Oct. 17, 2018 — The future of voting in Lane County in non-partisan elections will be decided this November as electors decide on Measure 20-290.

The question put forth to voters is: “Shall Lane County amend Charter to adopt ‘Score then Automatic Runoff’ method for counting candidate votes in local office races?”

The measure would look to affect two aspects of Lane County voting: Primaries and how citizens vote.

“I think it’s a powerful, revolutionary first step,” Hallie Roberts, campaign manager for STAR voting, told the Siuslaw News in June. “I don’t think it’s a cure-all patch for everything, but I think it’s absolutely a step in the right direction for our voting method. Whatever changes need to be made to go along side of it, we can address those one at a time.”

Roberts believed STAR would not be the end-all-be-all to fix voting America, but rather acting as a first step to a broader conversation in how America elects its officials.

While the measure would only affect non-partisan races held in Lane County — city races, like mayoral candidates, would not be affected — Roberts hopes that a successful rollout of the program would lead to a broad adoption of STAR throughout the state, revolutionizing how Oregonians vote.

Click here for full article.

Lane County voters will soon be asked to decide the outcome on STAR voting Measure 20-290. The initiative proposes a change in the voting method for non-partisan elections.

Advocates say the method would equalize the voting process. They also acknowledge many people “fear change.”  KLCC's Tiffany Eckert sat down with two people who helped get STAR voting on the ballot: Mark Frohnmayer and Alan Zundel. When ballots arrive in the mail next week, they hope voters will remember that “vote by mail” was once a new idea in election reform too...

For Bassnectar's #BassCenterXI concert in Hampton, VA, they did an experiment: what does democracy look like using the Electoral College, and what does it look like using #STARVoting? Watch it on facebook and see!

https://www.facebook.com/BeInteractiveHQ/videos/322994761800229/

click here to vote in the Eugene Weekly STAR Voting election for Best of Eugene! 

TYT's Cenk Uygur spoke with Mark Frohnmayer the founder of Equal Vote Coalition, an organization working to reform the primary election system to maximize choices in general elections where more voters participate. Click here to watch. 

Lars Larson had Mark on the radio to talk about STAR Voting and the Lane County ballot initiative for this Novembers general election. You also get to hear the latest on Arcimoto, Mark's 3 wheeled electric vehicle now in production in Eugene, Oregon.  Listen here. 

Kenneth Arrow won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science in 1972 for showing that no voting system can avoid imperfect, arbitrary results. Arrow died last year, which means he won’t be able to see whether a group of election reformers in Lane County can prove him wrong. They deserve a chance to try.

The reformers — led by Mark Frohnmayer, founder and president of the Eugene electric vehicle company Arcimoto, and Alan Zundel, a former professor of political science — want Lane County voters to adopt an election system used nowhere else in the world. They’re close to having enough petition signatures to put their proposal on the November ballot.

It’s called the STAR voting system — Score, Then Automatic Runoff. Rather than marking their ballots for a single candidate, voters would give all candidates a score of zero to five, just as they rate restaurants on Yelp. The two candidates with the highest average scores would immediately go head-to-head in a runoff. The winner of the runoff would be the candidate who outscored the other on the most ballots.

Click here to read full article in The Register Guard.

LANE COUNTY, Ore. – A new voting system could be used in Lane County, and it would virtually eliminate primaries.

The system is called STAR voting, and it stands for Scoring, Then an Automatic Runoff. During the vote, voters would be able to see all candidates, regardless of their party affiliation. They would then score each candidate between a 0 and a 5. The two candidates with the highest score would then go into an automatic runoff.

This would mean that there would only need to be one election in November, instead of one in May and one later.

"Right now it seems simple to pick one candidate, the one you like best, but that's often not what voters do. They have to go through a mental calculation of where can my vote [have] the most effect,” said Alan Zundel, one of the chief petitioners on the system.

Click here to watch the clip. 

CORRECTION: Article originally said "score each candidate between a 1 and a 5." but the low score is actually a 0. 

Recorded On: June 1st, 2018

Air Date: June 4th, 2018

Score the candidates, Then an Automatic Runoff, that’s the essence of a Lane County initiative petition that would change the way we elect officials for County offices. The petitioners call it STAR voting; they are working to put the measure on the General Election ballot this year.

The approach laid out in the petition would have voters cast their ballots just once, in the General Election, but give more input than just who they like best. Voters would rate the candidates according to how much they approve of them, for example with a score between 0 and 5. Elections officials would tally up all the scores and a winner would be declared at that time.

Click here to listen.

And here's the video from the City Club meeting: 




Correction: Article originally stated score between 1 and 5 but the lowest score is actually a zero. 

Proponents say it is ‘A step toward freeing people to vote for their favorite candidates’

By: Jared Anderson/Siuslaw News