Ranked Choice Voting Panel Comments

The Tacoma News Tribune editorial board writes about the Blue Ribbon Reveiw Panel on Ranked Choice Voting and notes that Pierce County's existing vote counting system will only allow voters to list three choices (due to hardware and software limitations). While being able to list three choices is definitely superior to being restricted to one, we hope that Sequoia Voting Systems will improve their software in time for the 2010.

UPS Professor Richard Anderson-Connolly in a June 7 Tacoma News Tribune op-ed piece is optimistic on the implementation of Ranked Choice Voting in Pierce County. Anderson-Connolly wants the Auditor's office to release the preliminary outcome of Ranked Choice algorithm each day much the same as the other preliminary results are released.

Pierce County Republican Party Chair and member of the Blue Ribbon Panel Deryl McCarty wrote a long piece on his experience on the panel. In his comments, McCarty makes a small reporting error on the mailing rates. The most likely result in November 2008 is that we will need to use two ballot cards and mailing those two cards back to the Auditor will cost $0.58. This is more than the cost of mailing back a single ballot card $0.41, but cheaper than the gas required to drive to one's polling place.