Measure 117 would change the voting system from first-past-the-post to ranked-choice instant-runoff voting for presidential, state executive offices, and Congress.
I believe it doesn’t go far enough. They should have it for Legislative Assembly elections as well. That being said, I’m still going to vote for it and tell all my friends and family to do the same.
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I grew up in Oregon, and graduated college there, but haven’t lived there in a couple decades. Can I have an opinion?
I agree with you, on all points, with one classification. IRV is good for single seat elections, but when it comes to multiple-seat elections like legislations (including Congress), they should adopt STV with Hare-Clark transfer distribution to get some proportional representation.
Keeping RCV (rather than using rated or some other system) keeps the ballot format consistent for voters, with only the vote counting differing between single and multiple seat elections. IRV is very easy to explain, understand, and execute; STV is harder to count and to understand, but it’s still more simple than many systems, and I personally feel there’s huge value to people understanding and therefore trusting the voting system (vs it being complicated “magic”). The worst part of STV is that hand-counting is much harder, and we see that in the US parties are willing to force that option in many cases of they don’t like the results.
I do hope Oregon joins the list, and that it expands RCV; the more states which do this, the easier it’ll be to get eventually implemented at the national level.
