On Almanac's April 23rd Political Panel, veteran public affairs analyst and FairVote Minnesota Board member Wy Spano touted Ranked Choice Voting's real potential to improve the tone of campaigns as it motivates candidates to stay focused on issues and away from attack campaigns for fear of alienating voters.

The discussion occurred in the context of the April 23rd-24th DFL endorsing convention, in which the multiple candidates vying for party endorsement depended on voters' second and possibly third and fourth choice votes to reach the 60 percent threshold to win party endorsement.

Spano was responding to fellow Almanac panelist and GOP activist Brian Sullivan's observation that "in a multi-candidate race, everyone is hoping to be every other candidate's 2nd choice. There's so much downside in criticizing another person that you could alienate their supporters and never hope of getting them on the 2nd, 3rd or 4th ballot and so every body essentially has to play nice."

The runoff process in an endorsing convention is similar to the way Ranked Choice Voting works but occurs in multiple rounds of balloting. In contrast, RCV provides voters with the opportunity to rank candidates in order of preference on a single ballot and a majority winner emerges as less popular candidates are eliminated in rounds and their ballots reassigned to more popular candidates until one candidate reaches the winning threshold.

Listen to full discussion on Almanac's Political Panel Segment (Apr 23).