Ranked choice voting tends to put candidates in office who are willing to find common ground

I don’t believe in single-issue voting, but a big reason I am voting for Grant Hauschild for State Senate and Rob Ecklund for Minnesota House is that among their many other admirable qualities, they are advocates for ranked choice voting.

Ranked choice voting, a simple change in how we conduct elections, has the near-magical ability to return government to what it is supposed to be doing: Solving problems.

Currently, divisiveness, rancor, and gridlock plague our legislatures. Finger-pointing and divisiveness are rampant, and troubling problems go unaddressed. But ranked choice voting tends to put into office candidates who are willing and able to find common ground in a sincere effort to create solutions to the many problems that vex our society.

With the traditional voting system, we just pick one candidate and that’s it. But that’s really not how most of us think about political candidates. We may like candidate A the most (even if we think she has no chance of winning), could tolerate candidates B and C, but would hate to see candidate D win the election. Ranked choice voting is thus more natural — because with ranked choice voting we get to list our candidate choices in order of preference (first choice, second choice, third choice, etc.)

The ranked choice voting system has several advantages. These include: allowing people to vote for who they truly support without having to worry about “throwing away their vote,” ensuring that those who get into office truly have majority support, bringing minority perspectives into the conversation, and making campaigns much more civil.

Ranked choice voting offers a way out of the current political quagmire. Candidates who endorse it — like Grant Hauschild and Rob Ecklund — deserve our support.

Charles Hathaway, Grand Marais