Richard Flowerdew makes a sly argument against ranked choice voting (RCV) in a lengthy April 5 opinion piece, with a reference to the Maine Constitution’s plurality requirement, by asserting that the “… real goal of RCV is to eliminate ‘splitters,'” and by crying foul because the ballots “.. of the voters who did not vote for one of the candidates in the final run-off,” are “eliminated or sent to the circular file.” 

With a couple of examples, he contends that RCV does not always result in a majority for the winner of the election if the “excluded” ballots are taken into account. 

Finally, in the last paragraph, Mr. Flowerdew introduces approval voting on “a more cheerful note,” suggesting it corrects all the flaws of RCV — without, however, any further elucidation.

Never having heard of approval voting, I proceeded to educate myself. Mr. Flowerdew may be intending a follow-up piece, explaining the mechanics and extolling the virtues of approval voting, but I’ve made my decision. I consider RCV the winner. Excluded ballots were cast by folks who didn’t like any of the candidates. Ergo, they stayed home. 

For anyone who’s interested, I urge them to go to FairVote.org and look up Ranked Choice Voting vs. Approval Voting. 

FairVote.org presents a truly objective comparison of the two methods, and they provide a link to all RCV election results back to 2004 for the data geeks among us, as well as a discussion of approval voting trials in St. Louis, Missouri, and Fargo, North Dakota, and at Dartmouth College. Have at it.

Thomas Laurent, Ph.D.
Rockport