WEBINAR: Chanda Meek on Ranked Choice Voting

 

On Thursday, the 22nd of December 2022, the PECS working group on collaborative governance and management hosted another webinar: Michael Schoon invited Marta Chanda Meek to talk about ‘Moving to the middle with ranked choice voting in Alaska’.

Through the initiative process, Alaska adopted the Ranked Choice Voting  (RCV) electoral framework to conduct elections beginning in 2022. The first case of an election using this method coincided with the death of Congressman Don Young, who had served for 49 years, leaving an open seat. Ranked Choice Voting has been touted as changing the tenor of electoral politics to shape candidacies that are more targeted towards the entire electorate rather than aiming to serve partisans in the primary system. In this way, it is theorized to reduce hyper-partisanship and the power of the two major parties in American politics. This presentation and the corresponding paper provide a narrative of the campaign and test theories of RCV against the surprising outcome in Alaska’s lone House race (authors of the paper:  Chanda L. Meek and Amy Lauren Lovecraft, University of Alaska Fairbanks).

You can listen to the recording of the webinar here.

All other past webinars hosted on behalf of the PECS Collaborative Working Group are available here.

Text by Michael Schoon/ Upload by Johanna Hofmann