still undecided with only a few hours before polls close

[totient]

The Progressive Democrats of Somerville have endorsed only two candidates for Alderman at large: Bill White and Fred Berman. I agree with them, and generally think it'd be nice if Bruce Desmond were not reelected. But I'm not at all convinced that voting for, say, Dennis Sullivan and Tony LaFuente is the right move, for all that Dennis appears to be a reasonable enough guy and Tony seems to have gotten with the progressive program since his last run for office four years ago. Bruce is likely to win election anyway and this year I'm more concerned about electing Fred than I am about defeating Bruce.

Comments

[scooterbird.livejournal.com]

Has anyone brought up the option of the Single Transferable Vote, or a similar ranked-choice method? There is another municipality in Massachusetts - I believe it's Cambridge - which elects its officials in such a fashion.

[palmwiz.livejournal.com]

Cambridge's election results depend on the order in which the ballots are counted. This seems like a poor feature of an electoral system.

[scooterbird.livejournal.com]

I looked it up, and that's true, to an extent. Not all STV implementations are like that; here's a paper on the subject.

And obviously, there are features of the current plurality-based system which are problematic. I would argue that they are worse - which would probably be the subject of another post.