New voting system may impact November mayoral election

http://www.dailycal.org/2012/09/23/new-voting-system-may-impact-november-mayoral-election/

When Berkeley residents go to the polls this November to vote for their next mayor, they will have the opportunity to vote for not one but three mayoral candidates.

Ranked-choice voting, a system already used by neighboring Oakland and San Francisco, will be implemented for the first time in the Berkeley mayoral election this year, after the city experimented with ranked-choice in the 2010 council elections.

With the new system, voters will rank their favorite candidates from one to three. If one candidate does not win more than 50 percent of first-rank votes, the least popular candidate is eliminated. The second- and third-rank votes of the eliminated candidate are then distributed to remaining contenders, until one candidate receives a majority of the votes.

University of San Francisco associate professor Corey Cook, who has widely cited studies on ranked-choice, said the 20.4 percent of voters who did not use all three ranks in the 2011 San Francisco mayoral election may be an indicator of such confusion.

Alternately, though, Cook said he suspects the reason for this percentage may also be because those voters just preferred to vote for only one candidate.

Cook added that ranked-choice falls short of its purported goal by artificially implementing a limit in the number of candidates voters can rank.

“We limit voters to three choices,” Cook said. “They should be able to articulate all their candidates. A 22-candidate field should have 22 choices.”