Okay, so the general election here in the States is many moons away, but anytime’s a good time to talk about the importance of voting, right? As some readers may recall, I’ve made several votes over the years regarding dealing with gerrymandering and the promise of ranked choice voting. The folks over at Vox have put together a video that explains how other countries tackle elections over and beyond the possibilities of ranked choice voting.…
Back in 2016, the state of Maine became the first state to use ranked choice voting in all their elections, including the Federal ones. There was something of a silly kerfuffle, as the paradigm shift hit established political power right in the comfort zone. But wait, what is ranked choice voting anyway? Well, here’s a fun video by CGP Grey to illustrate it with animals. As you might have gleaned above, I’m in favor of…
My local primaries were not particularly interesting, but I found Maine’s primary elections very interesting to watch because they were using ranked-choice voting. What is ranked-choice voting, you ask? Why not explain it with dinosaurs? Or, you could look at this longer piece by CGP Grey: I like this because it also explains how ranked choice voting (here called “alternative vote/instant runoff voting”) is not the end-all, be-all panacea, yet has advantages over “first past…
As that rare group of regular readers knows, eliminating gerrymandering and related cockamamie contrivances to prevent people from voting is near and dear to my heart. As explained by German Lopez in Vox, the Supreme Court has recently ruled in a redistricting case in North Carolina in a way that may help combat cockamamie efforts in the future.
As mentioned in a post last month, I’m very interested in addressing gerrymandering, the political practice of dividing up voting districts in a way that would befuddle the designers of Tetris. Last month, I highlighted Brian Olson’s algorithm to make voting districts more compact. However, in this article by Erica Klarreich, she suggests that a district’s compactness is not the sole criterion for gerrymandering and talks more about ways to address the problem. Hopefully, this…
I have friends and colleagues all over the political spectrum, so their reactions to last Fall’s election was quite varied, though perhaps all of them might agree that our country, post-election, feels more fractured and partisan than ever. In wanting to be more politically engaged, I also wanted to find something that all (or, I guess, most) of said friends and colleagues could rally around as Americans. Surely we can all unite in eliminating gerrymandering. What…