Hey Young Dems,
This is a reminder that our next membership meeting is on Wednesday August 28th, 2019 from 7pm - 9pm at 2044 Franklin Street, Oakland. At this meeting we will be voting on a EBYD bylaw amendment that would allow us to use Rank Choice Voting in our endorsement process.
Our great Secretary John Minot has written up and excellent summary and you can view the proposed bylaw changes here.
Summary: EBYD Endorsements using Ranked-Choice
This is a simpler guide than contained in the bylaws amendments to the proposed ranked-choice endorsement process.
For elections which are actually conducted using ranked-choice, we will endorse via a very similar ranked-choice methodology, except that 60% support of voting members will always be required for endorsement, and the process may result in no endorsement if there’s not that much support. (Simple video illustrating RCV; more complex real-life example from Oakland.)
Members will be able to rank as many candidates as they want (even all of them), and will be given the space for it, but are asked not to rank anyone they would not want to see endorsed. If nobody has a 60% majority counting first choices, we eliminate the lowest candidate and reallocate the ballots for that candidate to their voters’ other choices. We keep doing this until either someone has 60% (endorsed!) or there are two candidates and neither has 60% (nobody wins).
If someone is endorsed, we then go back to the beginning and eliminate that candidate, then use the same bottom-up process as above. This lets us see if another candidate besides the first also has 60% support. If so, we can endorse them, and potentially a third, if their support is broad enough, but no more.
For most state elections not using ranked-choice, like primaries, we still use ranked-choice for endorsements - but we endorse no more than one candidate, and only go through the process once, the bottom-up part, to find someone with 60% support.
To indicate you like some candidates but really want nobody to be endorsed if not them, rank those candidates, then “No Endorsement” after them. Or if instead you are also open to other candidates the club likes, rank “No Position” after them.
For elections with just one or two choices (two-candidate races, ballot measures), nothing will change. Same for at-large elections like Alameda City Council (multiple votes, multiple seats).
Key decisions made based on discussion from first meeting and further feedback:
If ballots are “exhausted” - meaning someone’s chosen candidates have been eliminated - they will still be counted toward the 60% needed to victory. (That means it still requires 60% of all present and voting members, as we have done in the past.)
For transparency, any member eligible to vote may request all the tallies and reallocations, and anonymized original ballot results (the Registrar of Voters does this for RCV elections today).
In Community,
Victor E. Flores, EBYD Director of Communications
“Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.”
-- President Barack Obama
