On March 9, the Aspen, Colorado, city council voted to use Ranked Choice Voting in the city election set for May 5, 2009. The offices up are Mayor and two at-large city council seats. The Aspen voters had voted in 2007 to use Ranked Choice Voting, but the city council had to determine the details. The city spent a great deal of effort choosing among competing sets of rules. This article has the details.
Ballot Access News
Edited By Richard Winger
Now that I can support.
Thanks for this great information. Hopefully we’ll have this someday in NM too!
It’s an interesting situation there. “Classic” instant runoff voting is being used for mayor, but for the two-seat races for city council, Aspen came up with an novel system that remains like the previous majoritarian system, but creatively uses key elements of instant runoff voting to generate two seats. FairVote would always prefer the choice method of proportional representation in such mulit-seat elections, but believe the Aspen system is a sensible way to elect two seats with a majoritarian ranked choice system. More analysis soon at http://www.fairvote.org/irv