Ranked choice voting: worth another look in NC

The Bottom Line from NC Newsline

Image: https://www.betterballotnc.org/

North Carolina elections have been shown to be fair, efficient and honest, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t always room for improvement.

And one important change our state would do well to take a second look at is ranked choice voting – a system in which voters rank candidates in their order of preference.

This assures that candidates can’t win with only a small minority of the vote – right now in North Carolina primaries, the threshold is just 30 percent; and it does away with runoff elections, which are expensive to conduct and usually attract a minuscule voter turnout.

North Carolina had a brief experiment with ranked choice voting almost 20 years ago, but it was abandoned after a few bumps arose in implementation and that’s too bad. Since then, numerous jurisdictions have clarified and finetuned how it works, and it’s become increasingly popular.

The bottom line: Experience shows that ranked choice voting helps assure that all winners have majority support and that candidates appeal to more than just their base. And in our divided times, those would be welcome electoral changes indeed.

For NC Newsline, I’m Rob Schofield.