By BOBBIE GREEN
The Progress
Ranked choice voting was the topic of discussion at the Mesquite Patriots meeting on Tuesday, Mar. 4 at the Mesquite Veterans Center.
Featured speaker Nathan Duell, explained how ranked choice voting works and shared views about whether instituting such a system would be beneficial or detrimental.
Duell is the Director of southwestern states for conservative grass-roots group Heritage Action for America.
Duell was critical of the rank choice concept.
“Ranked choice voting is confusing,” he said. “It is not based on the one-person-one-vote principle.”
In ranked choice voting, voters are given a ballot with the names of all the candidates in a race, regardless of political party, Duell explained. The voters are then asked to rank each and every candidate from their first choice to last. All votes are then tabulated by a machine.
If there is no candidate with a majority in the first tabulation, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated. For those who selected the eliminated candidate as their first choice, the machine automatically goes to their second choice. Then another round of votes are tabulated.
If no candidate wins a majority in the second round, the lowest-scoring candidate is again eliminated. Voters who chose that candidate as first choice, and the voters who had their votes already changed to that candidate, will now have their votes redistributed to their third choice; and another round of vote tabulation occurs.
This process continues until one of the remaining candidates achieves a majority, Duell said.
Duell mentioned a number of elections that have already been held using rank choice voting. In these elections there were many people who, unknowingly, did not rank all of the choices, he said.
“If you do not rank all candidates your ballot is not valid and not counted,” Duell said. “You do not have a choice of none of the above as the state of Nevada presently has.”
Duell related that, in 2021, the New York Mayoral race took no less than eight-rounds of tabulations. “By the eighth round 140,000 voter ballots had been thrown out because they did not completely rank all candidate choices,” he said.
Duell told of the 2018 Maine U.S. House of Representatives general election. “The incumbent Republican received the most first-choice votes,” Duell said. “But he was defeated by the Democratic challenger in a second round of ballot tabulation after the votes for two other third-party candidates were redistributed and 8,000 voter ballots, not properly ranked, were discarded.”
“Rank Choice voting leads to a fake majority and does not represent everyone who voted in the election,” Duell added. “It should be easy to vote and hard to cheat, but rank choice voting does not deliver either of these.”
While taking questions from the audience Duell explained if ranked choice voting is passed in Nevada on the general election ballot in November, the governor cannot veto it since it was already passed by the legislature and was passed by the people in the last election.
“We must inform the voters about this issue and how ranked choice voting does not work to represent the voters choice,” Duell said.
The Mesquite Patriots is a conservative group that supports the U.S. Constititon and its founding principles. The group meets once a month. Their next meeting will be held on April 2, and will feature U.S. Senate candidate Tony Grady.
For more information visit www.heritageaction.com.
