Letter: Take time to learn merits of ranked choice voting

It might have been in jest, but columnist David Shapiro writes misleadingly that the way ranked choice voting (RCV) works is “ … they keep counting your second, third and fourth choices until a Democrat wins” (“Legislators pitch savings but who’ll save us from them?” Star-Advertiser, April 28). In practice, RCV enables voters to rank every candidate, rather than only one, as our conventional system does now.

In the growing number of jurisdictions where RCV has been implemented, it is credited with reducing negative campaigning and the impact of money in elections, and most importantly, it eliminates the “wasted vote.”

Please, let’s have an informed Hawaii electorate: Learn what RCV can do from some basic research from a reliable source such as fairvote.org or Common Cause.

Elizabeth Weatherford

Pahoa

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