2024 may be a breakout year for Ranked Choice Voting

Across the nation, RCV will be on the ballot in a number of states and cities -- and already it has won 27 city and four statewide ballot measures in a row

Sunrise over the nation’s Capitol

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As part of my happenstance preparation for a career doing political reform work – there were no university degrees in “how to foment a revolution” – instead I obtained a degree in Geology and Geophysics. An odd path, to be sure, but there are many lessons to be learned from studying the earth, and one of them is that change happens slowly.

For example, the orogenesis of an earthquake is a story of inch-by-inch slippage along the margins of seismic plates over many years, undetectable except by the most sensitive of instruments. The plates are heading in opposite directions, scraping and sliding, and as they slip past each other year after year, tension and pressure build. Finally, the tension is so great that it all erupts in a violent jerk that lasts only a few seconds, yet those seconds can be devastating, causing death and destruction and resetting the landscape into a new normal.

Political reform has been like that, over my 30+ year career. For the first 10 years, after we founded the organization that today is known as FairVote, we had no political wins for electoral system reform. There were several unsuccessful attempts, including lost ballot measures in Cincinnati and San Francisco, and a few student body elections at universities that adopted either single-winner or multi-seat proportional ranked choice voting. Some favorable editorials, opeds and media interviews appeared, some influential leaders endorsed our efforts. But after a decade we didn’t have any major victories to point to.

Yet slowly, over time, the tensions of US politics were building along the tectonic plates of political fractures.

Finally, the first eruption occurred in March 2002 in earthquake-prone San Francisco. City voters passed a ballot measure for ranked choice voting (for single-winner races, then known as instant runoff voting) for local elections. It was the first victory mandating electoral system reform in the US in about 50 years.

More wins would occur over the next few years – Oakland, Berkeley, Minneapolis, Burlington, St. Paul, Memphis, Santa Fe and others. Followed by some repeal attempts, including an unsuccessful repeal effort in San Francisco in 2012. Then came the next big eruption, our first state victory for RCV in Maine in 2016.

The Maine victory had been preceded by a number of inch-by-inch steps, including RCV being introduced in the Maine State Legislature in 2001 and each subsequent year for the next 10 years. In 2011, the voters of Portland, Maine’s largest city, voted to use RCV to elect its mayor, with FairVote and the League of Women Voters leading that campaign. The stage was set for a statewide victory via an impressive voter initiative campaign, but even then political opponents, both Democrats and Republicans, tried to use the courts and the legislature to prevent its implementation. Another vote of the people was necessary in 2018 to halt any legislative, i.e. partisan hack obstruction in its tracks.

More victories followed in city after city – New York City, Boulder, Lowell, Easthampton, Minnetonka, Eureka…and then the next seismic eruption, this time in the most tectonically active state of all – Alaska. Eighteen years after we had lost there by a 2-to-1 margin, finally we had prevailed by the slimmest of margins. As we say in the political reform world, “There’s no such thing as losing, you just haven’t won YET.”

More cities were added in 2021, 2022 and 2023 -- Portland and Corvallis Oregon, Seattle, Evanston, Fort Collins, three cities in Michigan (Kalamazoo, East Lansing and Royal Oak), two dozen cities in Utah, including the capital Salt Lake City to elect its mayor and city council. Since this progress happened over many years, sometimes it felt like a trickle.

Reaching the “viability threshold”

The biggest challenge often was one of “branding” over a new idea. We always knew that the term “ranked choice voting” – and before that instant runoff voting, preference voting, choice voting, majority preferential voting, a real alphabet soup of names – was a mouthful for most people. The term sounded strange, even vaguely “foreign,” and part of the threshold of credibility and viability for political reform is whether the public recognizes the name of your reform and has a positive association with it.

My FairVote cofounder Rob Richie and I used to commiserate that you could say “public financing of campaigns” or “campaign finance reform,” which are also mouthfuls, but most people had an idea of what you meant. But most people greeted “ranked choice voting” with a blank stare.

So it’s been surprising and a relief that, over just the last five years or so, the term ranked choice voting has broken out of its black box of anonymity. More and more people are familiar with it, have a sense of what it means and a positive association with it. I’m amazed at the number of TV shows, radio programs and news articles that today casually mention “ranked choice voting” like that term is as familiar as Barbie and Ken. Groups of friends use RCV to pick pitchers of beer in the pub. Recently Minnesota used it to select its new state flag. There is even a RCV board game. The “name recognition quotient” has climbed into the stratosphere.

Not that every person can explain how the ballots are counted, but they have some major flickers of understanding that, as a voter, they know they will be ranking their ballots, and if their first favorite can’t win their vote goes to their second favorite, and that means they have more choice and don’t have to worry so much about spoilers and the “lesser evil” and for most people that seems like a very good thing.

That is such a sea-level change, in terms of political viability, and for those like myself who have been knocking hard on this door for decades, it’s awfully gratifying.

And it’s created a successful political movement that has gained significant momentum. Ranked choice voting has now won 27 city ballot measures and four statewide ballot campaigns in a row, and RCV is used in about 60 cities – including marquee cities like New York City, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Portland, Seattle – as well as half a dozen states for various offices, some major and some minor. At this point in its decades-long trajectory, ranked choice voting is spreading to all kinds of places – Blue, Red, Purple, big cities, small towns, large states, among liberals, progressives, moderates and even conservatives.

The potential 8.0 earthquake coming in 2024

But all of that previous success is just the warm-up for what’s coming next. At the current moment, there is a strong possibility that in November 2024 RCV will be on the ballot in at least four different states – Oregon and Nevada are a certainty, and Idaho and Colorado are near-certainties, with Arizona and Montana showing real potential. RCV campaigns in a number of important cities are also looking likely, including in Denver, Anchorage, Grand Rapids and Lansing, Michigan, and Washington DC which, if successful, would showcase RCV in the nation’s capital.  2024 may well turn out to be the most momentous year yet in FairVote’s productive history, and in the history of electoral system reform in the United States.

Here is a rundown of a few of the coming campaigns.

Oregon. What’s going on in Oregon is incredibly exciting. The state legislature voted on the final day of the legislative session to pass House Bill 2004, which puts a proposal to use ranked choice voting for federal and statewide races (including president and governor) on the November 2024 ballot. This was the first time in modern US history that a state legislature has allowed voters to decide whether to use an alternative electoral method for its elections. Oftentimes political reformers don’t have much support among the electeds, and so we use the voter initiative process to ask the voters to decide on reform. But in Oregon, the Democratic majority in the state house, led by its Speaker, Dan Rayfield, voted to put RCV on the ballot (DemocracySOS conducted an insightful interview with attorney Blair Bobier, Oregon’s longtime advocate for RCV, that illuminates how this remarkable event came to pass).

Nevada. Voters in Nevada have already approved RCV in November 2022, in a statewide ballot measure in which it was combined with a Top 5 open primary. All candidates from any party would run on a single ballot and the top five vote-getters would advance to the general election, which would be decided by RCV. But the political class is so afraid of reform that they made it so that, according to Nevada rules, the reformers have to win twice. Double jeopardy. And unlike in Oregon, where the Democratic Party leadership led the effort to put RCV on the ballot, in the Silver State both Democratic and Republican parties have the knives out for it.

The interesting factor that is driving the public support is that Nevada is one of a number of states that has seen a sharp increase in the number of registered voters who are independent of the two major parties – about 37% are registered as either nonpartisan or with a minor party, which combined is greater than either registered Democrats (33%) or Republicans (30%). Among voters 18 to 34 years of age, Non-Partisan is the largest voting segment and when combined with minor party registration is above 50 percent. Since the two major parties currently use closed primaries, meaning that a third to a half of voters cannot participate in the parties’ primaries, which is when most elections are decided. Like with Alaska’s Top 4/RCV combo, this political exclusion of a growing cohort of independent voters is driving voters and funders alike to embrace this reform, not only in Nevada and Alaska but also in other states (for more on the details of Nevada, see this DemocracySOS article).

Colorado.  This is another potential Top Four-RCV combo state, in no small part because  nearly half (47%) of Colorado’s active voters are registered as “unaffiliated.” A RCV ballot initiative has been launched by wealthy former DaVita CEO Kent Thiry to change state executive, state legislative, and congressional elections to Top Four with RCV. Thiry has won five previous ballot measures, including a measure that created independent legislative and congressional redistricting commissions. Like in Nevada, Thiry’s proposed measure is drawing bipartisan opposition, including MAGA gun-toting Rep. Lauren Boebert. But Democratic governor Jared Polis has commented favorably on RCV, which is used in Boulder and several cities. So if this makes the ballot, and if RCV is also on the ballot in Denver, there’s a very strong chance of success (though the statewide ballot measure would need to win 55 percent because it’s a constitutional amendment).

Idaho. The Gem State is also is a potential Top Four-RCV state. While it’s a heavily conservative state, like in Alaska many of those conservatives are not registered as Republicans but as independents  – over a third (35%) of voters are registered as “unaffiliated.” Unaffiliated voters are by far the second-largest “political party” in Idaho, greater than the Democrats. Yet these voters are not allowed to participate in the GOP’s “closed primary” where virtually all elections are decided. A coalition of independents and moderate Republicans, including the groups Republicans for Open Primaries and Reclaim Idaho, are collecting signatures on a voter initiative. High profile GOP leaders are getting on board, with former Republican Governor Butch Otter, as well as dozens of other past state lawmakers and officials, endorsing the campaign because they believe a Top Four primary combined with RCV will help defeat more extreme MAGA Republican candidates who have successfully ousted more moderate legislators in low turnout “plurality-wins-all” GOP primaries.

So 2024 could end up as the year that ranked choice voting becomes a new norm for representative democracy in the United States; AND the year that Donald Trump returns to power and rules with a vengeance, further eroding America’s long-held democratic institutions. It may well be the “best of times and the worst of times.” Fasten your seatbelts, the Spirit of 2024 is about to blast off into an uncertain future.

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776