ranked choice circus

We have a special city council election coming up in a week, with eight candidates for the one spot. There's one candidate who is (in my humble opinion) much better than any of the others, so I know who's getting my vote. But the city now has ranked choice voting, so the voter's job is more complicated than it was before. We are to pick our top five candidates, ranked in order of preference. So I did my research, looking up the candidates' positions and history. And I know how I'll vote -- barring the possibility of my learning something else significant (good or bad) between now and when I cast my ballot.

I'll give the powers that be credit for one thing. Reading up on how the votes will be counted, I became satisfied that picking my second, third, fourth and fifth preferences will not reduce the chances that my top pick wins. And that's important, because without that condition, the whole thing turns into a wild exercise in game theory. I'll also give them credit for the fact that you don't have to pick all five spots. You can make only one pick and your vote will count. That's important too. Of course, you can't pick the same name for all five spots; that will invalidate your ballot.

But the fact is, this going to make things too complicated. My son worked the polls in November. He said that a lot of people had filled in the oval for President twice -- because their preferred candidate was running on more than one party ticket. If a material number of people have trouble with that, then I don't see how we won't have trouble with them trying to rank their top five.

Grab your popcorn...we're in for a circus.