A third public judgment on ranked-choice voting

It’s a good time to start thinking through the merits of ranked-choice voting – the system itself, not the circumstantial disputes attached to it in Pierce County.

The County Council is poised to put the fate of RCV before the voters this November. The electorate has already approved it twice, in 2006 and 2007, but this time there’s a difference: Voters now have personal experience with RCV, having used it to decide several county positions Nov. 4.

A lot of them didn’t like that experience, judging from the responses of nearly 91,000 citizens who filled out a questionnaire that came with their ballots last fall. Two-thirds of the respondents seemed ready to ditch it after its trial run.

Democracy is all about the voters; they should be able to cast ballots the way they want, within reasonable limits. That’s an argument for putting the question before them again now that they know how RCV works in practice.

But it ought to be a clean decision – focused on RCV and RCV alone.

One way to clarify the question is to move county elections to odd-numbered years. Perhaps the best argument against RCV is that, by eliminating the August primary, it enabled Dale Washam – a perennial and arguably unqualified candidate – to win the office of assessor-treasurer.

Had Washam emerged from the primary as one of only two finalists, his candidacy would have received considerably more scrutiny. As it was, his name familiarity appears to have helped him slip through under the radar as one of six candidates amid the distracting din of the presidential and gubernatorial races.

That might not have happened in an odd-numbered year, with less background noise.

Another extraneous issue is the long wait many voters endured Nov. 4 before they could cast their ballots at the polls. There were simply too few polls and poll-workers, and too many voters. It wasn’t RCV’s fault that it was introduced during a massive turnout.

Some core questions about RCV itself:

 • Does getting rid of the primary really improve the democratic process?

 • Do ordinary citizens – not just insiders – trust the mathematical runoff it provides?

 • Does it make sense for Pierce County to run two entirely different election systems simultaneously, which will happen for the foreseeable future if RCV is retained?

 • Do the advantages of RCV – especially the weight it gives to voters’ second and third choices – outweigh its complications?

Many believe Pierce County voters adopted RCV in part as a reaction against the state’s widely detested pick-a-party primary. But pick-a- party is gone, at least for now. A vote in November should tell us if the county’s electorate really embraced RCV for its own sake.