| Cindi Ross Scoppe | Post and Courier |
This month, voters approved a ballot measure to make Nevada the third state in the nation to allow instant-runoff voting, also known as ranked-choice. Like Alaska, Nevada will go beyond that simple change and adopt a whole new system that combines ranked-choice voting with the elimination of the traditional partisan primaries.
According to the advocacy group FairVote, another six local governments adopted instant-runoff voting: Fort Collins, Colorado; Evanston, Illinois; Portland, Maine; Ojai, California; and Portland and Multnomah County, Oregon. It was leading in a Seattle referendum that was still being counted at week’s end.
”The rest of us should be able to use it as well.
That means ranked-choice voting has now been approved for 63 jurisdictions, including Nevada, Alaska and Maine and covering nearly 20 million people, making it “the fastest-growing, nonpartisan voting reform in the country,” according to FairVote President Rob Richie.
Among those 63 jurisdictions, you might recall, is South Carolina, which along with five other Southern states stretching westward to Arkansas and Louisiana provides instant-runoff absentee ballots in the primaries for military and overseas voters.
It’s great that members of the military and South Carolinians living overseas are able to use this system in the primaries. The rest of us should be able to use it as well. It would be even better if we could do away with primaries as we know them and use it in the general election too.
