voiceofchris

Which still means absolutely nothing unless we have the context to judge it by. What if 25% of voters skipped over the city council part during the last election when ranked choice was not used? In that context is it still fair to blame ranked choice for the “disengagement”? Maybe people just naturally vote for congress and presidents a heck of a lot more than they do for city council. Maybe ranked choice actually increased the percentage of voters placing votes for city councilors. If that happens to be true, how could this headline be anything but intentionally misleading? And without last election’s city cousel percentages this scenario i describe might as well be true.

So A) i will have to assume that the original article is a bit of journalistic malarky. It’s locked behind a login so i don’t know if the article provides some reasonable backdrop to this 1 out 5 = cratering engagement BS, but i doubt it. More likely is that this is just more anti-alternate voting scheme propoganda.

B) it has everything to with previous elections. You can’t claim that a voting process has had a negative effect on some metric or another without inherently referencing previous elections. Something getting worse (voter engagement) requires that it was previously better. So yeah, the entire claim that this headline makes requires that it was better under the previous system.

1 in 5 voters, in this election, failed to vote on the ranked choice options when presented.

Sure, and if the headline stopped there it’d factual and i’d have no issue. Instead it specifically says voter engagement has worsened and then doesn’t back that up.

So i say again, show us the data on voter engagement from the previous system or stop spreading this status quo, two-party-maintaining hogwash.

If you cannot compare the previous voter engagement to the current voter engagement then why title your post in such a way? Why blame ranked choice voting for “cratering” voter engagement if you have no metric by which to judge that?

My point being that you cannot blame the lack of voting for city counsilors (by one out of five people) on the new system without comparing it to the old system. Frankly, four out of five voters voting for City council doesn’t sound atrocious, and may or may not be perfectly normal for the city of Portland. Heck, without the data we don’t know if only three out of five people voted for city council under the old voting system. For all we know this new system actually increased that number. Do you see my point?

How many out of 5 chose a city councilor during the last election when no ranked choice voting was available? If you can’t provide that data then shush up.