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Davis
Enterprise
Thursday, November 18, 2004
"Try
choice voting"
To the
editor:
The Presidential election left many people in despair. Despite
working
so hard, a lot of people got nothing out of it. Imagine instead an
election system where everybody wins. Can there be such a thing? For
the city of Davis, the answer is yes!
Multi-winner choice voting is an election system in which everybody
wins. The Davis Governance Task Force is looking closely at this
system
for our future city council elections. It represents voters better
than
any other city election system in use today.
How does it work? Say we're electing three people to the Davis city
council. Choice voting makes it much easier to get elected. With
three
winners, a candidate only needs 25% voter support to win. With more
winners, this percent goes down.
To vote, you rank the candidates 1, 2, 3, and so on. First, the top
choices are tallied. If your top choice loses or wins with votes to
spare, your vote moves to your next choice down, and so on. The
beauty
of choice voting is that there are no wasted votes. Every voter gets
to
elect a top choice.
Choice voting has so many advantages over Davis' current block
voting
system. With choice voting, similar candidates can't hurt each other
by
splitting their common vote. They help each other. Also, choice
voting
removes the incentives to bullet vote. Under the current
winner-take-all system, a minority of voters can elect the entire
council. In contrast, choice voting guarantees that the outcome is
an
accurate cross-section of the entire voting body.
Choice voting is becoming more widespread every year. UC Davis
students
are using choice voting for the second year in a row this week. This
fall, for the first time ever, San Francisco used a ranked voting
system very similar to choice voting. In British Columbia, Canada,
their official citizens' assembly voted 146-7 to recommend choice
voting. The assembly comprised 160 randomly selected citizens and
studied voting systems for ten months.
This is an exciting opportunity for everyone in the Davis community.
To
become involved or learn more about Davis choice voting, e-mail
Davis
Citizens for Representation at [email protected].
Chris Jerdonek
Davis
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