Today was Election Day in my neck of the woods. And for the first time ever, we used ranked voting in the mayoral and city council races. Ranked voting is also known as instant runoff voting.
Around here, the city council election is the current hot ballot. There are seven candidates and voters can rank their top six. It's made for an interesting election season. There's been very little negative campaigning, and even if you have a yard sign for one candidate, you'll still get visits from the other people running, as they want to be your second or third choice or maybe even your sixth choice.
The counting of the ballots might be interesting. If one candidate wins more than 50% of the vote, it'll be easy. They win. However, it could get complicated with up to three or four rounds of vote reallocation. The city has given themselves up to two weeks to work it all out.
I'm hoping that they'll spell it all out for us, with "circles and arrows and a paragraph" for each round, explaining it all in detail for the voters.
And if the experiment works and the positive quality of the campaigns sticks around, I'd like to see ranked voting expand to the state and national races. Wouldn't that be nice?
Nano Update, Day 5:
Plot? Main character finishing off his first day of work. . . must have been a long day!
Word Count? 7843
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