Potential New Voting System in New Hampshire
Source: http://www.concordmonitor.com/ranked-choice-voting-alternative-voting-13779783
In New Hampshire, a bill is now being proposed to switch the New Hampshire voting system to a ranked-choice system. Ellen Read, the bill’s sponsor, has pointed out that such a voting system more accurately represents the population, because it takes everybody’s preferences for every candidate into account. Read also explained that it would completely remove one of the primary issues of the 2016 election, the spoiler effect, in which people cast votes against the opposing party instead of voting for who they truly want. In addition, it would give more representation to independents and those who support third-party candidates, more accurately representing the population. One potential issue is that seats in New Hampshire state representative races can have more than one person, but the bill would resolve this by assigning an equal weight to the first k choices of each voter, where k is the number of allowed members in the seat.
The system that has been proposed is very similar to the Borda Count discussed in class. One notable difference is that the first few choices of a given voter may have the same weight, whereas the weights in the Borda Count simply decrement by one from the start. Regardless, the system is similar enough that some of the same problems that showed up in class may very well show up in this system. For example, the Godfather example in Section 23.4 demonstrates how a candidate in the minority may still win, which is an artifact of this system that doesn’t exist in a one-choice voting system. Regardless, there are upsides and downsides to both, which is why Read in New Hampshire is bringing this topic into consideration.