A disturbing story about the just-completed race for Mayor in Anchorage: For Anchorage election workers, this month’s mayoral runoff was like no other. Citizen observers crowded outside the Election Center, photographing workers and writing down their license plate numbers. Inside,… Continue reading

From David Frum (@davidfrum), at The Atlantic (sub-titled: An overambitious faction of the activist left is standing in the way of voting-rights reform): Here are two leading examples. Republican gerrymandering works by stuffing as many as possible of a state’s… Continue reading

Wonder what to make of this. Some more results: Outside Europe, some 75% of people surveyed in China supported the idea of replacing parliamentarians with AI, while 60% of American respondents opposed it.

With New York City’s ranked-choice voting primaries coming up on June 22, it’s good news that the state has now approved the technology needed to manage the vote tabulation process. Story here.

Apparently the state has to approve the software NYC wants to use. Let’s hope the various governmental actors do not screw this up. In four special elections for city council, the Board of Elections had to tally all the votes… Continue reading

From The National Review. I had not been aware of these facts: Like Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, Stefanik pointed to the doubts on the part of some Americans about the election’s legitimacy as a reason to reject… Continue reading

I hadn’t been aware of this 2019 paper in Legislative Studies Quarterly by David Cotrell. The piece itself is behind a paywall. Here’s the abstract: Recent research has leveraged computer simulations to identify the effect of gerrymandering on partisan… Continue reading

From Fair Vote: A record 23 cities in Utah passed ranked choice voting ordinances for elections in 2021, more than doubling the number of elections that will allow voters to rank mayoral candidates. Altogether, with these added cities, 53 jurisdictions… Continue reading

For this race, Londoners used an RCV system, in which they were permitted to rank their first and second choices. But a terrible, confusing ballot design led a significant number of voters to cast a first choice for two different… Continue reading

This story is out of Colorado, from the CPR News. Proponents assert that there are good government reasons for these changes. But the story notes that the vote in committee to report out this bill was on a straight… Continue reading

Given the intense politics within Puerto Rico over statehood v. commonwealth status, it is rare to find journalistic stories that capture well the positions in this debate. This long essay from Ben Jacobs at the DC Examiner is one of… Continue reading