Voice for Democracy

Newsletter of Californians for Electoral Reform

Fall 2006

Quote Unquote:

The Candidates for Secretary of State on Ranked Voting

In interviews conducted for the California Channel's Free Airtime Project, CfER board member Paula Lee asked five of the six candidates for Secretary of State, "Most of the certified voting equipment is not compatible with ranking ballots in counties where voters have passed measures such as instant runoff voting. Many county election officials would like to see guidelines from the state for implementing ranked voting. What would you do as Secretary of State to address these issues?"

American Independent Party candidate Glenn McMillon, Jr. did not participate in the interviews.  Here are excerpts from the responses of the other five candidates, transcribed from streaming video at   freeairtimeproject.org and edited to give each candidate approximately the same amount of space.  The order of presentation is that used on the California Channel.

Forrest Hill (Green Party):  “I would be more than glad to sit down with registrars.  The system of instant runoff voting is not difficult to do. In fact, the only people who seem to have a hard time tend to be elected officials who say they can't understand it ... I know that in San Francisco -- and San Francisco is a very diverse city -- almost ninety percent of the people said they had no problem understanding the system at all, and most of them said they liked it.  So I come away from that thinking, well, our politicians need to have a refresher course in rudimentary arithmetic, because that's about what you need to know to understand the system.”

Debra Bowen (Democratic Party):  “I totally support people's right to use a runoff voting system if that's what they wish. And the choices that people make at the city and county level should govern the decisions about voting equipment, not the other way around.  The systems ought to work the same, though, from county to county.  One of the problems we have with our voting systems is we have 58 different systems.  Each county does its own thing and it makes it very difficult for people to audit, to review results. The result is we have better security and auditing for slot machines than we do for our electronic voting machines.  That has to change.”

Bruce McPherson (Republican Party):  “Well, I would work with the counties if that’s what they want.  But to date, there has only been one -- in particular San Francisco -- that really has ranked choice voting.  I have not heard a big outcry from people -- from the voters -- to say this is what we would like; this is the system we would like to follow.  If that is in place, then we will work to see how the voting systems that we have certified can conform and be workable within that framework.  But to date that is not the case in California.”

Margie Akin (Peace and Freedom Party):  “Ranked voting is a really good idea.  It makes elections go faster; it saves money; it's a very good idea and an excellent way to conduct elections.  Some counties have been sold equipment that cannot handle that kind of a race, and some of the companies that sold this equipment have just been doing a real hard sell.  All we can do is decertify machines that cannot handle instant runoff voting, and make sure that all of the counties have the right kind of equipment and that clear guidelines on how to do this kind of an election are sent out to all of the county registrars.”

Gail Lightfoot (Libertarian Party):  “I'd solve them. I'd sit down with experts in the field. This requires a little bit of mathematical knowledge and that's not my forte at all, so I would need help to work out the system, but we need to be able to have ranked voting.  Instant runoff voting is the one that's being talked about most, and being used ... A voter can say they want a Libertarian, but they're pretty sure the Libertarian isn't going to win, so then they can pick the lesser of two evils ... for partisan politics we definitely need it, because we can send a message to the winners as to where our true feelings are ...”

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