For the first time, New York City will be using ranked-choice voting in a mayoral primary. Studies show it makes government more representative and cuts down on negative campaigning.
Wicked Local
After he disappeared without a trace and with no signs of him anywhere in the days after he went missing, the Mittnacht/Johnson family was beginning to lose hope that their pug, Eddie Johnson, would return home.
“We were devastated and starting to give up hope. That morning I was talking with my husband about starting to put away Eddie’s things,” Anne Mittnacht said.
But on Saturday, May 22, 10 days after he first disappeared, Eddie was spotted on the families s Westminster Avenue front porch. A neighbor was driving by our house and they said that they thought they saw Eddie outside our house, Mittnacht said. We had left a crate out there and sure enough we opened the front door and there he was.
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ALL OF THE CANDIDATES in ALL OF THE RACES, not just the frontrunners. At MNN we believe that democracy is best served by introducing you to all of the candidates and what they stand for. MNN’s comprehensive election programming initiative has two components.
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Ranked-Choice Voting: A Conservative Election Reform
“[T]he thinking conservative understands that permanence and change must be recognized and reconciled in a vigorous society.”
When Russell Kirk penned his famous “Ten Conservative Principles [1]” in 1993, he was not writing specifically about reforming the modern electoral system. But with the recent political frenzy over laws to address “voter fraud” and subsequent charges of “voter suppression,” the need for prudential election reforms that balance permanence and change is greater than ever.
Barry Fagin of the Independence Institute takes on this topic in his new white paper “The Conservative Case for Ranked Choice Voting [2].” In this piece, Fagin highlights the problems with our ubiquitous “winner-take-all” voting system, known as first-past-the-post (“FPTP”), which incentivizes mudslinging and “lesser of two evils” campaigning. FPTP, according to Fagin, inevitably leads to a “political duop
Larry Diamond, Special to CalMatters
Larry Diamond is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University, ldiamond@stanford.edu.
It’s game on for the recall of Gov. Gavin Newsom. The gubernatorial recall in 2003 that struck California like an earthquake seems like ancient history, so here is a quick recap in a bid to help California do it better than the last time.
In that wildest of Wild West elections, there were 135 candidates running to replace Gov. Gray Davis, including movie stars, a porn star, a pornographer, recovering politicians and wannabes. The winning candidate, movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger, had less than 50% of the vote, which means that more voters preferred someone else. Davis was thrown off the Survivor Island in a rather bizarre episode of reality TV.