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I was asked recently by a reporter: “Where do the terms ranked choice voting (RCV) and instant runoff voting (IRV) come from?” I understand her confusion. There is such an alphabet soup of terms and abbreviations out there. Her next question was prescient: “Is IRV the same thing as RCV? Or are there different versions of instant runoff voting and ranked choice voting?”

This is not just a matter of academic interest. Advocates for other electoral systems are starting to co-opt the names “instant runoff voting” and “ranked choice voting” for their own purposes, piggybacking on their popularity to call their own methods by the same names. This is causing much confusion.

For example, last summer in Redondo Beach, when the city council was implementing RCV for its first election this March 2025, advocates for an obscure method known as STAR Voting, which is not used anywhere on Planet Earth, tried to claim that their method is also “instant runoff voting” (the term used in the Redondo charter amendment), and therefore would legally fulfill the mandates of the ballot measure that was passed by Redondo voters with 77% of the vote. That provided an opening for an obstructionist mayor and city councilmember, both opposed to reform, to take advantage of the confusion and try and convince their council colleagues to stop the implementation of the real instant runoff voting. Ultimately the council did the right thing and voted to implement, but it caused months of reform mayhem.

Political reformer Charles T. Munger Jr., who donated $12 million to the statewide ballot proposition in California for redistricting reform, has invented his own variety of another method known as Condorcet voting. Proponents of his method have tried to call it “ranked-choice ballots” or “ranked pairs.” Similarly Ohio State University law professor Edward Foley has called his recently invented, never-been-used method a total vote runoff “version of Ranked Choice Voting” that is “designed to be identical to Instant Runoff Voting, which is the most commonly understood and implemented form of Ranked Choice Voting.” Foley apparently believes there are multiple “forms” of RCV, when in fact there are not, since IRV and RCV are the exact same thing (as I will demonstrate below).

This kind of nomenclature piggybacking is greatly adding to the confusion, which in turn makes it harder to pass electoral reform because when voters are confused over a ballot measure, they vote “NO.”

So in this article I am going to clarify some of this confusion, including where the names “ranked choice voting” and “instant runoff voting” come from, and whether IRV and RCV are the same method (spoiler alert: they are).

How do I know this, and how can I state this so categorically? Simple. Because myself and other colleagues like Rob Richie were “in the room where it happened,” so to speak, in terms of inventing and adopting this electoral system jargon and nomenclature. Both the names “instant runoff voting” and “ranked choice voting” were launched in the 1990s and promoted in the ensuing years by us and other leaders from the Center for Voting and Democracy (which since 2004 has been known as FairVote — another name change!), an organization that Rob and I cofounded in 1992.

There are other methods that use ranked ballots, but there is only one ranked choice voting. And it is the exact same method that originally was called instant runoff voting, and also historically has been known by other names such as “alternative vote” and “majority preferential voting.” All of those names describe a single, well-defined method for electing political representatives that has been in use for 100 years in Australia and Ireland and for over 20 years in the United States. That method has a very precise procedure attached to it, which is this:

“Voters rank their favorite candidates in order of preference. Votes are counted in rounds, with the candidate with the fewest first rankings eliminated in the first round, and those voters’ ballots instantly moved to their next-ranked candidate. In each round of counting, each voter’s ballot counts as one vote for her/his highest-ranked remaining candidate until only two candidates remain, in which case the candidate with the most votes – a majority of that final round’s remaining ballots – is declared the majority winner in a single election.”

Here, told for the first time publicly, is the story of how the names “ranked choice voting” and “instant runoff voting” came into being, including a detailed timeline of documentation.

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The origin story of the names IRV and RCV

In 1995, Rob Richie, the executive director of the Center for Voting and Democracy (CVD) was speaking at an event and promoting CVD’s signature reforms -- proportional representation and the electoral method that was then-known to political scientists as “majority preferential voting” (“Preferential voting” was the term used not only by many political scientists but also by Australia to refer to Down Under’s single-winner method of election. The United Kingdom had used the “alternative vote” to describe the system, but preferential voting was also the term used in parliamentary guides recommending it, like Robert’s Rules of Order. And dozens of private organizations in the US and other countries had been using this method for internal elections for many years). Following his presentation, Rob was approached by an audience member who cleverly suggested that the term “instant runoff voting” was a better name for branding and promoting public understanding of this single-winner reform that we were calling “majority preferential voting.”

Rob, myself and a small circle of CVD colleagues and supporters discussed the pros and cons of this name change. Certainly in the five years that we had been educating Americans about these voting methods, the very academic-sounding terms “majority preferential voting” and “preferential voting” had not exactly grabbed the attention of American audiences. We recognized that “instant runoff voting” might better capture something essential in the US context, because numerous cities and also several states already used traditional runoff elections – a second election among the top two finishers – to pick majority winners. So an “instant runoff” could be used to compare favorably to what we started calling the “delayed runoffs” of a second election.

No other previous electoral method that we were aware of had been known as “instant runoff voting,” and CVD’s adoption of this term appeared to be its first widespread use in the US or in any country. The one known exception that we found was in a New York Times news story about Ann Arbor, Michigan’s use of preferential voting in 1975 to elect its mayor. In that Times article, one unknown official referred to the preferential voting system as an “instant runoff” but the name never caught on and Ann Arbor repealed its preferential voting system after one election (in which the Democratic Party’s candidate for mayor, an African-American, came from behind to barely defeat the GOP candidate by about 100 votes after picking up a sizable number of second rankings from supporters of the left-progressive Human Rights Party candidate. As the Democrat was the first Black mayor in Ann Arbor history, and had been elected by a new method, that led to a (unsuccessful) lawsuit, much controversy, a political backlash and finally repeal).

Feeling innovatively emboldened, CVD officially adopted “instant runoff voting” as the term that we would use for the Australian preferential voting system and the UK alternative vote system for single winner, majoritarian elections. For the rest of 1995 and the years going forward, CVD promoted the IRV name via op-eds, reports, media interviews and other promotional means.

For example, CVD used “instant runoff voting” in a policy report published in November 1995, “End of Majority Rule,” the release of which was covered by C-SPAN. In 1996 and 1997, opeds were published by Rob Richie and myself calling for IRV, including “A Cheaper, Better Way than Run-Offs,” “Majority Rule: As Easy as 1-2-3,” and “To the Spoiler Goes the Victory?”

IRV became the dominant “term of art” used in the US for this specific reform, including its use in a charter amendment enabling local implementation in Santa Clara County, California in 1998, and in New Mexico legislation to implement it for congressional elections that passed the state senate in 1999 (but died in the state house). In 1999 and 2000, a number of opeds about instant runoff voting by Rob, myself and others were published in the San Francisco Chronicle, Wall Street Journal, Vancouver Columbian, Syracuse Herald, the Charlotte News and Observer, Roll Call, The Nation, TomPaine.com, New York Times, Washington Post, Detroit Free Press, Colorado Daily, Raleigh News and Observer, Houston Chronicle and other publications.

In November 2000, two Bay Area cities in California passed ballot measures advancing IRV. San Leandro established IRV in its city charter as a statutory option allowing the city council to enact it without another vote of the voters (and which the city council finally enacted in 2010 for first usage). Oakland’s charter amendment authorized the use of IRV for filling vacancies, calling it “preference voting.”

In 2001, federal legislation was introduced by Congressman Jesse Jackson, Jr. and was titled the “Voting Equipment Compatibility With Instant Runoff Voting Act of 2001.'' In 2002, in an unsuccessful ballot measure campaign in Alaska to pass instant runoff voting, Senator John McCain recorded a robocall in support in which he uses the term “instant runoff.” (you can listen to Senator McCain’s 47 second promotion of IRV at this link).

Enter a new name for IRV – Ranked Choice Voting

In 1999 in San Francisco, in the heat of a mayoral election, the progressive president of the SF Board of Supervisors, Tom Ammiano, made it into the two-round runoff in December via a write-in candidacy. To counter criticisms from his opponent, the rascally incumbent mayor Willie Brown, that he had no chance to win and was therefore wasting taxpayers’ money on an unnecessary second election, President Ammiano introduced a charter amendment to establish IRV, saying that majority winners would be decided in a single November “instant runoff” election and therefore would not waste taxpayer dollars.

But a curious thing happened in the drafting of that IRV charter amendment. We at CVD, including my colleague Caleb Kleppner, wrote the first draft, but the city attorney’s office inexplicably inserted into the statutory language some new terminology, calling for the election of city offices “using a ranked-choice, or ‘instant run-off,’ ballot.” Throughout our draft, wherever we had used “instant runoff,” the city attorney also inserted “ranked-choice.” As Caleb and I already were fighting the city attorney on other issues, it didn't seem wise to challenge the use of "ranked-choice" in the charter. Besides, we did not really expect this charter amendment to actually make it to the ballot (it did not). But it set a precedent that would play out a couple of years later.

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IRV – nope, RCV – wins big in San Francisco

Following San Francisco’s brief flirtation in 1999 with an IRV charter amendment, in 2001 this effort gained more steam. A new ballot measure was introduced by a pro-IRV member of the Board of Supervisors, Matt Gonzalez, that mandated San Francisco to use IRV for most local elected offices, including mayor. Once again, in the drafting of the charter amendment, the city attorney’s office took liberties with the terminology, specifically adopting dual phrasing to call this electoral method both “instant runoff” and “ranked choice voting.”

The charter amendment on the ballot in March 2002 labeled the subsection of the charter as “SEC. 13.102. INSTANT RUNOFF ELECTIONS.” But within the charter amendment itself, this method was continually framed in the following ways: “shall be elected using a ranked-choice, or "instant runoff" ballot” and “Ranked choice, or "instant runoff" balloting shall be used for the general municipal election.” This dual framing as “ranked choice” and “instant runoff” was used 11 times in the San Francisco charter.

San Francisco voters decisively approved the IRV/RCV ballot measure, which was the first victory in several decades for electoral system reform in the United States that actually mandated an implementation (the previous victories in Santa Clara County, San Leandro and Oakland did not actually implement IRV, instead they removed certain legal hurdles to a possible eventual implementation). We at the Center for Voting and Democracy were ecstatic and looked forward to our first victory and implementation in the ten years since our founding in 1992.

But then another curious thing happened. San Francisco’s director of elections was not thrilled to have to change his administrative regimen to this new and unfamiliar (to him) method. The director and San Francisco’s voting equipment vendor ES&S, pressured by Mayor Willie Brown and other anti-reform forces, dragged their feet and failed to ready the voting equipment in time to implement IRV for the 2003 mayoral election (Brown’s handpicked mayoral candidate, then-Supervisor and now California governor Gavin Newsom, feared that IRV would favor his presumed chief mayoral opponent, the aforementioned Tom Ammiano, in building coalitions to win). CVD and local plaintiffs sued San Francisco to force compliance with the charter. The judge ruled that the City was breaking the law, that IRV/RCV was the law of the city, but because the judge’s decision was handed down in late August 2003 and so close to the November election and a gubernatorial recall in early October, he would not order SF to implement via our preferred remedy, a hand count of the ballots like is done in Ireland.

So IRV in San Francisco had a difficult birth amidst controversy, litigation and contentious headlines (that now-Governor Newsom never forgot when he vetoed state legislation for a “local option” bill that would have allowed “general law” cities to use RCV).

Once the mayoral election was over, backroom political interference disappeared and finally San Francisco was ready for a November 2004 first implementation. Except for one surprising detail – the director of elections, always a cautious administrator, unilaterally decided to change the name of our reform from “instant runoff voting” to “ranked choice voting” in all educational and outreach efforts, including to the media and on the ballot itself! His rationale was that he wanted to downplay expectations that the public would see “instant” results on election night, since the director was not planning to run the first IRV tally for several days after the Tuesday election. We at CVD were not pleased that the DOE had done this, but there was little we could do since we didn’t want to mire IRV’s first use in more controversy.

Also, for the first election in which we needed to educate voters that they now had the option of ranking their ballots, the name “ranked choice voting” turned out to be descriptively useful in helping voters to grasp how they should use the ranked ballots to select multiple favorite candidates.

The slow transition from “instant runoff voting” to “ranked choice voting”

This dual framing of instant runoff voting/ranked choice voting continued to be used in the years ahead, not only in San Francisco but all across the country. Two years later in 2006, the Oakland charter amendment (link here) that voters overwhelmingly approved to elect local offices used the dual framing: “shall be conducted using ranked choice voting, known sometimes as ‘instant runoff voting.’” Also in 2006, Minneapolis passed a ballot measure for instant runoff voting to elect its mayor, city council and other offices, but by the time of its first implementation in 2009, Minneapolis had changed the name for this method to “ranked choice voting.”

In 2005, voters approved ballot measures to establish “instant runoff voting” in Burlington (VT) for mayoral elections and Berkeley (CA), Pierce County (WA) and Takoma Park (MD), though these amendments did not use the name “ranked choice voting.” In 2007, Vermont legislation to establish “instant runoff voting” for U.S. House and U.S. Senate elections earned the support of Sen. Bernie Sanders and in 2008 reached the desk of the governor, who vetoed it. In 2008, 65% of voters in Santa Fe, NM approved a charter amendment with language to establish “ranked choice (sometimes called instant runoff) voting.”

The terms used in charter amendments, as well as in media coverage, began to shift over time. In a New York Times article from 2004 reporting on first usage in San Francisco, both the terms instant runoff voting and ranked choice voting appeared but IRV was the more featured name. By 2011, NPR affiliate KQED in San Francisco featured an article, “Ranked Choice Voting Explained,” that still used both names, but now ranked choice voting was the more featured name.

In 2011, the federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously upheld the legality of RCV and ruled against a plaintiff trying to stop its use in San Francisco, Dudum vs Arntz. The court used the same dual framing, saying: “instant runoff or ‘ranked-choice’ or ‘alternative vote’ systems have been used in the United States and elsewhere at various times.”

In 2012, California Secretary of State Debra Bowen issued statewide guidelines titled “Instant Runoff Voting in Charter Counties and Charter Cities” (link here) using the same dual framing. The first paragraph of this document reads: “’Instant Runoff Voting,’ also known as ‘Ranked Voting,’ is an election method in which a single election determines the candidate supported by the voters, eliminating the need for separate run-off elections… ballots are counted in rounds that simulate a series of runoffs until either a single candidate among several attains a majority of votes or only two candidates remain and the one with the greatest number of votes is declared winner.”

As of December 2014, FairVote’s website introducing this reform was headlined “Ranked Choice Voting / Instant Runoff Voting.” But from 2015 through 2020, the term ranked choice voting became the more widely used term. What really cemented its preeminence was Maine’s passage of a ballot measure that established the use of “ranked choice voting” in 2016. From that point forward, the use of RCV as the dominant term of art really took off and surpassed IRV.

Also, RCV became more popular with activists because it was useful as a catch-all umbrella term for both single-winner and multi-seat elections (the latter being proportional representation, PR). IRV was still sometimes used in certain local situations for the single-winner, majoritarian version in which a “delayed” two-round runoff was being replaced. IRV’s use of ranked ballots was viewed as a useful transition step towards the ranked ballot version of PR, i.e. single transferable vote, STV. Also, RCV was favored because it usefully communicated to voters that they should rank multiple candidates on their ballots.

History cannot be unlived

The celebrated American poet Maya Angelou wrote in her poem “On the Pulse of Morning” that “history cannot be unlived.” The history of ranked choice voting/instant runoff voting also cannot be unlived, despite the attempts by some enthusiastic proponents of other electoral methods to do so. A few of us from CVD/FairVote were there at the beginning, in the room where it happened. We know where those names came from because we were the ones who either invented them or adopted and then promoted them.

As outlined in some detail above, this long and documented history shows where the terms “instant runoff voting” and “ranked choice voting” come from. That history makes it crystal clear that, from a historical, legal and operational standpoint, there is no daylight between the terms “instant runoff voting” and “ranked choice voting.” They are exactly the same method and have long been used interchangeably, depending on the situation. And they are exactly the same as Australia’s preferential voting system used to elect its House (with the multi-seat version, STV, used to elect its Senate), and the same as what Ireland uses to elected its president (with multi-seat STV used to elect its parliament, Dáil Éireann).

As RCV/IRV has grown in popularity, it was perhaps inevitable that proponents of other obscure methods would try to piggyback on that popularity by trying to coopt the names. My advice to those advocates is: it's a big country, and there is lots of room for competing electoral reformers promoting different methods. Despite some disagreements among this broad world of reformers, we should try to approach our work and our relations as fellow reformers as respectfully as possible. Trying to coopt and in some cases outright steal the names used by other reformers in their work is dishonest and unethical, despite your good reform intentions. And it creates confusion over names and definitions that actually undermines your own reform work, as well as those of others.

In other words, find your own names and terminology. Ranked choice voting and instant runoff voting are already taken.

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776.bsky.social @StevenHill1776

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[Editor’s note: Happy New Year to DSOS readers. Since the November 2024 elections, in which multiple political reforms (including ranked choice voting, open primaries, majority winners, redistricting reform and more) were on the ballot in 10 states and lost in most of them, DemocracySOS has been contacted by a number of readers asking for some assessment about “what went wrong” and “what should come next.” I have been listening and reading closely to a number of different pundits and commentators as I form my own perspective (which I will outline in a future article). I thought this thoughtful piece from Alan Durning, executive director of Sightline Institute based in Seattle, is dispensing some badly needed “take a deep breath, everybody” wisdom. Here’s to better success in 2025 and beyond (a longer version of this article was published on Sightline’s website).]

Sooner or later, bad things happen to everyone. That’s inevitable. The problem is that people often learn the wrong lessons from their misfortunes.

Across the Pacific Northwest and beyond, proponents of unified primaries (also sometimes known as ‘open primaries’ — editor) and ranked choice voting just had bad things happen to them. They lost four out of five statewide ballot measures in Cascadia and matched that record elsewhere. What’s important now is to avoid learning the wrong lesson.

The wrong lesson would be that winning a better democracy is hopeless—an impossible get.

It is not. It’s just hard. You lose more often than you win. You have to keep trying, even when the odds are against you. In fact, you have to study your losses assiduously and learn from them: they reveal the obstacles between you and victory. As Thomas Edison said about the trial and error required to invent the light bulb, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that don’t work.”

You have to persevere because success, when it comes, brings immense payoffs. Open primaries and ranked choice voting are steps toward a public sector that can better do its jobs, from educating children to maintaining roads, from safeguarding borders to defending rights, from policing crime to cleaning the air. Specifically, unified primaries and ranked choice voting upgrade representation, dampen extremism and polarization, and favor leaders intent on governing, rather than grandstanding. They yield a public sector that is better able to solve problems.

Losing and winning

Proponents of reform swelled with optimism in 2024 as one after another state put change on its ballot: in Idaho, Montana, and Oregon within Cascadia, and in five states (Nevada, Colorado and Arizona among them) outside Cascadia. Conversely, they grew concerned about an attempt to repeal open primaries and ranked choice voting in Alaska.

Among the ten ballot measures in populous jurisdictions for electoral reforms involving open primaries or ranked choice voting, only in Washington, DC did voters newly embrace reform. They did so with enthusiasm, approving ranked choice voting by 73 percent.

One source of encouragement in this gloomy picture is that Cascadian places familiar with ranked choice voting, including Benton County, Oregon, and the state of Alaska (which already use it) and Portland, Oregon (which launched it in November), were the most supportive. They provided majority support for reform.

One source of discouragement is that everywhere in Cascadia, the pro-reform campaigns spent more money than the anti-reform side—much more. Overall, pro-reform campaigns in the region spent $44.8 million, against their opponents’ $3.6 million.

Oregon barely had a “no” campaign, with opponents spending less than $15,000 while reformers there spent $9 million. Still, only 42 percent of voters chose “yes.” In Montana, the yes campaign for Constitutional Initiatives 126 (open primaries) and 127 (majority winners) spent about $22 million, while opponents spent an estimated $3 million. In Idaho, reformers spent more than $5 million, while opponents spent less than $500,000.

Meanwhile, defeating the repeal of Alaska’s election system required the pro-reform campaign to outspend their opponents a hundred times over. Reformers in the 49th state spent more than $13 million to win not quite 161,000 votes—more than $80 per vote—while repeal proponents only spent about $100,000 to earn almost as many votes, at a cost of 70 cents per vote. In the end, only 664 votes separated the two sides. If that’s what it takes to defend an existing reform, well, King Pyrrhus’s line comes to mind: “Another such victory, and we are undone.”

Gaining insights and lessons to win

Winning election reforms at the ballot box is hard. Very hard. People vote no by default on citizens’ initiatives, as every political pollster will tell you. Voters understand that passing laws is the legislature’s job, so their attitude toward proposals to bypass lawmakers is “impress me!”

This default is especially strong for election reforms. Even if they are convinced that the status quo is rigged against them, voters view warily any proposal to change it. Altering the way they vote or how their vote counts seem fishy to them. Skepticism about politics is so pervasive that many are convinced powerful interests pull the strings of every ballot measure. When democracy reforms come up, they suspect self-serving ploys and attempts to dupe them. And they vote no.

Beating the odds is unusual, and citizens’ initiative ballot questions lose more often than they win. But many do go on to win later, on subsequent occasions. Oregonians rejected a state income tax six times in the 1920s before finally adopting one in the Great Depression. Other issues in various states that have needed to lose before they could win include legalizing marijuana, pricing carbon pollution, four-year terms, tobacco taxes, and privatizing liquor sales.

Before RCV won a squeaker victory in Alaska in 2020 with 50.45% of the vote, it lost handily in 2002 with only 36%. Losing before winning has been common for decades.

In this context, first-time ballot measures for ranked choice voting that got about 40 percent support, as did Oregon’s and Montana’s, do not seem hopeless at all. They just seem like a bruising round one. And the ballot measure for open primaries that got tantalizingly close to victory in Montana seems like an invitation to try again. There’s ample reason to soldier on.

None of which is to say that trying the exact same things over again is smart. Losses teach lessons. The split reactions in Montana to open primaries (48.9 percent) and ranked choice voting (39.6 percent) suggest the former may be ready for statewide prime time while the latter is not. Indeed, unified, all-candidate primaries might hold appeal not only in Montana but also in Idaho. And maybe Oregon voters, who rejected ranked choice voting, would also warm to unified primaries soon.

2024’s lesson: Go big, lose big, learn big

These questions and others deserve reflection and analysis. But right about now, reformers may be feeling in no mood for study hall, so chagrined are they that their $45 million bet on five Cascadian ballot measures yielded only one win, barely. They may feel like throwing in the towel.

The situation brings to mind a story former IBM CEO Thomas Watson told: a man made a disastrously bad call for his business, costing the firm $10 million. The CEO called the man in, and the man said he understood why he was being fired, but the CEO said, “Fired? Hell, I spent $10 million educating you. I just want to make sure you learned the right lessons.” That’s the appropriate attitude toward the ballot measures of 2024.

The right lessons of 2024 remain to be discerned, of course. Reformers would do well to study their losses carefully and revise their strategies in response. It may be that different strategies or tactics are in order, that the details of the reforms need adjusting or resequencing, or that campaign plans need overhauling. Trying all of those things is a good idea. Gathering and evaluating available evidence is a must.

The stakes of reform are as high as ever. To solve the dozens of tenacious problems that afflict the US, from climate change to homelessness, from the high cost of living to the epidemic of drug overdoses, our country needs its democracies tuned to work better. We need public institutions that represent the public, reflect society’s values, consider the best science, understand the law, and deliver the changes they promise. From our leaders, we need less vilification, spite and polemics, and more wisdom, collaboration and compromise: more us, less us vs them.

Open primaries and ranked choice voting do not guarantee us these things. Nothing does. But they are a big upgrade over the status quo. That’s why they’re worth investing a lot more than $45 million. Losing some ballot measures this year is disappointing, no doubt. But the only tragic outcome would be giving up.

On the long road to reform, losing is not the problem. Quitting is.

Alan Durning @Sightline

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I am a longtime advocate for political parties, and see their potential to get us out of our current polarization and resulting domination by elites. Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) has potential to reinvigorate grassroots political association in the United States, while at the same time offer voters real choices. In particular, the use of ranked ballots allows for more opportunities for engagement and cross-associations among political actors.

Political Association

I was involved in the effort to get Ranked Choice Voting used in Pierce County, Washington in 2008. This effort took advantage of widespread voter discontent with recently implemented partisan primary ballots. This situation, along with a surprising legal ruling at the state level to institute a “Top 2” election system for all state and federal races, greatly affected how RCV was soon repealed in Pierce County (I will cover more about the special circumstances of that repeal in Part 2, to be published at a later time).

In Pierce County, whose largest city is Tacoma (population 219,000), RCV was used for single-winner races, including within the county council, the governing body elected from single-seat districts. This is the usual winner-take-all implementation of RCV in the United States. However, RCV in Pierce was unique in regards to political association, as parties nominated their candidates under their own rules and methods.

Nominating candidates for the ballot is the fundamental reason for a political party to exist. The candidate is the ambassador to voters, of the party’s needs and values. Before RCV in Pierce, parties had ceased being actual political associations. Instead they had become elite-driven organizations in which even active political members like myself were ignored (as I will show below). The party was little more than a PO Box, a website and a bank account controlled by “leaders.”

The United States is unique among democracies with how the various states monopolize party nominations. RCV is spreading in our country, however it is still tied to the old idea of limiting the party system. For example, RCV has been implemented alongside several different systems of candidate nomination, including partisan primaries, nonpartisan (open) ballots, or in Alaska, Washington and California, "prefers party" disclaimers which appear on the ballot and state that the candidates listed are not endorsed by any political party.

How an election system handles political association has been central to political battles in Washington State, well before RCV was passed in Pierce County.

Enter Top 2

From 1935 through 2004, Washington had a so-called “blanket primary.” With this system, a voter from any political party or an independent could vote for any candidate they wished. The top vote-getter from each major party, alongside minor party and independent candidates, advanced to the general election. This gave voters maximum electoral freedom, and preserved the structure of having one candidate each from every political party on the November ballot.

But then the US Supreme Court invalidated the blanket primary. In 1996, California voters had passed a version of it but it was soon sued by the major political parties in California Democratic Party v. Jones, and the plaintiff parties prevailed. Consequently, Washington State also lost its longstanding blanket primary system.

With the blanket primary gone, Democrats and Republicans in Washington, by way of the state legislature, instituted exclusive party primary ballots. Voters had to now, colloquially, “Pick A Party” and vote only in that party’s primary. This confinement to a “closed primary” was unpopular with voters who for decades were used to open choices on their primary ballot.

The Washington State Grange, sponsors of the 1935 initiative and in which I am a longstanding member, offered a new kind of blanket primary. In 2004 voters passed ballot Initiative 872, rejecting the Pick A Party primary preferred by the Democratic and GOP leaders. Under this new system, called a “Top 2” primary, only the top-two vote getters, regardless of party, advanced to the general election. And candidates were not running as endorsed by a political party but as individuals, yet they were allowed to put “prefers Party X” next to their name on the ballot. The political party itself had no control over who adopted their label. That candidate could in fact be ideologically unaligned with the views of the “preferred party,” yet still be allowed to adopt its name. It has great potential for abuse, such as fake candidates from one party running from another party to split that party’s vote, which apparently happened in a California senate race.

This makes the candidate — not the party — paramount. The "preferred" party — on the ballot itself — does not have a chance to rebut the self identifying candidate claiming its endorsement.

While this method resurrected voter choice in the primary, other choices offered from the old system are gone. In particular, the general election ballot in November no longer features independents and third party candidates alongside the two major parties because smaller parties and independents rarely finish in the top two.

That became the new way for how candidates advanced. The associational component of party primaries — namely, how the ballot dealt with party cues as aids to voters — quickly turned into a landscape of constant legal battles.

Serving a Bowl of “Prefers Party”

Some political parties decided to strike back. The respective state Libertarian, Republican and Democratic Parties still wanted their Pick A Party closed primary, so they sued to block the Top 2 system. Their facial challenge succeeded all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States. The high court then surprised legal experts by overturning the lower courts and upholding Washington’s Top 2 primary.

Justice Thomas wrote for the 7-vote majority in Washington State Grange v. Washington State Republican Party. However, the nuts and bolts with implementation are found in a concurring opinion from Justices Roberts and Alito. The justices stated that these ballots pass constitutional muster by way of comparing political association cues next to a candidate’s name to someone preferring a can of Campbell's soup.

However, Alito and Roberts wrote that they wanted to see this system in action, and an accumulation of electoral history, before considering whether to invalidate it. But that did not settle it. Soon after the March Grange decision, the Democrats and Republicans rolled the legal dice again, this time filing an as-applied challenge. To succeed legally, the parties now had to demonstrate how Top 2 disclaimers harmed the right of association. So they set about trying to gather evidence and foster the conditions that would prove the harm.

The Democratic state chair told the various state organizations they had to nominate their own candidates. By doing this the party, as a private association, will have “expressed” itself, and the state, with its ballot disclaimer allowing self-identification, would have usurped this right (or so it would be argued). The Chair was serious about the need for evidence for the legal proceedings and told the rank and file, "If you don't nominate candidates, I will do it for you". Of course, the idea was not to empower the grassroots through free association; rather, the respective party establishments needed evidence in court to get their exclusive partisan primary ballots back.

What irony how the Chair, like a true party boss, virtually at the snap of a finger, granted the various Democratic Party groups power.

RCV and Parties

In the state of Washington, where I live, Precinct Committee Officers (PCO) are constitutional officers. Under their state chair’s decree, local Democratic organizations relied on PCOs to nominate candidates. I was very active in the state Democratic Party Central Committee in 2008 — I was Chair of my county party, and was an elected PCO for my precinct.

PCOs are elected on the primary ballot from over 1000 precincts in the state. PCO elections, along with US President, are the only exclusive partisan ballots in Washington elections, utilizing a ballot featuring a voter declaration of affiliation with the party. PCOs are basically elected by their neighborhood.

In my rural county group, nominations were a breeze as races were uncontested. Other party groups, with multiple candidates, experienced messy nominations. In some places, after PCOs nominated the party standard bearer, those who lost the PCO elections expressed hurt feelings, unsettling local organizations.

Pierce County had many contested public elections, especially for high profile races such as an open seat for County Executive. In this situation, Democratic PCOs used RCV to solve their problem of messy nominations. They nominated multiple candidates for the public ballot. The use of RCV helped increase the engagement of voters and fostered the power of association. That’s because ranked ballots allow for more opportunities for engagement and cross-associations among political actors. There were many races that featured two Democrats, alongside a GOP challenger. The GOP did not change their rules and only nominated single candidates for the RCV ballot.

Maximizing Voter Choice

Let me offer a great example of how RCV fostered the power of association, while at the same time expanded voter choice. Pierce County elects a County Executive, which is like the governor of the county. This office now was elected using a single RCV race in November. Democrats stood two candidates for County Executive; the county auditor Pat McCarthy and state legislator Calvin Goings. McCarthy was the centrist, while Goings ran as the union-supported candidate. There was also a Republican and an independent, so the general election ballot featured four candidates representing a broad range of political opinion. Voters had choices.

Here is how the single November election RCV ballots were tabulated in that race: In the first round, there was no majority winner, with the GOP frontrunner having only 35% of the vote, and the second and third place Democrats separated by only 3%. The independent came in last (though with a significant 15% of the vote), so his voters' 2^nd and 3^rd choices were redistributed to the remaining candidates.  That still resulted in no majority winner. Following that round, the battle between the 2^nd and 3^rd place Democrats played out. With the Democrat Goings in 3rd place, his preferences were distributed overwhelmingly to the other Democrat, McCarthy, who then passed the GOP frontrunner and won the election.

Scholars Todd Donovan, Matt Barreto and Loren Collingwood conducted a study of this election, An assessment of ranked choice voting in Pierce County, WA. (2009), which provides a rundown of how the partisan RCV ballots performed in Pierce County with all races. The political science paper concluded that RCV "mirrored the primary / general dynamic" but succeeded in finishing the election in one ballot instead of two. Democrats, who offered to voters multiple candidates from their party, did not split a single race, and in fact their “voter coalition” allowed the Democrat McCarthy to close the 8.5% gap with the GOP candidate and prevail.

Party Killers

While voters were empowered by the expanded choices, political elites quickly had their knives out for RCV. Dominant forces, like the unions supporting Goings, were not happy with their candidate finishing third. Under both the “closed primary" and Top 2 system, they would have likely knocked centrist Democrat McCarthy out in the primary — when the turnout is lower and the more activist voters participate. I am confident to speculate, since the unions ran the only negative ad in the RCV County Executive race, and it was against the other Democrat! (it is as if they could not break old habits.)

The GOP wasn’t happy because their initially frontrunning candidate lost. The winner McCarthy also stated opposition to how parties had to nominate candidates in this new system. This opposition to political association was widespread among elites, who could compare the new Top 2 ballot used in other elections, such as in state and federal races. This was a key dynamic of the RCV repeal effort that was about to emerge — the hated Pick A Party closed primary was gone, and voters in Pierce County could now use a wide-open primary again by getting rid of RCV and adopting the Top 2.

Many of the Democrats’ rank and file also started opposing RCV, yet their argument was RCV gave parties too much power! They were in favor of Top 2 because they did not like nominating candidates, and RCV required them to. Having used the blanket primary for so many decades, the Top 2 seemed like a “good enough” return to the familiar.

Unfortunately, this attitude seems like a general rule in American politics. Prof. Seth Masket, in his excellent tome The Inevitable Party: Why Attempts to Kill the Party System Fail, and How they Weaken Democracy, says parties are viewed by most people as corrupt organizations. The study is about how special interests gain power through the vacuum left by weakened party groups. Masket adds that political actors can find willing allies in the American people if they frame their reform proposals as curbing the power of parties. (Read my review of Masket’s book here https://deepriverdispatch.com/essay/books/perspect2.html)

My Party Time

As Chair of my county Democratic Party, and as an elected PCO, I attended a state committee meeting in early 2009 after what I considered a successful Pierce RCV election. Yet I was dismayed to find widespread misunderstanding and rumors about this new election system. There was no support from even the Pierce County delegation. They understood how it worked, but never bothered to think about why it was good for democracy or even for the Democratic Party. And they would not listen to what I had to say on the subject.

I tried to understand their viewpoint, realizing I was involved with a group that, for generations, had never nominated candidates for the ballot. There was simply no culture, sensibility, or among some members, energy to harness the power of association. For me personally,  a political party that doesn’t want to act like a party and nominate candidates was like a bicycle club which never goes on a ride, instead just sits around and talks about bikes.

Top 2 is a wrecking ball against political association. On the other hand, RCV, as implemented in Pierce County, was a lifeline. Nevertheless, the party folks did not see that. The Pierce Democrats had no idea about the potential for political association that RCV offered.

This was disappointing because, as a way of reviving the grassroots of the Democratic Party faithful, I had been advocating an unassembled caucus / firehouse primary system within the party. That is a candidate-nominating contest funded and overseen by a local party organization rather than public election administration officials. I traveled to other party groups in the state to speak at their meetings about the firehouse primary. The idea was for PCOs, who are accountable to voters in their neighborhood, to set up polling locations in their communities for those who feel aligned with the party to come in and cast a ballot to nominate candidates. I found this simple idea to be over the heads of many Democratic leaders and members.

I quietly quit the Washington Democratic Central Committee soon after my convention experience. I resigned for other reasons too, but I did not want to be in the bike club that refused to ride.

Eventually, after I had left, Democrats voted to stop using their archaic and frustrating presidential caucus, to instead adopt the party-exclusive state presidential primary ballot. I wonder if even a single party member argued to change caucus rules more along the lines of the firehouse primary I had advocated?

Top 2 Wins the Day

The appeal of the Supreme Court decision allowing the Top 2 to go forward lost in the federal district court in Washington. The judge just followed the Grange decision precedent. While Party leaders and other elites grumbled over seeing Top 2 in action, they identified this as a system they could work with. At the end of the day, it was not much different from the old blanket primary.

RCV had another good election in 2010 with a couple of races in Pierce. Nevertheless, it could not withstand the gossipy negative impressions, collusion of Democrats and Republicans, unions and other elites. The dreaded Pick A Party was gone, and in the afterglow of the new Top 2 system, RCV was repealed in the same election. (I have a lot more to share about this in the upcoming Part 2 of the story.)

Which was really a tragedy, not only for voters but for the political parties themselves. RCV in Pierce County was unique with its powerful grassroots associational component. As previously stated, RCV in the United States currently works in a number of primary contexts, including partisan primaries, nonpartisan ballots, or in "prefers party" ballot disclaimers. Reformers need to make more apparent how RCV can unleash the potential of political association, even as it offers maximum choice to voters. The use of ranked ballots allows for many more opportunities for engagement and cross-associations among political actors.

2008 was a long time ago. People forget history. RCV will be back in Washington. In fact, recently Seattle voted overwhelmingly with 76% of the vote to use RCV in its local primaries. In nearby Oregon, state Democratic Party leaders have led an exciting effort to put RCV on next year’s ballot, which will give voters maximum choice. Democrats and Republicans in other states hopefully will follow Oregon’s lead. There is no greater army than an idea whose time has come.

Krist Novoselić

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Dear DemocracySOS readers – as we stand on the cusp of another election – one in which the balance of power in the US Congress is at stake, and signs of voter suppression and a faltering democracy are lurking – I want to take a moment to reflect with you on the first six months of DemocracySOS’s existence.

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Now back to our regular programming…Yes, it’s election time again! Some people roll their eyes over this ritual of democracy, and let their internalized cynicism leak out like radioactivity. “If voting mattered, they’d make it illegal,” “it’s not who votes that counts, it’s who counts the votes,” that sort of thing. Certainly there are a lot of alarming stories out there about the potential for voter suppression, stolen elections, losers refusing to concede, a partisan Supreme Court. As the negativity increases, some voter’s tune out and stay home, leaving the playing field even more in the grip of the partisans. Things do feel perilous, in certain ways.

Yet in the midst of this already tumultuous election there are points of light, I do believe. We have to remember that human governance has always been a fraught struggle, often advancing in incremental steps. As one example of a step forward, I would point to the amazing recent progress of Ranked Choice Voting in the United States. I’ve been involved in democracy reform for 30 years and I have never witnessed such a banner year for a single reform as this year. We are seeing an outbreak of RCV democracy, all across the country. What could be more democratic than people voting on how to improve their democracy?

Allow me to take you by the hand and show you what’s going on out there. It’s a big country, but we are making progress. Already a total of 55 cities, states and counties, with 11 million voters across the nation, are using RCV. Military and overseas voters in six states cast RCV ballots in federal runoff elections, and Democratic primaries in four states have used it to nominate their presidential choices, while the GOP used it to select its gubernatorial candidate in Virginia.

Now, on November 8th, ten of those RCV cities and two of the states will be using it. Voters in those locations will elect various officeholders, including governor, US Senator, federal and state legislators, mayors, city councilmembers and more.

In addition, a record 10 locations across the country will vote this November 8 on whether to change their current electoral system to RCV. That includes the largest cities in several states, as well as small towns and the entire state of Nevada.

Here’s a quick rundown. Get out your scorecard and keep track on Election Day.

Where RCV will be used on Nov 8

Alaska

Alaska has been garnering the most national attention in recent months due to its first RCV election in August. That was a special election to fill a congressional vacancy that resulted in the election of Democrat Mary Peltola, who defied the odds and surprisingly defeated two Republicans, Sarah Palin and Nick Begich, in this conservative state. Next Tuesday, the same three candidates will compete in a rematch to see who will fill that seat permanently, and polls indicate that it is going to be close.

But that’s not all. RCV will also be used to elect Alaska’s governor, lieutenant governor, U.S. Senator and dozens of state senate and house members. Alaska combined RCV with top-four open primaries, meaning the top four candidates for each seat get to compete in the general election. Many analysts are particularly watching the US Senate contest, where moderate GOP incumbent Lisa Murkowski faces off against Trump firebrand Kelly Tshibaka. Since Murkowski is being challenged by a candidate from the right wing of her own party, her path to reelection involves winning first-choice support from independent-minded and centrist voters, and second-choice support from Democratic voters.

Maine

Maine first used RCV in 2018, and now will use it for a seat in the US House of Representatives, after also using it in partisan primaries this past June. Like Alaska, Maine features a rematch, in this case for the 2nd congressional district between Democrat incumbent Jared Golden and the former GOP representative he defeated in 2018, Bruce Poliquin, when Golden won a come-from-behind RCV victory in the second round.

Maine’s largest city, Portland, which has used RCV for mayor since 2010, voted to expand it in 2020 to also apply to city council and school board races. Now the 81% of Portlanders who supported the RCV expansion will have a chance to use RCV for multiple offices.

Other cities using RCV this November 8 include:

San Francisco, to elect district attorney, six members of the Board of Supervisors (city council) and several other offices. San Francisco has used RCV since 2004, longer than any other city except Cambridge, MA.

Oakland CA, which has used RCV since 2010, to elect its mayor in a very competitive race with 10 candidates and no clear front runners, as well as three city council seats.

Three cities are using RCV for the first time, including Corvallis, OR which adopted RCV by a city council vote in 2022 and will use it to elect its mayor and city council; Palm Desert, CA, which adopted proportional ranked choice voting (also known as single transferable vote) as part of a California Voting Rights Act settlement; and Albany, CA, which also adopted proportional RCV but by ballot initiative with 73% voter support, will elect its city council and school board. Other cities using RCV to elect various offices on November 8 include Berkeley CA, San Leandro CA, Takoma Park, Maryland, and Arden, Delaware.

As a special bonus, Burlington VT will use RCV in December to elect its city council. This one is particularly interesting because Burlington adopted RCV to elect its mayor in 2005, then repealed it after that mayor became embroiled in a scandal. So it’s “back to the future” for Burlington.

Where RCV will be voted on this November 8

Ranked Choice Voting has had a remarkable run of victories over the last six years. From 2016 thru 2021, voters weighed in on 20 ballot measures, including four statewide measures (two in Maine) and 16 measures in cities and counties. RCV emerged victorious in 18 of those ballot measures. Often the victory margin has been significant, with an average of nearly 30 percentage points in the last 13 cities to vote on RCV.

But as they say in the stock market: “Past results are no guarantee of future performance.” The more successful and popular RCV has become, the more opponents of reform are taking it seriously and starting to raise more campaign funds to oppose it. Entrenched incumbents in particular have emerged as the opposition in some of these races. RCV is in their crosshairs.

The two most important battles by far are one for RCV for the state of Nevada, and a second in which proportional ranked choice voting will be voted on in Portland OR.

Nevada

Nevada will vote on a state constitutional amendment to establish a “final five voting” system, after Nevada Voters First collected sufficient signatures to place Measure 3 on the ballot. FFV includes a nonpartisan open primary to select the top five candidates, regardless of party, then RCV would be used in the November election to choose among the top five finalists. Nevada is a state where over a third of voters are registered as some category of “independent,” more than either Democrats or Republicans. So RCV combined with an open primary would empower all of those independent voters. Maybe that’s why the leadership of both the Democratic and Republican parties, as well as their allied groups , are strongly opposed to Measure 3.

Portland, Oregon

Portlanders will vote on whether to adopt proportional ranked choice voting for city council elections. This is an important one to watch since P-RCV is really the best method for a large, “multi-everything” city of 600,000 Portlanders. If it passes, other cities may follow Portland’s example over the next few years. The measure was put on the ballot by a near-unanimous vote of a charter commission, which was grappling with how to provide adequate representation for different minority groups that are geographically dispersed. Portland United for Change is leading the “Yes” campaign, backed by the largest coalition ever assembled in Portland with over 50 local organizational endorsers. The measure has been polling well but faces major opposition by wealthy and well-connected interests in government and business who are wedded to the status quo, since they know how to manipulate it.

Portland is the largest city in Multnomah County, where a charter commission voted almost unanimously to place a referendum on the ballot to adopt RCV for Oregon’s most populous county, with more than 800,0000 residents. Leading this effort is Oregon Ranked Choice Voting and the Coalition of Communities of Color.

Washington state is a hotbed of RCV activity this Nov 8. First there is Seattle, which is in a battle against both Approval Voting and the current plurality system used in local elections to narrow a larger field to the top-two candidates. Voters will first vote on a question asking if they want to change the primary election system from its current method, then vote on whether they support an RCV primary or approval voting primary. Groups like Seattle for RCV and FairVote Washington are leading the charge, and early polling looked good.

Then there’s San Juan County, Washington, where a charter commission placed a charter amendment on the ballot to adopt RCV for local elections. And Clark County, which is Washington’s fifth largest with over 400,000 residents, just across the Columbia River from Portland, Oregon. Here too a charter commission voted 11 to 4 to put an RCV measure on the ballot.

Other places where RCV is on the ballot include Fort Collins, Colorado, where the city council voted 6-1 to advance an RCV measure to the November ballot. If Ranked Choice Voting for Fort Collins manages to pass it, Fort Collins will join five other Colorado cities and towns that use RCV. Then there’s Evanston, Illinois, just north of Chicago on Lake Michigan, where an effort led by to RCV for Evanston could result in their city becoming the first in Illinois to adopt RCV. And there’s the “other” Portland, in Maine, where a charter commission in the state’s largest city voted unanimously (12-0) to enable the city council to pass ordinances to use proportional ranked choice voting for any of the city’s multi-winner elections (RCV is already used for all city elections based on two prior charter amendments approved by the voters).

So get the popcorn out, some of these elections are going to be nail biters. More Americans than ever have heard of ranked choice voting, understand it and seem to have a generally favorable view. The movement for a better democracy may be poised for new breakthroughs. But one thing I’ve learned in 30 years of political reform work is that in every election there are winners and losers. And the losers are always looking for reasons they lost, something or someone to blame it on, besides looking in the mirror. So expect there will be a lot of post-election whiners complaining about RCV!

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776

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Whoever said political reform is not adventurous? I remember when I ran the first campaign in Alaska for ranked choice voting (RCV). It was exactly twenty years ago in August 2002, and I and my FairVote colleagues had just passed RCV in San Francisco. We were heady with victory, and an opportunity had presented itself for placing RCV on the ballot for the entire state of Alaska. So I was dispatched there to run the campaign, taking our winning tactics and strategy to a new electoral landscape.

Probably there are not two places in the United States more different than Alaska and San Francisco. Not only is one considered very progressive and the other very conservative, but Alaska is enormous (665,000 square miles, 2.5 times larger than Texas), the very definition of that Gertrude Stein quote 'There is more space where nobody is than where anybody is.” San Francisco is tiny by comparison (47 square miles, less than one-tenth the size of Houston or LA), and dense with denizens who wouldn’t know a moose from a mouse.

What could possibly go wrong?

Quite a lot, it turns out.  We lost that campaign by a wide margin, and twenty years later I’m thinking about lessons learned -- just as Alaska prepares to use ranked choice voting for the first time ever on August 16. Led by a new generation of reformers, they figured out how to crack the code of successful reform in a decidedly puzzling place. In two Tuesdays, Alaska will use RCV to fill a congressional vacancy. Then, in November, the state will use RCV again to select its governor, US Senator, state legislature, and then in 2024 its presidential choice. For the first time ever, RCV is being paired with a “top four” primary, which will be used on August 16 to narrow the field of candidates to four. The future of US politics is happening right now, in that out-of-the-way place, Alaska.

What is the difference between then and now? Why did we fail while they succeeded 20 years later?

II. Alaska reform:  “It was 20 years ago today, Sgt Pepper taught the band to play…”

The first thing that must be said to those from the lower 48 who don’t already know: Alaska is a jaw-droppingly beautiful state. I can still remember when I flew in to Anchorage through a swirl of gigantic cumulus clouds that parted at one point to reveal the most stunning natural landscape. I had hiked in the Cascades near Seattle, the Sierra Nevadas in California and the Rockies in Colorado and Banff, and all are magnificent. But those areas seemed puny compared to the fresher orogeny of Alaska’s muscular, heaven-bound mountains, interspersed with glaciers, inlets and snaking “arms” (Alaska-speak for a fjord). This was “The Last Frontier,” as the locals fittingly call their home state, and in the summer they have 20 hours of daylight to revel in it.

Populating this geologic cauldron of wonder is bountiful wildlife – including right in the middle of Anchorage, Alaska’s largest city of 270,000 people (at that time). I remember one afternoon, in the middle of our campaign, when one of my enthusiastic campaign workers burst in the door, wide-eyed and breathless. “You won’t believe what I saw!” he shouted, waving aloft the campaign door hangers which he was distributing door to door in various neighborhoods.

“A moose, right in the middle of the street! In the neighborhood!” Robert was part of a crew of volunteers we had flown to Alaska from California, Washington and New York to help replicate our San Francisco success. Naturally Robert had never seen a moose in his hometown San Francisco. Me, ever focused, hardly blinked: “Did you hang some door hangers on its antlers,” I asked, “slap it in the butt and send it running down the street to spread the word?” In Alaska, delivery by moose seemed to make a heck of a lot of sense (gotta watch this video).

With its unsurpassed rawness and beauty, Alaska’s frontier culture also is…unique, might be the best way to say it. For starters, it is one of the few American states where there are more men than women. While nationwide the US is majority (50.5%) women, less than 48% of Alaskans are female, joining other “frontiersy” kinds of states like Wyoming, Idaho, Montana, Utah and both Dakotas with that kind of reversed demographic.

Perhaps all those men and testosterone is one explanation for another uniqueness about Alaska – it’s fondness for hunting and gun ownership rights, and weapons of all denominations.

I remember the first time, soon after my arrival in Anchorage, when I went to the law office of one of the sponsors of our Alaska initiative. He was a local attorney who handled the state legal matters for the Republican Party. Sitting in an adjoining space to his office, I suddenly was startled by the loud sound of a nearby gunshot. I sat frozen, listening. A few second later, “Bang!”, there it was again. When I heard it a third time, I had to investigate.

I crept down the short hallway, poked my head in his empty office. “Bang!”, again with the gun shot! I walked around the desk to his desktop computer, and there I saw the source of his piercing ordnance – the gunshot sound was his version of “You’ve got mail!” Every time an email arrived, the metallic explosion of Billy the Kid’s Colt double-action . 41 caliber blasted through his powerful speakers.

No, we were not in Kansas anymore, Toto.

Alaska is a state dominated by an ideology that prizes individual liberty above all else, and doesn’t much like “big government” or regulation. This was the charming backdrop to our electoral reform campaign. The reason why there was interest at that time among some Alaskan leaders in instant runoff/ranked choice voting was because Alaska had a very vibrant independent and minor party culture. While Republicans vastly outnumbered Democrats, the most distinctive thing about Alaskan politics was that fully half of its registered voters had chosen "Non-Partisan" or "Undeclared" as their affiliation. And most of those constituted an army of curmudgeonly conservatives who didn’t much care for political parties any more than they cared for big government.

Also there was a Libertarian Party, an Alaska Independence Party, a Green Party, and finally a splinter group from the heavily dominant Republican Party called the “Republican Moderate Party,” which formed due to perceptions that the core GOP had become dominated by the religious right. The latter party especially caused some GOP leaders to fear that the conservative vote would fracture and split among too many rightist candidates, allowing Democrats to win. So these GOP leaders started the campaign to place on the ballot a voter initiative for ranked choice voting, Measure 1, as a way of preventing spoiler candidates on the right.

I had about a dozen campaign volunteers, plus support from Rob Richie and the FairVote crew back in Washington DC, and we worked indefatigably to target our message, especially to those nonpartisan and undeclared voters. Precinct walking, phone banking, radio interviews – with a state as large as Alaska, radio was an indispensable medium for reaching small pockets of Alaska sapiens, some of whom lived in the bush far away from anything that might be called a “settlement.” We also gave brief presentations about Measure 1 to any organization that would invite us. Yes indeed, ANY organization.

One of these was to a private party at a country club-looking place, a beautiful ranch carved out of various marbled brown tones of timber and stone. Of course, lining the walls of the great hall were the obligatory mounted racks of various marvelous heads and horns of hunted prey. This was no ordinary party. It was a campaign event for one of the GOP candidates for governor – Wayne Anthony Ross. Better known by his initials, W.A.R., which he used on his campaign material, Mr WAR was a board member of the National Rifle Association and fairly notorious, even by Alaska standards. He would later be nominated as attorney general of the state by Governor Sarah Palin, only to have his appointment rejected by the Republican-dominated legislature because, among other things, he defended a statue of a KKK figure as an expression of free speech and compared his distaste for gays to his distaste for lima beans. That was the first time in Alaska history that a governor’s Cabinet nominee failed to win confirmation.

The keynote speaker at WAR’s campaign event was none other than Ted Nugent, famous rock ‘n roller (big hit: “Cat Scratch Fever,” which appears to be about getting a sexually transmitted disease) and also noted author of the Fox News bestselling cookbook, Kill It and Grill It. Nugent once called US Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who was lead author of an assault weapons ban, a “worthless whore.” While heavily armed attendees eyed me and my campaign workers with cross-eyed suspicion – and we all eyed the quickest route to the nearest exit – author Nugent inveighed against all governments everywhere, ending with the inspiring mantra, “The United States sucks, Alaska sucks a little less, and W.A.R. doesn’t suck at all!” With that ringing endorsement, Mr. WAR got walloped by nearly 50 points in the GOP primary for governor (Sarah Palin, who I was introduced to at a major GOP get-out-the-vote event during a Sunday service at an evangelical church attended by thousands – no separation of church and state there -- was then mayor of the small town of Wasilla, population 5500. She finished a close second in the GOP primary for lieutenant governor, which launched her later gubernatorial and then national career).

We left the event soon thereafter, and met up for dinner with another one of my campaign workers who had the most plum assignment of all. In true “Go where the people are” spirit, we had been instructed by our Republican advisers that we should table at gun shows. Brent from Seattle was “volunteered” for this duty, armed with a large bright banner that read: “Vote for Measure 1: it will increase the Bang! of your vote!” Clearly a genius slogan that struck the proper balance between voter education and pandering. We could feel victory within our grasp.

But poor Brent. He returned from the gun show looking thoroughly traumatized. Gun shows are strange, but Alaskan gun shows? Another planet entirely. This one had been visited by thousands in a large gymnasium, where attendees in camos could purchase all manner of handguns, shotguns, semiautomatics, sniper rifles, Glocks, gnarly-looking “survival” knives, ammo, Confederate and "Don't Tread On Me” flags and more.

During the adventurous month that I and my campaign crew waged our righteous battle, I had an increasingly sinking feeling that we were in over our heads. An Alaskan campaign needed more of an Alaskan cultural touch. Certainly we had support from our Republican Party sponsors, but a split developed within the GOP, with some leaders wanting to pass RCV and others calculating how they could use their overwhelming Republican legislative majority to change the ballot access laws, and wipe from the ballot the Republican Moderate and other small parties threatening their dominance by splitting the conservative votes (this was not only a Republican thing – in New Mexico, around the same time, when the Green Party began spoiling Democratic candidates, the Democratic establishment split over the same strategy debate, i.e. whether to accommodate third parties using RCV, or pass a law that wiped them off the ballot).

III.  Losing is a drag, but it teaches lessons.

For reformers, there are a few cautionary lessons here.

1) Helicoptering in to foreign lands may well provoke a backlash. Indeed, in Alaska we encountered significant pushback from certain Republican leaders who were furious over San Francisco liberals leading a campaign for reform, despite us having been invited there by other GOP leaders. Nevertheless, we were regarded as “outsiders” by many.

2) The importance of culture. In some places, cultural insights and deep knowledge can be as important to successful reform as political arguments or the “Problem plus Solution” formula that is also necessary to pass political reform.

We fell on the wrong side of that vote in August 2002, 36 to 64%. After the thrill of our San Francisco win six months before, we now had tasted the bitterness of defeat. We didn’t realize until too late that our local GOP sponsors had not been able to swing the party and its apparatus firmly on board the reform train. And without that imprimatur, the vast number of the all-important Undeclared and Nonpartisan-registered voters didn’t take too kindly to those strangers from the Lower 48 and their newfangled ideas.

3) Sometimes you have to lose before you win. We wish we would never lose and always win. Winning is a peak experience, especially at the conclusion of a mighty effort. But always winning is not real-world. In a campaign for political reform, there are so many factors that feed into success or failure. The important thing is to learn a lesson every time you lose.

Twenty years later, on November 3, 2020, a homegrown Alaskan effort tried again. The campaign this time was led by three solid Alaska co-chairs, Jason Grenn, a former independent state legislator and also Republican and Democratic co-chairs, a “three-pronged attack on making our elections better,” as Grenn called it. By the thinnest of margins, 50.55 to 49.45%, this time reform proponents prevailed.

As we like to say in the RCV movement: we didn’t really lose in August 2002…we just hadn’t won YET. That motto has prevailed in other places and times. We lost in San Francisco in 1996, but won in 2002. We passed RCV in Santa Fe in 2008 but it took 10 years to implement it. There are some places – Memphis, Sarasota – where RCV was passed 15 years ago and has not (yet) been implemented.

Sometimes success can take a little while. Patience is advised.

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776

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Some personal reflections as FairVote celebrates its 30th anniversary this July 25 in Washington DC

I remember with crisp memories the first time I met Rob Richie. He was drenched in sweat and clutching his bicycle helmet. It was 1990ish, in Seattle, and I had founded a local grassroots group called Citizens for Proportional Representation. We advertised our monthly meetings in the Seattle Community Catalyst, which were held in an old school building in the University District. Rob showed up to one of our meetings, having bicycled there, his determined demeanor that would soon translate into a national leader already apparent. That began a partnership that has lasted, on and off, for 30 years.

Rob was especially curious about our group because he had launched a similar one with the exact same name in Olympia, about 90 minutes south of Seattle. Later I found out that another group in Washington DC also had independently adopted the same name. Coincidence? Destiny? Already many of us were traveling on the same beam, independent paths that were somehow fated to interconnect. How does that happen, I sometimes wonder. There are 8 billion people on this planet, what kind of cosmic plan causes any two or four or ten of them to join forces? Or is it all just…random?

I and my Seattle colleagues soon launched a voter initiative drive to change the electoral method for the city council to one of proportional representation. Our group was too small and penniless for such an ambitious effort, but in a quirk of Seattle law we had unlimited time to gather the signatures, so one of our members stored our petitions in her freezer (we never completed that first initiative drive; those petitions might still be in a freezer somewhere).

Rob meanwhile had moved from Washington state, heading east with his partner Cindy Terrell, an inspiring organizer and leader in her own right, and they both rolled up their sleeves to assist with a ballot campaign for proportional representation in Cincinnati. That seemed like a great target because it had used proportional representation to elect its city council from 1927 until 1957, until the election of two black councilors led to a racist-tinged repeal. Unfortunately, that campaign in 1991 lost. So our fledgling movement was 0-2.

Finally Rob and Cindy made it to the Washington DC area, and Rob connected with Matthew Cossolotto, who not only had started his own CPR group but had been a speechwriter and special assistant to Speaker of the US House of Representatives Jim Wright. With Rob and Matthew on the East coast, and me on the West Coast and many other supporters scattered throughout the country, we launched a national organization called Citizens for Proportional Representation, with a founding convention in Cincinnati in June 1992 (which, unfortunately, I was not able to attend). Ted Berry, one of the African American councilors in Cincinnati elected under proportional representation in the 1950s, gave the moving keynote.

You might have noticed that the acronym for Citizens for Proportional Representation is CPR. Our slogan was: “CPR – let’s resuscitate our democracy!” That fits nicely on a bumper sticker. And we thought for sure that, with a slogan that catchy, this movement would soon sweep the country.

Were we ever wrong. Someone once said, “Don’t worry about someone stealing your idea, because if its any damn good, you’re going to have to ram it down people’s throats.”

Yes, we were a bit naïve. But in a way, it’s good that we were, because if we had really understood how difficult it would be to change the antiquated, 18th-century “winner take all” electoral system in the US, either at local, state or heaven forbid federal levels, we might never have started on this meandering journey, 30 years ago.

II.

Lesson Number 1: Political reform is opportunity driven. There has to be a problem that you have identified, and for which you have the unique solution. “Problem plus solution,” that is the formula for successful political reform.

Rob, Cindy and soon their growing family eventually settled into Takoma Park, MD, just up the Red line from Washington DC, and ran the new organization out of their house. Rob was the first employee, I was the second. Sometimes we actually got paid. Rob brought an incredible brainiac focus to our research capabilities, combined with a relentless drive like water cascading down a waterfall. No doubt he was moved by the spirit of his great-uncle, Dr. George Hallett, who was a founder of the Proportional Representation League in the 1920s, and was once called by the New York Times “America’s leading advocate of PR.”

Along the way, CPR flatlined and died – the name, that is. Prospective funders were not yet sold on our solution, so it wasn’t helpful to have our name shout out that we were for this thing that too few people understood. That realization seems common sense today, but the slogan had been soooo good.

We changed in 1993 to the Center for Voting and Democracy (CVD), and former presidential candidate John B. Anderson became chair of the advisory board and later of the board of directors. Proportional voting was still our focus, but now we also embraced instant runoff voting, and eventually universal/automatic voter registration (I wrote about our history with that reform here), national popular vote for president, a constitutional amendment guaranteeing a right to vote (the US is one of the few democracies that has no such constitutional guarantee), improvements to election administration, and more.

Rob’s statistical wizardry provided the vision for advancing the most powerful critique of America’s “winner take all” elections, incorporated into our regular reports called Dubious Democracy and Monopoly Politics (which soon became mimicked by a number of other news and research organizations, such as the Charlie Cook Political Report). CVD became a pioneer in several important and original areas of research, analysis and reform.

III.

By 1994, I had moved to San Francisco. A voter initiative had established an Elections Task Force that was deliberating over whether San Francisco should change its at-large plurality election system — a terrible method that was underrepresenting SF’s minority communities — to a district election system. Certain constituencies in SF had pined to return to district elections since the late 1970s, when districts were blamed for the assassination of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, the first prominent gay politician in the US. In the midst of that tragedy, a citywide ballot measure opportunistically repealed district elections and replaced it with the at-large plurality method (in the tortured logic of the times, the assassin, another elected supervisor named Dan White, was elected from one of the 11 districts, so he was chosen by only a small number of voters, i.e. 1/11th of the city. Repeal advocates claimed that switching to an at-large system would mean winners would need more votes, and so better officeholders would be elected. Or at least officeholders who were not assassins. This may have been the first time that political reform was spurred by murder since the assassination of President James Garfield in 1881 by an embittered appointment-seeker, which resulted in the passage of the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act).

But the Elections Task Force, which was presumed to be returning district elections to San Francisco, began noticing an uncomfortable fact – since the late 1970s, minority communities had become more geographically dispersed. It was not so easy to draw districts that would ensure diverse representation.

So there it was, an opportunity, based on a problem that needed to be resolved: how could San Francisco have fair and competitive elections that resulted in diverse representation and political equality in an increasingly diversified city? We at CVD had a unique solution to this problem.

I was able to meet with members of the Elections Task Force, and offer a different democratic vision for this “multi-everything” city. I introduced the task force to the idea of proportional representation, using a visual presentation to demonstrate to them how an electorate can cast the same votes through different electoral systems – proportional representation vs district elections vs. at-large plurality – and come up with completely different results, in terms of who gets elected. I showed them how a ranked ballot method called preferential voting (and which is now called proportional ranked choice voting) could work in San Francisco.

To their credit, most of the task force members were open-minded and forward-looking. They did not balk at a new and different electoral method (that is not always the case with such task forces and commissions). Over a period of many months, I was able to round up enough support among community organizations, political leaders and ultimately task force members to convince them to recommend to the Board of Supervisors (the city council in SF) that proportional representation, along with a “winner take all” district-based system, should be put on the ballot, side-by-side, for the voters to decide.

Huzzah! Only three years after our founding, we were making real progress in a major city!

Or so we thought. Now we had to convince the elected officials to put this electoral package on the ballot. That is, to agree to allow voters to change the rules that will impact their own reelections. Incumbents tend to “dance with them that brung ya,” as Stanford Law professor Pam Karlan once told us. Yes, we were blissfully naïve enough to hope that the incumbents would allow the voters to decide the election rules. Unfortunately, the gatekeepers voted down the package, and we were facing over a year of work suddenly circling around the drain.

But we did not give up. I redoubled my efforts to enlist endorsements and support from key organizations and political leaders. A group of us met with the mayor – the formidable Willie Brown. Former speaker of the California Assembly for 15 years, first African-American mayor of San Francisco, and known as the wiliest (and perhaps most crooked) politician in California who knew how to twist an arm, step on a foot, or sweeten the deal with candy and pork to get the votes that he needed. Willie had been the king of the California roost, and after term limits had removed him from the state legislature he brought his scheming to San Francisco.

He was no fan of political reform; in fact he disdained it. He was the type of politician that liked backroom deals, because for years he had been the one in the back rooms – “in the room where it happens.” But for some reason, he gave us invaluable advice. I still remember how he sat in this enormous chair, an ornate cathedra like a king’s throne, and softly pounding both fists on the wooden arms he told us: “You don’t give incumbent politicians a chance to vote on the rules that affect their own reelections.”

Blank stares from all of us.

An exasperated His Willie-ness, practically rolling his eyes, spelled it out for us: “Set the implementation date of the first election to go into effect after those who are voting on it are term limited out of office.”

Duh, of course. So that’s what we did. And it worked. The incumbents voted to place two ballot measures before the voters, Proposition G for district elections and Proposition H for proportional representation. San Franciscans voted in November 1996 and the first date of implementation would be in January 2000, after all the current incumbents were gone. Amazing how some clever little legislative sleight-of-hand sometimes can flip the tipping point.

That indicates Lesson Number 2 of political reform: be sure to factor in the incumbents’ self-interest. You can’t let it paralyze you, but if you ignore it, you will never get over the mountain pass.

IV.

We actually lost that election, in November 1996. Proportional representation was too new of an idea, even in liberal San Francisco (“No, for the hundredth time, San Francisco will not end up like Italy and Israel!”). District elections prevailed with 56% of the vote; our ballot measure earned a strong yet ultimately insufficient 44%. We were disappointed, and now 0-3. But we dusted ourselves off and kept going.

Our first major ballot box victory, the first electoral system change passed by US voters in nearly 60 years, would have to wait almost 6 years longer, until March 2002. District elections were implemented in San Francisco in 2000, and that year several elected officials proposed that we present to the voters a ballot measure for “instant runoff voting,” the ranked ballot method to ensure majority winners within the districts, as well as for citywide offices such as the mayor, district attorney, city attorney and others. In a previous article, I wrote about the exciting and successful campaign that passed instant runoff voting in March 2002 (in a strange coda, that name would soon be changed to “ranked choice voting” by San Francisco’s Director of Elections who did not want the pressure of producing “instant” results, so much to our dismay he unilaterally changed the name. “Hey, can he change the name of our reform?” we wondered. Apparently yes. Talk about random. But the name kind of stuck, because it described what voters have to do – rank their candidates – and that wasn’t a bad thing).

So we had our first major victory, plus an unwanted name change for our reform, and by 2004, yet another name change for our organization -- the Center for Voting and Democracy became FairVote, a shorter name that wasn’t such a mouthful to say. We also now had a half dozen or so employees, and Rob oversaw an army of interns during the summer months. Several of us wore multiple hats as reformers, organizers, researchers, op-ed writers, dishwashers and whatever else the job required.

We were like a small startup business, always looking for new sources of revenue and trying to keep the doors open. We were still inspired, and not as naïve as before. The world of political reform often felt random and haphazard – stuff happened beyond our control – but we were still determined and pragmatically idealistic enough to keep going. Through it all, I remember being inspired by a quote from social activist Abbie Hoffman who said, just before he died in 1989 as he looked back on his life as a reformer:

“We are here to make a better world. No amount of rationalization or blaming can preempt the moment of choice each of us brings to our situation here on this planet. The lesson of the 60s is that people who cared enough to do right could change history… We were young, self-righteous, reckless, hypocritical, brave, silly, headstrong and scared half to death. And we were right.”

We are still right. US democracy is still based on antiquated, 18th century institutions and practices that have resulted in the most pernicious “minority rule” which is gravely undermining America's future. The mission and mandate of the former Citizens for Proportional Representation a.k.a. Center for Voting and Democracy and now FairVote is more important than ever, and crucial to this fragile American experiment with representative democracy. 

Cue Frank Sinatra: “We did it our way.” Now ranked choice voting is used in 55 cities, counties, and states in jurisdictions that are home to over 11 million voters. Two states, Maine and Alaska, use RCV for most of their important state and federal races, and Democratic primaries in four states have used it to nominate their presidential choices. New York City’s use of RCV in its municipal elections contributed to the first women-majority city council in its history (31 out of 51 seats, 25 of them women of color). Military and overseas voters in six states cast RCV ballots in federal runoff elections. More people than ever have heard of it, understand it and seem to have a generally favorable view. Sure, it’s a big country, and we still have many tall mountains to climb. But the movement for a better democracy is poised for new breakthroughs in the years ahead.

There is no greater army than an idea whose time has come.

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776

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March 5, 2002. That was the historic day when the national movement for ranked choice voting took its first giant step forward. Twenty years ago in March. On that night, following a grueling, months-long campaign, we passed a voter initiative in San Francisco for ranked choice voting (RCV). Against all the odds, against all the money from entrenched interests that was stacked against us, FairVote (which then was known as the Center for Voting and Democracy), fought a hard campaign to pass our reform, known as Proposition A. It was the first victory for electoral system reform in the United States since the 1950s.

I still remember that moment like it was yesterday. As the campaign manager, I had led a merry band of idealistic election reformers who dared to believe we could convince an entire city of 800,000 people that a new way of voting was the wave of the future. “The way democracy will  be,” as my colleague (and longtime CVD/FairVote director) Rob Richie was fond of saying.

Our opponents, mostly the usual mix of political consultants and downtown business interests opposed to change, had spent gobs of money to kill Proposition A. They outspent us about 10-1, with negative TV and radio ads and they mailed tens of thousands of citywide mailers, attempting to slander our efforts. One mailer showed a photo of a National Organization for Women march and said, “If Proposition A passes, women’s representation will suffer.” Just one problem – the local chapter of NOW actually had endorsed our measure, as had national woman’s leaders like Patricia Ireland and Ellie Smeal.

Another mudslinging mailer showed the famous photo of a lone Chinese man standing in front of the line of tanks at Tiananmen Square in June 1989, after the Chinese government's deadly crackdown on protesters. The message said, “If Proposition A passes, your right to vote will be taken away,” and it was mailed to Chinese surname households all across the city. That was downright insulting. Not only had most prominent Chinese and Asian political organizations and leaders endorsed our measure, but one of our chief goals in waging this battle was to empower traditionally underrepresented communities (which RCV elections in subsequent years would succeed beautifully in doing).

Our opponents had no shame. They were willing to do and say anything to stop reform. As the polls closed on Election Night, I was exhausted. I had been awake for nearly 36 hours at that point, directing the troops (over 100 volunteers), transporting signs and door hangers, leading a wee hour lit drop to our most supportive precincts, giving media interviews, and urging on my teams of precinct walkers, street sign holders, phone bankers and more. One photo from that time, which I recently pulled out of a shoebox, showed me talking into two telephone receivers at once, one for each ear. I look like a strange kind of insect, with the portable phone antennas extending past the top of my head. I remember scanning my to-do list, looking for the next task, unable to stop my campaign fever, flying along on adrenaline and a refusal to lose.

Finally, my co–campaign manager and fellow conspirator from the Center for Voting and Democracy, Caleb Kleppner, looked at me and said, “Hey, what are you doing? The polls have closed. Election’s over.” I realized he was right. There was nothing left to do, except wait for the results. I slid into a chair at our campaign headquarters, exhausted, and with a sinking feeling. Our prospects for success suddenly looked grim.

The reform we were trying to pass, ranked choice voting (or instant runoff voting as we called it at the time – in a future post, I will tell the odd story of how the name got changed for crazy random reasons). As an advanced electoral method, RCV allows voters to sincerely express the full range of their electoral preferences by ranking multiple candidates according to their first, second, third and more choices. If your first choice doesn’t win, your vote goes to your second selection—that’s your runoff choice, the candidate you prefer if your favorite candidate can’t win. The goal is to elect candidates who have support from more than 50 percent of voters and to determine that in a single election. Voters are liberated to vote for the candidates they really like instead of choosing the “lesser of two evils,” or worrying about voting for a “spoiler” candidate who might split a constituency vote and result in non-majority winners.

In effect, RCV asks voters to tell us more about themselves. OK, you know who your favorite candidate is, but tell us more—tell us your second favorite in case your first choice doesn’t have enough support to win. OK, you’re a moderate Democrat, but what about this moderate Republican candidate? Might that candidate be acceptable as your second or third choice? Or maybe you are a Libertarian Party or Green Party supporter—tell us who your second- or third-choice candidates might be in case your top candidate can’t win. Voters can think more about which candidates they like regardless of partisan labels. And this in turn fires the synapses of voters in ways that the current “highest vote-getter wins all” system can never do.

US elections are filled with examples of third party candidates in races for president, U.S. Senate and House who very likely spoiled the results for one of the two major party candidates. In the 2020 presidential election, Libertarian candidate Jo Jorgensen’s share of the vote was much higher than the margins between Joe Biden and Donald Trump in the key battleground states of Georgia, Wisconsin and Arizona. If Trump had won those three states, he and Biden would have tied in the Electoral College vote at 269 apiece, and all hell would have broken loose.

Or flash back to the presidential election in 2000 – with RCV, the 97,000 Ralph Nader voters in Florida would have had the option of ranking a second choice. No question, tens of thousands of them would have ranked Al Gore, who would have received all those “instant runoff” votes, winning Florida instead of losing it to George W. Bush by 537 votes. For that matter, in New Hampshire, Nader’s 22,000 votes was three times the vote difference between Bush and Gore. If Gore had won either of those states, he would have become president. History would have been different.

So using an advanced electoral system like ranked choice voting in a single winner race produces fair, more majoritarian results, and can change outcomes. And RCV leads to a more satisfactory experience in the voting booth because voters are no longer trapped in the dilemma of always picking the “lesser of two evils.” You can cast your vote for your favorite candidate, knowing that if your favorite can’t win, you can give your vote to your second choice.

Waiting for the initial results that Election Night twenty years ago, I reflected on the fact that no ranked ballot system like RCV had been enacted in the United States in many decades. Americans are used to thinking that we are the paragon of democracy, that the way we elect our representatives is the best — indeed, the only — way. Most Americans, even many political scientists, are unaware of the vast array of electoral methods available and used in other nations, almost all of them better than those we currently use. With that kind of hubris, it’s no wonder we had a dangerous insurrection following the 2020 presidential election, and an electoral meltdown following the presidential election in 2000, and nearly again in 2004.

Despite these recurring electoral dysfunctions, many Americans remain very closed-minded about trying other methods. Yet, against all those odds and more, we in San Francisco had been audacious enough to believe that we could convince an entire city to take a chance on a new method like RCV.

That night, twenty years ago, victory was ours. We had managed to pass one of the most significant electoral reforms in decades. San Francisco went on to hold its first RCV election in November 2004, and the city has now used it in 15 different election years for dozens of races at the local level to elect the mayor, Board of Supervisors (city council), district attorney and more. The Proposition A victory was momentous because it showed that significant political reform was possible.

But the movement for RCV was just getting started. Since then, other cities and states have passed ballot measures for ranked choice voting, including New York City, Oakland, Portland (Maine), Santa Fe, Minneapolis, St. Paul, numerous cities in Utah and other cities, a total of over 50 cities. The states of Maine and Alaska now use RCV for some of their federal races, and the Republican Party in Virginia used it in its gubernatorial primary in 2021, as did Democratic primaries and caucuses in Wyoming, Nevada, Hawaii, Kansas, Maine and Alaska. Legislative bills for ranked choice voting have been introduced into state legislatures in dozens of states, and the FairVote-sponsored Fair Representation Act seeks to use RCV to elect the House of Representatives in multi-seat districts, a form of proportional representation. Support has been gained from the left and the right.

Ranked choice voting, both for single-winner elections for executive offices, as well as multi-seat elections for our local, state and federal legislatures, is the right kind of reform for our country at this time. In a recent Gallup poll, 62% of Americans say that a viable third party is needed, with a record 63% of Republicans expressing third party support. Yet our eighteenth-century electoral methods, whether for Congress, the president, or state legislatures, create and reinforce the two-party system. More modern methods such as RCV are far better suited for our twenty-first-century politics and our multi-everything society.

Indeed, at this point in the evolution of the nation’s political landscape, the case for RCV is the case for democracy itself. All Americans deserve representation, no matter where they live or what they believe. But our current "single-winner plurality" system, with its zero-sum, winner-take-all dynamics, will never be able to deliver that.

It’s time to think like the Founders of our nation once did – outside the old box, with invention and inspiration, guided by a zeal for renewal instead of clinging to the flypaper of old ideas.

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776

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On April 11th, FairVote held its inaugural FairVote Awards in New York City. It was truly a lovely evening, with some 230 guests and a sweeping view of the Hudson. This is from my opening remarks.

Tonight is truly a special one. It’s testimony to what our reform movement has become and our momentum toward sweeping structural change of our election rules. It’s particularly special to lift up tonight’s honorees Andrew Yang, Katrina vanden Heuvel and Kathryn Murdoch. I couldn’t think of three more deserving leaders and change agents so worthy of your awards tonight. Thanks to all of you. 

Let me go back to the beginning - briefly! My wife Cynthia Terrell and I found common purpose with a small band of idealistic visionaries - like Howie Fain and Hendrik Herzberg, both here tonight –  who were ready to dream big as we launched FairVote. It was 1992, and I was 29 years old. For those counting, that puts me before Generations X, Y and Z…. Let’s call it “Generation Why Not.” 

I was in Berlin just days after East Germans broke through the Wall and triggered the fall of the Soviet Union. I’d witnessed an ailing Nelson Mandela be released from jail – and then lead South Africa to its first democratic elections, grounded in full proportional representation. At home, I’d lived with my father Dave Richie as in the course of a decade he transformed a backwater National Park Service project into one of the largest initiatives in Park Service history – one that quadrupled the miles of the Appalachian Trail protected for future generations. When change is needed, don’t tell a member of Generation Why Not that it can’t be done.

In 1990 I devoted a whole issue of an environmental newsletter to the challenge of climate change. My search for getting to the core of what was needed led me to voting as an unrealized tool for collective voice and action. Electoral reform could be the lever to change the world, I realized. As FairVote’s founders came together with a fervent belief that our country could do so much more to create a healthy democracy for all, many dismissed the idea of changing winner-take-all voting as quixotic – that we might not last a year. But what defined FairVote from the start was that question: Why not? Why not seek the big changes that our times demand and find tangible ways to move toward them?

If barely two-thirds of Americans were registered to vote, why not aspire to accurate rolls with every eligible voter registered? Thinking big, but acting pragmatically, our resulting policy innovations catalyzed major progress for automatic voter registration in dozens of states. We brought the same approach of getting to the core root of hard electoral reform questions when sparking movements for major changes to presidential elections and gerrymandering.

What has centered FairVote’s work through thick and thin has been relentless focus on what we’re best known for - the way electoral rules translate our votes into power. When you go to vote, and there are more than two choices, why not give the voter the power to do more than tick a single box? Why not open the ballot to the freedom of ranking candidates – to ranked choice voting, that holds the promise of elections providing greater choices, stronger voices, and fair elections for all? And let’s go further: Why not take that same insight about the power of offering more than a single choice to enable Americans to have more than a single representative in the “people’s house” - to provide all voters with real chances to elect someone no matter where they live? Why not create electoral incentives for our leaders to truly represent us - and take on and solve our era’s daunting challenges - by passing the Fair Representation Act?

To be sure, the journey to make ranked choice voting the national norm and the Fair Representation Act the law of the land has taken time. My 29-year old self of 1992 would be appalled by the barriers we’ve faced – of antiquated voting equipment, fearful officeholders, and sheer institutional inertia. But my 50-year-old self of 2012 would be thrilled. Two states now use ranked choice voting for their presidential and congressional elections. More than 50 cities just used ranked choice voting– and yes folks, that includes right here in New York.

And let me be clear. We’re just getting started. Our growing reform coalition is truly thrilling. Success depends on people working as allies who might disagree on most everything else. That means conservatives, liberals, and moderates finding common purpose in winning electoral reforms that are right for our nation - people like our former board chair and independent presidential candidate John Anderson, and the Libertarians, Greens, Democrats and Republicans we work with every day in support of ranked choice voting as a tool to end the “spoiler wars.”.

It means having some reformers focus on big ballot measure campaigns that can change congressional elections overnight – as could happen this year in Nevada and Missouri. It mean others –  like our great team at FairVote, with our eyes on the ultimate prize of a national win in Congress - focused on winning and sustaining ranked choice voting through building coalitions and finding legislative allies in city, state and national government — with victories for RCV to replace local runoffs and handle crowded primaries being valuable in themselves while building the foundation for sweeping national change.

Make no mistake. It takes all of us. With this growing chorus of allies, let’s all become part of Generation Why Not and get it done.

By 2024, why not have a dozen states use ranked choice voting in primary or general elections for president? 

By 2025, why not have 500 cities across America use ranked choice voting?

By 2030, why not expect Americans to define “voting” as “ranking” - everywhere? Why not pass the Fair Representation Act in Congress so that every voter, in every election, has the power to join with like-minded Americans to define their own representation -- no more “elections only decided in the primary”.... no more shaming of third parties, no more funhouse mirror representation of America. Why not have the left, center and right of every corner of our nation come into Congress to help decide our future, with new electoral incentives to do what’s right by voters and needed for the world? Why not indeed?

As I stand on this stage, looking out into a hall filled with friends, allies, family, and people who collectively have the power to do so much, I feel deep gratitude - and great determination and hope. Let’s transform our elections… together.

Rob Richie @Rob_Richie

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