Support RCV
A coalition of 11 multi-partisan organizations will be showing their support for National Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) Day at the State House in Columbia on Monday (Jan. 23). They will ask the General Assembly to make the legislative changes necessary to allow RCV in local and municipal elections.
The date (1/23) was selected because ranked choice is as easy as 1-2-3. With RCV, you rank candidates on your ballot in order of preference: first, second, third, etc. If your favorite doesn’t win, your vote counts for your next choice.
Polls show that where RCV has been tried, voters love it. It’s easy; it empowers voters with more choices, ensures the winner has a majority, reduces negative campaigning, and helps candidates with the best ideas get a level playing field. And there is no need for a time- and money-wasting runoff.
RCV has been tried recently in more elections across America than ever before. Sixty-two American jurisdictions have RCV in place, reaching about 13 million voters. Even our South Carolina military and overseas voters cast RCV ballots. So why not the rest of us?
Join me in letting our legislators know that we support RCV.
Bob Hooper, Bluffton
Inform our youth
The evidence is out there: many young people are misled by the news and information they consume via social media.
We previously presented evidence, to S.C. lawmakers, that most S.C. middle and high school students fail that part of the state readiness test that measures their ability to identify bias and the credibility of information.
Knowing these facts, why has the S.C. legislature ignored efforts to strengthen the weak “media literacy” standards that currently exist? What are they afraid of?
State lawmakers are apparently not interested in sending a strong message to the S.C. State Department of Education that our state could be doing what New Jersey just did (“Gov. Phil Murphy signs a law to make NJ first state to require media literacy for K-12,” January 4, 2023). Inaction means we leave more students behind.
Frank Baker, Columbia
Who are we?
If there’s anyone left in this MAGA Wonderland who can’t grasp what’s happened to our once venerable Grand Ole Party, you’d do well to take a careful look at what got elected to Congress by New York – a 21st-century Pinocchio who has been sworn in and seated by Speaker McCarthy.
McCarthy is the guy who suffered from a moment of disgust with Trump, then came to his senses and caught the next plane to Mar-A-Lago, and sanctimoniously points out that Rep. Santos was duly elected by his district. That he got there based on a pack of lies that rivals Trump’s inaugural crowd whopper seems irrelevant.
You’d think it would matter now that we’ve learned Santos appears to have cheated a military veteran out of Go-Fund-Me money raised to treat his service dog’s cancer.
How bad does this have to get?
And now it’s reported that our once proud and universally admired “Shining City on a Hill” is being emulated by election deniers and anarchists in Venezuela. What have we become?
I’m no longer a Republican, and never was a Democrat. I’m terrified.
George Martin, Chapin
Archive security?
Let’s discuss the subject of the National Archives as the secure repository of the nation’s top classified government documents.
Just as your local neighborhood public library checks out books to individuals with a previously issued library card, the local equivalent of “authorized to view,” doesn’t the National Archives, in all its grandeur, have a similar system for the dispensing and retrieving of our most precious classified documents?
The neighborhood library makes a record of exactly what books you borrow, and when they must be returned, usually in a week or two. If I am “late” in returning a book, I am notified and could be charged an “overdue fee.”
In my youth, that was two cents a day at the Brooklyn Public Library, but the point is, they knew I had the books and they wanted them back by the due date.
Perhaps there is just a large bin of documents in the National Archives’ lobby under the sign, “Help Yourself.”
Hank Druckerman, Bluffton
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