Colorado Politics

Griswold to convene meeting on voting methods

Secretary of State Jena Griswold will convene a meeting on Dec. 15 to discuss the logistics of implementing alternatives to plurality, or winner-take-all, voting.

“For many years, election integrity activists and subject matter experts have advocated alternative voting methods such as ranked voting and approval voting as voting methods that are superior to the plurality method,” Griswold’s office said in its announcement.

Most elections in Colorado use plurality voting, in which the candidate with the most votes wins. Other possible methods of choosing election winners include approval voting, in which voters may select multiple candidates in a race, and ranked choice voting, in which voters indicate their choices in order of preference.

The meeting will take place virtually at 1:30 p.m. Topics will include timelines, costs and infrastructure required to support such alternate voting systems in Colorado’s jurisdictions.

According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, the city of Fargo, North Dakota, conducted the first approval voting election in the United States on June 9, 2020. Maine is the only state with ranked choice voting for state and congressional elections, which began in 2018. Municipalities that use the system include St. Paul and San Francisco, with Utah establishing a pilot program in 2018.

RELATED: Bennet promotes ranked choice voting as partial cure to ‘partisan fever’

At a similar meeting in February, Griswold explained that she was “really happy to facilitate that discussion and learn best practices,” according to The Colorado Sun.

A Jefferson County resident puts her ballot in a 24-hour drop box outside Lakewood’s city hall on Tuesday, Nov. 5, 2019.
(Ernest Luning/Colorado Politics
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