This is the Katordilly podcast for Thursday, October 17th,

2004.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Rank choice voting is on many Americans ballots this year. The process allows voters

to communicate more detail about their preferences. Walter Olson says

despite a great deal of fear about the process from many partisans, it's nothing

to worry about. We spoke last week.

People have very strong feelings about rank choice voting and I would like to believe some of those strong feelings are rooted in actual problems with

rank choice voting and not just a naked ploy for partisans to maximize their vote share

by avoiding Rank choice voting entirely.

And there are a lot of, it has picked up steam in some places

to the extent that states or localities have deployed rank choice voting in some way,

what can we say with confidence about how those experiments have gone so far.

Widespread experiments, and we're talking now about, I think, 60 or 80 different, mostly

citizen counties, are still recent enough that we should be cautious about trying to generalize about where they are

headed because people take a while to get used to the system. The different players such as candidates

deciding whether to run also take a while to adjust.

But I'd say point number one that I would make is that there is no real evidence that it changes the partisan outline of which

party does better. It has tended to be adopted in more liberal cities and

Republicans didn't have a chance in those cities for the most part

and Rankshvoting doesn't change that if anything it could give the Republicans a couple of

new cards to play by align with moderate Democrats, but by

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