/Cruz (or Cruz/Kasich) ballots than Cruz/Trump and Kasich/Trump ballots. If they were given 3 choices, there likely would've been a lot more Kasich/Cruz/Rubio ballots than Kasich/Cruz/Trump ballots. And so on.

RCV reduces the likelihood that somebody relatively unpopular can skate through by simply winning a plurality, particularly when the runners-up would've gotten crossover support from the voters of other runners-up.

In DC, Bowser probably wouldn't've won the 2014 primary. Anita Bonds probably does not win an at-large seat in 2022. There are probably a few other cases, but those are just off the top of my head.

[Anonymous]

Here is a DC council example: The Ward 2 primary in 2020. The results are below. If after the first round there was RCV, then the candidate with the least number of votes would be dropped (in this case Daniel Hernandez) and his votes would be allocated to the candidates that the people who listed him as first choice listed as their second choice. Then this would be run again, with the votes to Evans being reallocated. This could at some point push a candidate up- if all the votes from the bottom four candidates listed Patrick Kennedy as their second choice then he would have moved ahead of Pinto. This is done until one of the candidates has more than 50% of the votes. You can see from the numbers below that this would be very easy to change the outcome, especially if two of the candidates were similar and drew similar types of supporters. So if Kennedy and Grossman had similar positions then maybe most of Grossman's supporters would have preferred Kennedy to Pinto so their votes would be reallocated to him, potentially pushing him past 50%.


Brooke Pinto 28.4% 3,142

Patrick Kennedy 25.0% 2,763

Jordan Grossman 21.5% 2,385

Kishan Putta 9.9% 1,100

John Fanning 6.3% 695

Yilin Zhang 4.3% 473

Jack Evans 3.4% 376

Daniel Hernandez 1.2% 129

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Here is a DC council example: The Ward 2 primary in 2020. The results are below. If after the first round there was RCV, then the candidate with the least number of votes would be dropped (in this case Daniel Hernandez) and his votes would be allocated to the candidates that the people who listed him as first choice listed as their second choice. Then this would be run again, with the votes to Evans being reallocated. This could at some point push a candidate up- if all the votes from the bottom four candidates listed Patrick Kennedy as their second choice then he would have moved ahead of Pinto. This is done until one of the candidates has more than 50% of the votes. You can see from the numbers below that this would be very easy to change the outcome, especially if two of the candidates were similar and drew similar types of supporters. So if Kennedy and Grossman had similar positions then maybe most of Grossman's supporters would have preferred Kennedy to Pinto so their votes would be reallocated to him, potentially pushing him past 50%.


Brooke Pinto 28.4% 3,142

Patrick Kennedy 25.0% 2,763

Jordan Grossman 21.5% 2,385

Kishan Putta 9.9% 1,100

John Fanning 6.3% 695

Yilin Zhang 4.3% 473

Jack Evans 3.4% 376

Daniel Hernandez 1.2% 129

This is a great example. I doubt Pinto would have won under RCV.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:
There's a reason why the incumbent politicians loathe this proposal so much: it's a direct threat to them. DC has a long track record of fractured opposition to unpopular electeds. That would translate to incumbents losing with RCV. There's a very real chance the DC Council will look different if this passes. Which is why I look forward to voting for it.


Brianne Nadeau should be absolutely terrified of RCV.

If RCV can help us get rid of Brianne, I will happily sign up to canvas door to door in favor of switching to it.