Personally, I’m skeptical of ranked-choice voting. Seems confusing and makes election season too short and subject to less information voters should know about the candidates. That’s my knee-jerk reaction, no doubt selfishly seeing months less coverage of important municipal election campaigns as potentially crippling for a community.
I’m much more in line with what I take for normal civics in America: a primary election followed by a general election as necessary.
Also, Utah this year is finishing out a trial run of ranked-choice elections for municipalities that choose them. It’s unlikely the state will bring them back, at least not in the foreseeable future.
This means the Park City Council’s decision in March to go with ranked choice for this election season would be a one and done if the council had stuck with it during a special meeting Monday. This begs a natural question: Why change course now?
Hah, that’s a double question. Why change course at the last minute after already deciding a month ago to go with ranked choice? And the deeper question, perhaps: Why change the primary-general system for only one election cycle in the history of Park City with the probability that Utah will not allow ranked-choice elections after this year?
KPCW reported on insiders making much of Utah County Clerk Aaron Davidson sending a recent letter to Park City claiming flaws in the software used in counting ranked-choice votes. Davidson is notorious for opposition to mail-in ballots and using his office to track the voting habits of state legislators.
Summit County Clerk Eve Furse and others vouch for the software, saying it has held up to rigorous testing and elections in Utah, and this has all the feel of a reboot of 2020’s utter nonsense, frankly.
The scuttlebutt also strikes me as quite beside the point. The best thing the Park City Council members could have done as they weighed whether to take back their decision was to toss aside the red herring means of counting, and I was happy to see they all did. No one Monday afternoon pitched an argument based on perceptions of relative accuracy of counts.
Besides, there’s a bigger question suggested by the assertion that ranked-choice voting would have changed the outcome of the last Park City election in which Councilors Bill Ciraco, Ryan Dickey and Ed Parigian won their seats.
Specifically, Ciraco would not have won his seat if that election were done by ranked choice, I understand, as Bob Sertner or Matt Nagie split the vote among common supporters and one of them would have prevailed.
Compared to this, the rantings of a 2020 election denier and hot blowback rank as poor sideshow. Though sadly enough, there it was all too often Monday in lieu of substantive arguments, as if ranked choice were the last bastion of democracy and elections of the past 140 years or so were … what, exactly?
I don’t care for pulling back a decision the council made a month ago to go through it all over again. It disrupts planning for candidates in this cycle, although I’m not overly persuaded that “only” having weeks to commit to decisions they’ve all already made or that candidates will have to work harder and longer campaigning are detriments for the community they aim to serve. I’m not among those who think it should be even easier to run for office. It should be a gantlet and it should test the commitment of those who presume to serve.
I also don’t like what this says about a council that already can’t seem to make a decision that sticks, though I’m being a little unfair looking at finally putting Bonanza Park up to bid, only to put the eight-year quest up to bid again, or a senior center that can’t seem to get built, Main Street in limbo, whatever’s going on with positioning of park-and-rides out in the sage. I do actually think they are bearing up on balance with a heavy workload.
But if the difference between the traditional primary-general election cycle and ranked choice can result in different winners, that’s serious and merits real discussion, however belated.
I thought the council should make short work of the ridiculous Utah County clerk’s assertions, cut off partisan ranting, and get to this question of how election systems themselves might change outcomes.
The councilors on Monday did discount the means of counting as an issue. The partisan ranting was ironic in that the partisans in the audience were pretty much the only ones ranting about partisanship, which is absent in reality whether Park City votes as it always has done or tries out this new way just this once.
And I thought everyone missed an opportunity to apply ranked choice to the past several elections to see if that would have changed any outcomes. The discussion Monday was wanting for the kind of clear insight this exercise would provide.
I’m a supporter of the system that Park City has always used and will need to use again, but that doesn’t mean ranked choice is wrong this time. Maybe it is the better way to choose candidates with the most widespread support in a community vs. what emerges from primaries and then general elections. Just do it when there’s a future for changing the election system if it shows such promise. There’s no compelling reason to change just to change this year, only to go back again.
Monday, the councilors succeeded in explaining themselves but I think lost something in adding an element of anger among them that looks like it might linger — unnecessarily.
Several public commenters fumed that this issue didn’t rise to calling a special meeting, that there was no emergency here, no real reason at all to revisit a decision that weighed on the conscience of one councilor, Bill Ciraco, to the point he spoke out last Thursday before it really was too late.
He was admonished for not shutting up, sucking it up and letting what he clearly saw as a bad call just roll by. Mayor Nann Worel probably was on point warning him not to make a habit of this. Bad enough the council has earned a bit of a rep for being timid.
It just may be that I personally prefer what Park City has done historically by way of nonpartisan elections with mostly civil campaigns and wonder why suddenly it all needs to change for most likely one election only. One speaker who said switching to ranked choice seeks to solve a problem Park City doesn’t have, but could very well add some new ones, resonated with me.
So it was easy for me to see why taking the time to reconsider an anomaly was worth the annoyance of the moment. Park City’s future could even hang in the balance, though I might be a little dramatic here. Still, I believe the council in the end made the right decision, flip-flopping to continue on a steady course.
Don Rogers is the editor and publisher of The Park Record. He can be reached at [email protected] or (970) 376-0745.