NORTHAMPTON – During the Northampton Ranked Choice Voting Committee’s Aug. 24 meeting, the committee received a presentation from Voter Choice Massachusetts about implementing ranked choice voting in Northampton.

To start the presentation, Greg Dennis with Voter Choice said when coming up with a ranked choice voting system it is better to keep the process and report short.

“Keep it short and sweet; we know the Amherst report was long. That was a very good and interesting report, but we do not think there is any need to delve into that amount of detail when implementing ranked choice for any municipality,” he said. “At the end of the day, I think the meetings can be brief and you do not have to meet for a long period of time.”

Along with providing recommendations, Dennis also described some terminology and pitfalls to avoid with ranked choice voting including surplus transfer which moves votes based on the amount of votes a candidate receives.

“In single winner ranked choice, if your candidate comes in last, you do not want that vote to be wasted so the vote gets transferred to the voter’s next choice on the ballot. In a multi-seat election, you do not want your vote wasted on a very popular candidate and they could get way more votes than needed to get elected. In surplus transfer, if a candidate has more than enough votes to get elected, then you can transfer some of those votes to the voter’s next choice,” he said.

Committee Vice Chair Catherine Kay said the idea of surplus transfer was troubling to her.

“The concept of surplus transfer is initially troubling to me. I am thinking as a voter I want my vote to be my first-choice candidate. I want my vote added to that tally, from the voter’s perspective I want that candidate to have as many votes as were voted for that candidate to show they have incredible support,” she said.

Andy Anderson from Voter Choice explained surplus transfer is important because it prevents all the first-choice votes from one group or political party going to one candidate, especially in the case that party is the majority, so their second choice gets the second seat in a multi-seat race.

“That will still be on the record, that they had that support to begin with. The point of this is to ensure that you have majority control. The important thing is you do not want to have someone pulling all the first-choice votes and then not be able to help their colleague to get elected,” he said.

During his presentation, Dennis also discussed overvotes and skip ranks, two common mistakes voters make with ranked choice voting.

“An overvote happens when you vote for more than one candidate in a single rank, for example if you picked two candidates for your first choice. Another pattern is a repeated rank, this is where you mark the same candidate in multiple ranks. Another scenario, called a skip rank is when you pick somebody first and leave the second rank blank,’ he said.

In terms of taking care of overvoting and skipping ranks, Dennis said municipalities tend to truncate the rank or skip over the rank in question and promote the others.

“There are two different ways people handle these markings. One is truncating the ranking there and then, that rank and all other ranks are treated as if they are blank. The other thing you can do is skip over it and promote the later ranks,” he said.

Another commonly used technique in ranked choice voting is batch elimination, which can eliminate multiple candidates from a race at a time.

“Batch elimination allows you to eliminate multiple candidates in a round, if the number of votes of those candidates you are eliminating combined do not have more votes than the next highest candidate,” Dennis said.

For his final recommendation, Dennis said the legislation for ranked choice voting should give its implementers flexibility in some of the details.

“Our last bullet point is a recommendation not to over legislate, you do not need to put every detail into the legislation, you can leave yourself some leeway. If you have seen Easthampton’s legislation it is short and says enough to explain what is going on and leaves some details up to the implementation,” he said.

The Northampton Ranked Choice Voting Committee next meets on Sept. 22.