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 ra