A ranked choice voting proponent wants Missourians to vote “no” on Amendment 7 on November 5th. The constitutional amendment aims to ban both ranked choice voting and non-citizens from voting.
Larry Bradley with Better Ballot KC said that ranked choice voting requires that candidates receive the majority of the votes – 50%, plus one or better – to win and avoid a runoff.
“In the Lieutenant Governor (primary) race, you had two people, one with 30% of the vote, the other with 31%,” Bradley said. “Only 7,452 votes between the two of them. There were 235,262 votes for other candidates and those voters were unable to weigh in to make a final decision on this nominee.”
State Sen. Ben Brown, R-Washington, Mo., sponsored the legislation that became Amendment 7. He said that ranked choice voting causes voter confusion and lower turnout.
But Bradley pointed out that the current system sees plurality winners, not majority winners, something ranked choice voting would require.
“The little pièce de resistance so-to-speak, here, is that the person who got the Republican nomination for Secretary of State (Denny Hoskins), did so with 24.418% of the vote, not even half of the half that we should expect a political party to get us,” he explained.
Bradley explained that you do not have an obligation to rank every candidate on the ballot.
“So, if there’s a particular office — let’s say there’s four candidates, and you don’t like three of the four, you think they’re all bozos,” he said. “Then mark a ranking for the candidate that you like, of course you’re going to rank them number one, and leave the rest blank. You’re allowed to do that. Your vote counts with ranked choice voting.”
Better Ballot KC called ranked choice voting a ‘fair and easy system’ for voters protected under the Voting Rights Act.
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