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People who are voting in D.C. are not just seeing candidates on their ballot, they’re also seeing “Initiative 83,” which is a ballot measure that would bring ranked choice voting to the District.
That’s the system that allows voters to rank up to five candidates in order of preference.
Through the traditional voting system, the candidate with the most votes wins, even if they don’t have a majority.
Ranked choice voting, on the other hand, requires that the winner receive at least 50% of the vote.
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Lisa Rice, the lead supporter of the initiative, said too many candidates are elected with a small percentage of the vote, especially in races that draw a long list of candidates.
“We have so many people being elected to office with a sliver of a sliver of the vote,” Rice said. “What we want to do is get people into office with 50% or more.”
In ranked choice voting, voters rank candidates as their first, second, third choices and so on.
If a candidate receives more than 50% of first-choice votes, they win immediately. If not, the candidate with the fewest first-choice votes is eliminated.
Those votes are then reassigned to the voters’ next choices, and the process repeats until one candidate has a majority.
“I’ll be voting ‘no’ on the initiative,” said D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, a high-profile critic of the idea.
Bowser called ranked choice voting “a very complicated election system.”
“I am totally against ranked choice voting,” Bowser said. “I don’t think that our very good experience with elections suggests that we need to make any change.”
Rice said she thinks the system is “different,” rather than “complicated.”
“Voters like it and voters get used to it,” Rice said.
If approved, Initiative 83 would also allow independents to vote in primary elections.
D.C. currently has closed primaries, which restrict participation to voters who are registered members of the party holding the primary.
Only Republicans can vote in Republican primaries and only Democrats can vote in Democratic primaries.
“These are taxpayer-funded primaries,” Rice said. “All of us are paying for these primaries, so all of us should be eligible to vote in them.”
Bowser argued the two issues — ranked choice voting and opening primaries to independents — were very different and should not have been included in the same ballot measure.
“We certainly shouldn’t be asking the voters to vote on two such different topics in the same question,” Bowser said. “I think it would have been better if those issues were separated.”
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