The campaign to stop the repeal of ranked choice voting, the No on 3 Campaign, has launched its official campaign website: http://www.protectvoterchoice.com. Pierce County Charter Amendment 3 was put on the ballot by the Pierce County Council this past February. If passed, it would repeal ranked choice voting for county elections. RCV was first passed by county voters in 2006, and in 2007, voters voted to keep RCV elections on track for 2008.

If you care about improved democracy in Pierce County, please visit the campaign’s website, and volunteer to donate your money and/or your time. For more on why we should keep RCV, please see my recent article on this very website: Give Ranked Choice a Chance (http://themelononline.com/2009/05/give-ranked-choice-a-chance/).

As a former University of Puget Sound student who worked on the “Yes on Three” campaign to bring ranked choice voting (or, as we called it during the campaign, instant runoff voting) to Pierce County in 2006, I was disappointed to hear the news that the Pierce County Council voted put a repeal measure on the ballot this fall. Its action flies in the face of how well ranked choice voting (RCV) is working in other states and the rising support for the system, which now includes President Barack Obama and Sen. John McCain.

Talking to friends back in Pierce County, the perception is that not enough voters understand the system. This comes as a big surprise to me. Of the countless number of voters that I talked to in 2006, only a single person objected to the system because they thought it was confusing. In the nine other municipalities that have run ranked choice elections this decade, voters have handled it quite well – in fact the number of invalid ballots was very low in Pierce’s RCV races as well. I have faith that people in my former county can handle ranking candidates just as well as they can in any of the other places using RCV.

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