Santa Fe goes big for "Clean Elections"
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Tags: Charter Amendment 4, Clean Elections, Public Financing, ranked choice voting, Santa Fe election
Tags: Charter Amendment 4, Clean Elections, Public Financing, ranked choice voting, Santa Fe election
On Tuesday, voters in Santa Fe made it the second city in New Mexico to adopt "Clean Elections" public financing for municipal campaigns.
Charter amendment 4 cruised to victory with 61% of the vote. The reform was backed by Common Cause New Mexico, the League of Women Voters and AARP
In 2005, Albuquerque embraced "Clean Elections by a big margin. Public financing was used for the first time in the Duke City in the 2007 election when 6 of 8 city council candidates in contested races chose to participate in the system, pledging not to use private money in their campaigns.
Election results showed two mandates for city councilors -- that they figure out how to implement a "meaningful system" of publicly funded campaign financing and study the technology available to use ranked-choice voting in future elections.
Ballot language for Amendment 4 called for the details of how to implement public financing to be worked out by the city council. The lessons learned from the Albuquerque experience should provide a useful guide as Santa Fe sets out to perfect its system.
Another reform measure adopted by Santa Fe on Tuesday was ranked choice voting. This is how the Santa Fe New Mexican described the system:
Charter amendment 4 cruised to victory with 61% of the vote. The reform was backed by Common Cause New Mexico, the League of Women Voters and AARP
In 2005, Albuquerque embraced "Clean Elections by a big margin. Public financing was used for the first time in the Duke City in the 2007 election when 6 of 8 city council candidates in contested races chose to participate in the system, pledging not to use private money in their campaigns.
Election results showed two mandates for city councilors -- that they figure out how to implement a "meaningful system" of publicly funded campaign financing and study the technology available to use ranked-choice voting in future elections.
Ballot language for Amendment 4 called for the details of how to implement public financing to be worked out by the city council. The lessons learned from the Albuquerque experience should provide a useful guide as Santa Fe sets out to perfect its system.
Another reform measure adopted by Santa Fe on Tuesday was ranked choice voting. This is how the Santa Fe New Mexican described the system:
It works like this: When voters cast ballots, they rank all candidates in order of their preference. If no candidate has more than 50 percent of the top-choice votes, the ballots for the person with the least votes are 'relocated,' which means those ballots are recounted, only this time they are tallied for the voters' second choice. The process is repeated until a candidate has a majority of votes.
The major challenge to implementing the voting system is technology. The companies that provide the state-approved vote-tabulation machines has said it does not have software to count ranked-choice ballots. Other companies have provided software that can tabulate ranked-choice ballots, however.
