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I was fully ready to be skeptical about these comments, and to agree with you. But I read the article and nowhere does it make the situation any better than the headline.
The fact that certain districts (black and low income) undervote doesn't itself justify the suit to prevent ranked choice voting. In fact, nowhere in the article is there an explanation by anyone why ranked choice voting would be worse for these groups, just that it would be confusing.
Yes, changing things can be confusing. People will get over it and learn. It's definitely not exactly a good progressive look for democrats to be arguing, "oh, it's hard for people to learn a new way, so the old way is better." Kind of the opposite of what democratic voters are looking for.
Uh, being confusing is what would make it worse.
I'm not saying that they're right or wrong. What I'm saying is that the reactions in this comment section of people saying "oh the racist Democrats think black people are too dumb to understand ranked choice" is a complete misrepresentation. The Democrats are saying that the evidence has shown that people in these low-income, predominantly black areas, under-voted when expected to choose two candidates on a ballot, and they're concerned that this will be an even worse problem on a ranked choice ballot where people may be expected to choose up to 5 candidates.
Disenfranchisement of poor and minority voters should be a concern.
No no, I get it. What I don't see - and what would be the most important thing to justify a lawsuit - is why preventing a permanent, better representation selection system isn't a greater impediment to voting rights than temporary confusion.
The justification for the lawsuit here is basically, "Evidence - real evidence! - shows certain people are confused when we fix the broken system, so let's ditch the fix and keep that system." You're focusing on the "evidence" part of that, when the logic itself is what's more seriously flawed.
There are so many less restrictive, less regressive options. Educate those communities. Clarify on the ballot in big large-type bold, simple language what they're supposed to do. Even before filing a lawsuit, they should have looked into publicly available information to see whether that confusion actually resulted in electoral result defects. Right now all we have is that those communities undervote. That's a very thin basis for such extreme action here.
So to be clear, I don't agree with them that this is a good enough reason to block ranked choice voting. All I'm saying here is that the reason for blocking isn't just "hur dur Democrats are racist too", which is the main takeaway of everyone in this comment section.
It's racism point blank, no need to act like these assholes are anything more than that. Democrats are now also trying to pander to some of the racists as Trump has, we need ranked choice now more than ever.