Out-Of-State Donors Funded The Push For Ranked-Choice Voting In Massachusetts – By JAZZ SHAW (Hot Air) / Oct 27 2020
Next week, voters in Massachusetts will be deciding on more than who the next President will be. Their ballots will include “Question 2.” That’s a referendum on whether or not the state will follow in the path of Maine to adopt ranked-choice voting. One group has been flooding the airwaves and people’s mailboxes with promotional material attempting to convince everyone to support this radical change. The Yes on 2 Committee has been driving this frenzy of advertising and activism and they’ve poured a ton of money into it. But the Boston Globe has revealed what should be a very telling detail about this “movement” taking place in the Bay State. Of the nearly ten million dollars that Yes on 2 has spent, nearly all of it came from out of state. And beyond that, it was largely from a scant handful of very wealthy liberal donors. The one leading the charge is a Texas billionaire who is a former energy hedge fund manager and Enron trader, named John Arnold.
“Houston,” the billionaire wrote of his hometown, “should aim to lead the way in bringing it to Texas.”
Eighteen months later, it’s voters in Massachusetts and Alaska — not Texas — weighing whether to push into a new frontier of voting this November. It’s also still Arnold helping drive the case for why they should.
Arnold and his wife, Laura, are among a network of wealthy out-of-state donors helping fuel ranked-choice voting ballot initiatives in Massachusetts and beyond, by seeding local committees with millions of dollars and, in the Arnolds’ case, buttressing research on the system’s potential impact.
Continue to article: https://hotair.com/archives/jazz-shaw/2020/10/27/state-donors-funded-push-ranked-choice-voting-massachusetts/
