Instant runoff voting in KC

[swid]

This has been brewing in the back of my mind for a while, but after I found out that a instant-runoff/ranked choice voting referendum in Maine passed this week, I think it's time to bring it here, and I think it'd be rather easy to build support a broad nonpartisan support base for it if we play our cards right:

What I'd like to see is a local initiative to abolish the separate primary and general elections for mayor and city council and replace them with a single election with candidates elected by instant runoff voting. I think that having a single election would increase the embarrassingly low turnout we usually have for local elections, and what's even better, that current low turnout should make getting enough petition signatures to get it on the ballot a reasonable task.

The angles of the potential of increased turnout and reduced costs by having only a single election would play well to both neighborhood associations and the CFRG types, so I'd thing that the biggest hurdle to overcome would be getting buy-in from the mayor, city council, etc.

Any Raggers interested in tilting at this particular windmill sometime in 2017 or 2018?

[TheBigChuckbowski]

Yes, it's time as a city, state, country that we look at how we elect our representatives.

[flyingember]

I've heard about this and I like the idea. I don't think selling less elections would be hard to the people running elections.

The hard part will be getting voters used to it. You have a usability issue and a politics issue of people not wanting to put a rank to certain candidates. I could see doing it on municipal elections only for a few years to start.

[swid]

Yeah, I'd love to see it used more broadly, but given that KC mayor and city council elections on their own schedule, it's a good place to start with an election that will always have a small number of ballot items anyway.