Seattle voters have narrowly approved moving their elections to ranked-choice voting, the system that Alaska voters approved in 2020 and used for the first time this year.
About 51% of Seattle voters in the Nov. 8 election agreed to change the city’s primary voting system from the usual top-two to the new election fad of ranking candidates from most liked to least. about 49% of voters opposed the change.
The ballot measure was a two-part question. The first question asked voters if they wanted to remake the city’s procedures for conducting primary elections.
Then, voters were asked a second question: Which would they prefer — ranked choice voting or “approval voting,” in which voters could choose any number of candidates in city primaries, but assigns no ranking to them.
People who answered the second question overwhelmingly preferred ranked choice voting, by 76-24%.
The Seattle City Council is dominated by socialists and far-left Democrats. It’s possible that ranked-choice voting will work against them. But the measure was close, passing by only 6,000 votes. Some 911,000 King County voters cast ballots.
Fargo, North Dakota passed an initiative in 2018 allowing it to use approval voting in its local elections, becoming the first community in the nation to move to that method.
In Alaska, a citizen application has been filed with the office of the lieutenant governor to begin collecting signatures on a petition to reverse the initiative passed in 2020 by just 4,000 votes. Critics say the system is set up to give liberal candidates an advantage in a conservative state and, indeed, ranked choice voting led to Alaska’s only congressional seat being occupied by a Democrat, even though only 12.5% of Alaska voters are registered Democrats.
