Frank DeFilippo: Pulling Rank

...Lierman’s daughter, Del. Brooke Lierman (D), of South Baltimore, wants to give the Baltimore City Council the authority to cook election-day books. Translated, legislation she’s sponsored would let the Council decide whether to establish open primaries and “ranked choice” elections in the city.

These are loopy ideas that have their origins in such mellowed-out places as California and Takoma Park, and if the rest of the nation has learned anything it’s to follow the lead of neither of the two. One is increasingly unfit for human habitation and the other has bunkered itself into a nuclear-free stupor. Both fancy themselves as incubators for advanced thinking...

...Ranked choice elections, and their variations, are supposed to prevent candidates from winning with less than a majority of votes. They have approached disaster in Maine, the only state to adopt the controversial system, and a cumbersome system in the several California cities that have instituted the ranking system. (Ranked choice voting is also under considering in the Montgomery County legislative delegation; Takoma Park uses the system in municipal elections now.)

Ranked choice elections delay returns as well as results while election board math whizzes tinker with algorithms to chase the elusive 50.1 percent and in some elections have failed to reach the magic qualifying number. In Baltimore, often as few as 20 percent of the voters control 100 percent of the vote. That dismal performance probably won’t change with ranked choice, though the margin of victory theoretically would. Who would we be kidding but ourselves?

Essentially, ranked choice elections are the new politics plugged into the old. They institutionalize the old political machine trickery of “single-shooting” that is a common behind-the-curtain practice of political insiders but is little-known to the general public.

Here’s how it works: Let’s say there are six candidates running for five judgeships on the ballot and a voter prefers one over the other five. Instead of voting for five of the six, the voter casts a single vote for their preferred candidate, thus giving their candidate a vote and the others none. That single vote has a multiplier effect of five in the electoral advantage. Single-shooting was how political machine entrenched itself for decades.

And so it goes with ranked voting. Voters rank candidates according to preference. And in tallying the votes, candidates are eliminated from the bottom up until one at the top achieves a fraction more than 50 percent of the vote for a simple majority. Name recognition and incumbency would dominate the ballot...

https://www.marylandmatters.org/2019/01/13/frank-defilippo-pulling-rank/