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The Presidential Election Of San Francisco

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San Francisco, along with many other cities around the world has started using instant runoff voting. This style of choosing a winner is very different than the plurality, borda count, or Condorcet method that can be used. As an example I live in Granite City, IL and we still have plurality voting for many local elections. When I take part in an election I will go into the polling place and choose one candidate on the ballot. On the contrary, this is not the case in San Francisco. When attending a polling place in San Francisco the voters are asked to rank order candidates on a basis of one to three. Candidate number one being the most preferred and candidate number three being the least preferred candidate. In doing this it allows the …show more content…

The article was on the view that instant runoff voting would not be beneficial for the city of San Francisco. It criticized that the general public will put their favorite officials first, and then second choice second, and third choice last. That seems like the logical thing to do, but may result in the most preferred candidate losing. The article hinted at the idea that more educated people that understand the method will manipulate their ballot in a way that will benefit them. An example of this would be if they knew that a candidate was favored so they put them last. The voter did this to ensure that when the columns of ballot got moved over after a round that in the final tally the favored candidate would not receive another vote. Democratic political consultant Jim Stearns said, “This is the Green Party using San Francisco as an experiment or stepping stone in a grand national strategy for ranked choice voting” (Ostrom 2004, 1b). This was a bold statement pertaining to the new ranked choice voting system implemented in San Francisco. Historically in the general publics eye Democrats represent the middle class and Republicans represent the higher social class. That being said for a Democratic political consultant to be a critic intrigued me. In the December 2001 election of San Francisco 3 million dollars were spend running the

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