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League of Women Voters of Boulder County
Empowering Voters. Defending Democracy
Serving the People of Boulder County, Colorado

News / Articles

LWVCO Supports Prop 131 “Final-4 Voting” and News from Marcus Ogren

Celeste Landry | Published on 10/2/2024


Prop 131 “Final-4 Voting”

Initiative 310 “Final-4 Voting” qualified for the November ballot where it has been renamed Proposition 131 “Establishing All-Candidate Primary and Ranked Choice Voting General Elections.”  LWV of Colorado supports Prop 131; see the LWVCO Prop 131 webpage by clicking here or going to lwvcolorado.org > Elections > Where the League Stands > 131 -Elections.  All of the state ballot measures are listed on the “Where the League Stands” page with links to more information.


The Blue Book’s name (which doesn’t appear on your ballot) for Prop 131 includes the words “Ranked Choice Voting” (RCV), but RCV includes multiple ranked voting methods.  The type of RCV in Final-4 Voting is Instant-Runoff Voting, the same method used in Boulder’s new mayoral elections.  


The city of Boulder also used the only other form of RCV authorized in Colorado statute.  In fact, the city of Boulder was the second city in the nation to use Single Transferable Vote (STV), a proportional form of RCV.  My house, then known as R.F. Maul’s residence, was one of the polling places for Boulder’s very first city council STV election in 1917!  Boulder continued to use STV until 1947.


To find out about the different types of RCV, you can read our “What Is RCV Anyway?” article, which was published online in Fulcrum on September 11.  https://thefulcrum.us/electoral-reforms/what-is-ranked-choice-voting-2106755 

  

Last month in the Voter we reported on two other common language problems with the Final-4 Voting measure:

  1. The proposed primary is known as an all-candidate or Top-4 primary (but many reports mistakenly call it an “open primary”).
  2. A candidate can win the Instant-Runoff Voting (IRV) general election without getting a majority of the vote (but reports often claim that IRV yields a “majority” winner).  


Related Ballot Measures in Other States

  • Alaska voters started using Final-4 Voting in 2022 and will consider a measure to repeal it.  
  • Idaho’s ballot contains a Final-4 Voting measure.  (LWVID and LWVCO have been talking to each other about our similar measures!)  
  • Nevada’s ballot contains a Final-5 Voting measure.  The voters approved it already in 2022, but initiated constitutional amendments must pass in two consecutive general elections to be adopted.
  • Arizona’s ballot contains two competing measures: Prop 140 Final-5 Voting and Prop 133 to require separate partisan primaries, each limited to candidates from one party.
  • Montana has two measures: CL-126 to create a Top-4 primary election and CL-127 to require “that [general] elections for certain offices must be decided by majority vote” as set forth in law (to be proposed if CL-127 passes).
  • South Dakota voters will consider a Top-2 primary, like Washington (state) and California have.
  • Washington, DC has a ballot measure to allow unaffiliated voters to vote in any party primary (like Colorado currently) and to use IRV in both the primary and general elections.


LWV Estes Park Final-4 Voting Exercise

LWV Estes Park invited the community to participate in a Final-4 Voting exercise on September 18th.  The results were surprising!  Unlike a primary in June and a general election in November, the electorate in these two elections were basically the same, but the preferences changed noticeably from the primary to the general election!


The ballot question was “If our group were choosing a country to live in for a while, which would you choose?” Voters had 7 countries in the choose-one primary.  The 4 highest vote-getters were England (21 votes), Spain (7), Italy (5) and India (4).  Looks like England is the clear front-runner!  Interestingly, the other three countries (Paraguay, China and Bahrain) each got 2 votes.


For the Instant-Runoff Voting general election, 

  • Rd 1 had Italy and England with 10 votes each.  It was surprising that some people who voted for England in the primary did not rank England #1 in the general.  Spain and India got 8 votes each; to eliminate one of them, we needed a tiebreaker.  The country with the lower number of votes in the primary, India, was eliminated, and the votes on India’s ballots were transferred to the next ranked candidate.
  • Rd 2 had Italy with 15 votes, England with 11 and Spain with 10 so Spain was eliminated and its supporters’ ballots’ votes transferred to the next available ranking.
  • Rd 3 had Italy with 23 votes and England with 13 votes so Italy won.


 

 





Marcus Ogren Was a Panelist at the Equal Vote Symposium

Many of you know that LWVBC member Marcus Ogren moved to Israel in 2022, but they have remained very active in our Voting Methods Team.  Marcus has a personal voting methods blog at https://voting-in-the-abstract.medium.com/ (not speaking for LWV) and had an academic paper (“Candidate Incentive Distributions: How Voting Methods Shape Electoral Incentives”) published in Electoral Studies in August.


On September 28th Marcus was on Equal Vote Symposium’s first panel (9pm Israel time).  The panel’s subject was Bridging the Gap Between Theory and Practice.  You can see a list of all the great panels and speakers at https://www.equal.vote/evs_schedule.  If you missed it or couldn’t Zoom in (like me), the recording of the symposium will be on Equal Vote’s YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@equalvote 


STAR Voting Is Up for Adoption in Oakridge, Oregon

Jurisdictions in the US have adopted ranked voting methods and Approval Voting, but efforts to adopt STAR Voting have yet to be successful.  This fall the Oakridge, Oregon electorate will consider piloting STAR Voting for three elections.  An added incentive is that the city would not be required to pay the cost of STAR Voting.