As easy as 1-2-3: Coastal reader urges support for National Ranked Choice Voting Day

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

Don’t ban books

As leaders of the Beaufort High School and Beaufort Academy chapters of DAYLO (Diversity Awareness Youth Literacy Organization), we believe access to diverse stories is essential to fostering a healthy, empathetic, and diverse community.

The 97 books in BCSD libraries targeted for censorship disproportionately represent authors of diverse backgrounds.

Reading these books and having school library access to them encourages personal growth and critical thinking skills imperative to becoming engaged leaders and citizens.

Banning these books violates the intellectual freedom of students and families, and will only make students less empathetic and curious.

As Atticus Finch said in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “You never really know a person until you consider things from his point of view … until you climb in his skin and walk around in it.” Restricting these books removes a point of connection among students who may feel isolated in their experiences and also removes an opportunity for promoting empathy among those with little exposure to viewpoints different from their own.

The book banners cite “inappropriateness” as their motivator, but their attempts to circumvent established parental control and force their values on everyone are what is truly inappropriate.

Millie Bennett and Elizabeth Foster, Beaufort

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

Eating crow

Ok, it’s my turn to eat crow. I’ll admit it.

For all the times I disparaged Trump, I must admit that the revelation that Biden had classified documents on his properties makes him not much more believable.

It’s time we the people start looking for better candidates for everything. It’s time for Graham, McConnel, Shumer, Pelosi, McCarthy, Biden and many of their cronies to be voted out of office. It’s also time to admit Trump is a has-been. We need people who represent us, not themselves or special interest groups.

We need a “people’s candidate “ who will stand for the majority of the country – not Big Tech, not big time CEO’s, but us.

William Bunting, Loris