Pierce County voters today will decide the fate of Charter Amendment 3, which if passed, would modify the county charter to eliminate ranked choice voting and restore the primary and general election system for all county elected offices.

Here are three good reasons to approve Charter Amendment 3:

1. Takoma Park, Maryland Is Not Tacoma, Washington -  63% of Pierce County voters dislike ranked choice voting.  This number is based on nearly 91,000 voters who filled out a questionnaire that accompanied mail-in ballots last year. 

So who does support ranked choice voting?  Special interest groups from Maryland, who have donated some $32,000 to oppose Charter Amendment 3.  Here's what the Pierce County Better Government League had to say about it in a press release: 

PDC records show that Citizens Against Rigging the System (CARS) is funded entirely by two organizations: Fair Vote of Takoma, Maryland and a political action committee that shares CARS’s P.O. Box.  Of the total $27,000 contributed to CARS, $22,000 has been donated by Fair Vote and $5,000 from the PAC that is itself heavily funded by Fair Vote.

It appears that Fair Vote’s contribution is the largest to a Pierce County Charter Amendment campaign on record.

The money to support Charter Amendment 3 has been raised entirely in Pierce County.

2.  Crock the Vote -  Ranked choice voting is supposed to give voters more choices, but, in fact, it ends up disenfranchising them.  Ranked choice voting is too complicated (and expensive), both in its voting and counting methodology.  It leads to under-voting, whereby a voter chooses not to vote on a specific race or issue.  A study by the Washington Poll concluded: 

Overall, under-voting was greater in the RCV contests than in the traditional ballot contests. Although this may be due to the fact that voters received two different ballots, this trend toward under‐voting is worrisome.

The Washington Poll study also found that about 20,000 fewer voters returned their ranked choice voting ballots than returned their traditional ballot.

3.  This is America, Not Europe - The above-mentioned Fair Vote's director is Washington resident and former Nirvana bassist, Krist Novoselic.   Novoselic and Fair Vote's stated goal is to implement proportional representation, an electoral system aimed at securing a close match between the percentage of votes that groups of candidates (grouped by a certain measure) obtain in elections and the percentage of seats they receive in the legislature.  This system in Europe has allowed fringe political groups as the Communists, Socialists, Greens, and neo-Nazis to acheive political relevance, as these parties' assistance is often required to form (unstable) coaltion governments.  According to Texas A&M political scientist Chris Lawrence:

If the incentives for a two party system melted away, more likely than not our existing Republican and Democratic parties would melt away with them (or at least be transformed beyond recognition). And if you think our parties are bad now, wait until you see the parties led by Maxine Waters and Pat Robertson (or their acolytes) and comprised solely of their true believers.

Ranked choice voting opens the door for extremist, crackpot, and/or grossly unqualified candidates to take office.  This already been seen in Pierce County, according to the Tacoma News Tribune:

The third candidate in the [Pierce County Auditor] race, Will Baker, deserves special mention. He’s been arrested many times for disrupting public meetings, and he’s been convicted of disorderly conduct.

He’s made a hobby of running for office, and we would ordinarily regard his candidacy as a joke. Under ranked-choice voting, however, he could conceivably win if he garners enough second-choice votes. Not all diehard Republicans and Democrats are aware of Baker’s past, and some might choose him over the better known candidate from the other party. When he ran for state auditor as a Republican in 2004, he won a dismaying one-third of the total vote.

Another perennial candidate with no apparent qualifications, Dale Washam, managed to get himself elected assessor-treasurer on an RCV ballot last year. The assessor-treasurer’s office is now in predictable disarray. Let’s not repeat the mistake with a candidate who, unlike Washam, actually has a criminal record.