Pierce County's first ranked-choice voting runoff

Note: This is a posting from the Tacoma News Tribune's Inside the Editorial blog.


Posted by Kim Bradford @ 09:57:09 am

At last week's City Club of Tacoma forum for Pierce County executive candidates, the League of Women Voters gave audience members a tutorial on ranked-choice voting.

The race was to name the two Tacoma Narrows' bridges. The winners: Olympic and Cascade.

It seems some "voters" had trouble figuring out how to mark their ballots (which is strange since such basics don't change with an RCV election), and others didn't understand there's no advantage in voting the same choice all three times. Below is a comment from the League of Women Voters.


"This was our first large group for teaching RCV. Our key point was that Ranked Choice Voting for the voter is as easy as One, Two, Three. The only complicated part is the counting which will be done a computer. Please let your readers know we can do the same thing for their group as we did at the City Club.

Some interesting items: People circled their choice, checked their choice, and one even circled the arrow but most connected the arrow as they were supposed to. I made the point to the group that the machine can only read the connected arrow and anything else will have to be handcounted which was complicated.

Several people only voted for one, several voted for the same for all three. The other point we made is that you don't have to vote for all three. You can vote for one, two, or three. Voting the same doesn't change anything.
Another point to make is that for the election they can vote for any party they want, even different parties in each column.

The final result from the City Club was Cascade for the Old Bridge and Olympic for the New Bridge. It was an extremely close vote though with Old and New and Gerty and Gordy just one point behind. We will continue to do this exercise at each of our forums and I'll let you know the updates."

Thanks for your interest.
Terri Baker, 1st VP, LWV