In my district we elect 4 State Representatives. There were 8 people running for the 4 positions, and you could vote for up to 4 candidates in any distribution you choose (no individual was running directly against another).
To simplify things, I’ll summarize my opinions of the candidates as follows:
A & B : 100% for
C & D : 60 % for
E & F : 40% for
G & H : 0% for
So what would have been the best way for me to vote? How do you vote in these situations? I ended up voting only for A & B, but I’m not sure it was the best choice.
FWIW, I probably won’t have 4 reps to elect next term (pending the results of a ballot question) so likely this is all academic.
Your own opinions on the candidates is only one factor in making your decision. There’s also their electability.
Suppose for example, that candidate C has no chance of being elected and the two front runner candidates are E and G. In that case, you might decide to vote for E rather than C.
Ah, that is part of my problem. It’s not exactly a high-profile race (the winner had fewer than 3,000 votes), so we don’t really have a good idea of who is likely to win, except for name recognition.
I just went to the state website, and it turns out that the results went: G-H-A-B, then only a 20 vote gap to E. There’s nothing like local elections to make you feel that your vote actually means something.
Scratch “we” in my above post, and make that “I”. I suppose that people who are more into local politics than I do probably know better, but I am not in on that info.