Opinion: Mayor ballot measure still has serious problems

The “Our Mayor, Our Choice” ballot measure failed to gather enough signatures to qualify for the ballot. But the Boulder City Council voted 5-4 to put it on, anyway. The council fixed a number of problems that both the petitioners and city staff had ignored. But the council failed to address the fundamental problems that a directly elected mayor will face within our governmental structure, as well as the serious flaws with this measure’s mandated “ranked choice voting.”

Ranked choice voting (RCV) is a system where the voters rank order the candidates using a grid on the ballot that has the candidates’ names down the side and first, second, third, etc. across the top. Voters fill in the ovals in the grid to “rank” order the various candidates. Obviously, this could get tedious and mistake-prone with lots of candidates, which we’ll likely have, because there are no restrictions on who can run.

Worse, we could easily end up with a mayor who is not the people’s optimal choice. Imagine a race with three mayoral candidates – Fast, Medium, and Slow Growth. Suppose all voters like Medium as their first or second choice. But around 35 percent (barely over a third) rank Fast first, 35 percent rank Slow first, and the remaining 30 percent rank Medium first.

Under RCV, the candidate with the fewest first place votes gets dropped. So Medium, who only got 30 percent of the first place votes, is out. Then the contest is between Fast and Slow, even thought 65 percent prefer Medium to Fast and 65 percent prefer Medium to Slow. So, although Medium is clearly the head-to-head winner, Medium is disqualified, producing a polarized, sub-optimal outcome – exactly what we don’t want. This actually happened in Burlington Vt., after which the town repealed RCV.

The costs associated with RCV could be very high. The county clerk cannot currently administer RCV elections. So the city may have to pay $350,000 for a license to run them, and manage a private firm doing the work. Do you really want Boulder city officials, who work for the council and completely blew the petition process, overseeing the election tallies? It’s an invitation for elected officials to influence the outcome and potentially create an even worse mess.

A much better alternative is Approval Voting (AV), where voters get to vote for as many candidates as they “approve” of. AV leads to a winner who is supported by a majority, and so is less polarizing and more satisfying. And AV could be run by the county clerk just as our current City Council elections are. The only differences are that voters are not limited to voting for only five candidates, and there’s only one winner. Proper policy analysis would have required consideration and evaluation of such an alternative. Now voters will have to do their own research.

Under the “mayor” ballot measure, the elected mayor has no more power than any other council member. But being directly elected, he or she will be held personally responsible to give the voters what they want. So the mayor will be deluged with calls and emails, much more so than under the current system.

Council members reasonably expect the mayor to run the meetings impartially and do the hard work of making sure the agendas are completely prepared. But since council members have no say in selecting the mayor, a lot of unnecessary tension could easily develop. It could become especially bad if the mayor has no experience, which could happen because the job has no limiting qualifications.

The ballot issue also would weaken the term limits passed in 2016. Under the new system, council members could serve three four-year terms on council and two two-year terms as mayor, or two and then four. So former council members who were previously three-term limited can run for mayor. City staff should have informed voters of such a consequential change.

On a more personal note, I find it grossly unfair that the council would decide that, even though neither “Our Mayor, Our Choice” nor “Bedrooms are for People” met the state-mandated signature requirements, the council would (appropriately) turn down “Bedrooms” but then put “Mayor” on the ballot, and then, worse, deny the CU South petitioners even the ability to gather signatures for almost a month.

We have laws so that people are treated equally. But that did not happen, even thought the council received ample warning about the serious problems with the petition process and the arbitrary decisions being made by its city attorney.


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