The “RCV Express” keeps rolling
Landslide wins in two more cities to use ranked choice voting, the Oscars use RCV to choose Best Picture, and reformers are thinking big
Ranked choice voting (RCV), one of FairVote’s signature reforms, continues to gain momentum. On March 7, two more cities voted overwhelmingly to switch their local elections to RCV. These mark the 21st and 22nd consecutive wins for RCV ballot measures in US cities The accumulating record is clear: when you give voters the option to adopt RCV when they see reasons to improve their elections, they take it.
As a testament to how RCV continues to penetrate not just our politics. but also American culture, it was again used by the Academy Awards to select the Best Picture for 2022. This is one story that ends well – an innovative film like Everything Everywhere All at Once being chosen by an innovative electoral method.
Welcome Redondo Beach and Burlington to the RCV fold
On March 7th, two cities on opposite sides of the country made a commonsense change to their elections. In Redondo Beach, a California city of 70,000 people, more than 70 percent of voters chose to replace the city’s costly, low-turnout, two-round runoff elections with RCV. The overwhelming argument was, “Why pay for two elections when you can identify the majority winner in one?” With RCV, you don’t need a head-to-head, bare-knuckle runoff where negative attacks often get personal and turn off voters.
It’s also usually expensive. Taxpayers have to foot the cost of a second election in which the voter turnout often plunges. Candidates also have to pay for the second election, giving an edge to better-funded candidates and undermining the goals of campaign finance reform. In fact, a 2013 runoff in Redondo Beach cost taxpayers $300,000, which is a lot of money for a medium-sized city. Redondo Beach will become the eighth city in California to adopt RCV, and the first city in Los Angeles County. Hats off to CalRCV and local backers.
Across the nation in Burlington, the largest city in Vermont, 64 percent of voters made the sensible choice of replacing runoff elections with RCV. Burlington voters already have been using RCV for city council elections, and they liked it so much that they expanded it to cover the mayor, school commission members, and ward election officers. The campaign was boosted by the Vermont Public Interest Research Group, whose Democracy Advocate Sam McGinty said, “Ranked choice voting is already giving Burlington voters more voice, more choice, and a stronger democracy in our city council elections. Voters have felt the benefits of RCV and voted for more.”
Both measures in Redondo Beach and Burlington were placed on the ballot for the voters to decide by their city councils, showing that support from elected officials can be just as strong as support from voters. RCV has now won 22 straight city ballot measures because it solves real problems and makes elections better for everyone. With RCV, more candidates can run without worrying about ‘splitting the vote’ or being a “spoiler,” while voters can vote their conscience and elect candidates that they truly support.
RCV has won in the largest city in seven states - and for president in two
With the Burlington victory, the largest cities in seven states have adopted RCV: New York (NY), Seattle (WA), Portland (OR), Minneapolis (MN), Salt Lake City (UT), Portland (ME), and Burlington (VT). More than 60 jurisdictions across the nation have RCV in place, reaching approximately 16 million Americans and electing presidential electors and Members of Congress in Alaska and Maine. Keep an eye on Nevada, which passed RCV in 2022 for all its state and congressional elections as part of an Alaska-type “Final Five” system; with its two-vote requirement for passage of initiatives to change the state constitution, Nevada Voters First is gearing up for another vote in 2024.
RCV adoption in cities is good in itself and key to building momentum for larger wins. Think of Maine, where RCV was first used in its largest city of Portland before being adopted statewide; Minnesota, where RCV started in Minneapolis. has won in four more cities and is poised for major advances in the state legislature; or Alaska, where RCV was used in a presidential primary in 2020 prior to passage that November for all general elections for federal and state office.
And the winner is…
Ranked choice voting is not just improving our politics, it is also penetrating into American culture. This past Sunday, RCV and its close cousin proportional-RCV played a starring role on the stage for the Academy Awards.
The Oscars used RCV – often called the “preferential ballot” in awards show circles – to select their Best Picture winner, as the Academy has been doing every year since 2009. And proportional-RCV was used to select nominees in almost all major categories, as it has been done since the 1930s.
The Oscars offer a non-political example of how RCV can help find a consensus winner in crowded fields and lead to better representation in multi-winner races. It's also a reminder that criticisms of RCV as “untested” ring hollow – it’s long been for national elections in several countries, s used for governance elections by hundreds of private organizations, including the Academy, and is recommended by parliamentary guides like Robert’s Rules of Order as the best alternative to repeated in-person voting.
Since 2009, the Oscars have nominated 10 films for Best Picture. If the winner were chosen by the most widely used electoral method in the US – single-choice, plurality-wins-all, which is used to elect offices from members of Congress to local city councilors – a nominee could win with as little as 11% of the vote. If a majority of Academy members split their vote between two or three similar films, another movie with a very narrow but passionate base of support could sneak to a victory.
This may sound familiar to political junkies who follow Democratic and Republican primaries, where nominees routinely win contests with well under a majority of the vote (and often turn out to be not-so-good nominees).
RCV finds the most representative winner – a candidate with both broad and deep support – in a crowded field. The easiest way to win the Oscar is to get a majority of first choices, but that is unlikely with so many nominees. So it’s also beneficial for the first-round leaders to also have broad appeal, racking up second- and third-choice preferences to propel you to a majority of the vote. In other words, RCV offers the best of both worlds — broad support and core support. Perhaps more aptly, it avoids the worst of both worlds. If you’re a mushy middle snooze-fest, you won’t get enough first choices to win. But if you’re incredibly polarizing, you won’t get enough backup choices to earn the Oscar.
In the decade-plus that it’s been used to select the Best Picture winner, RCV has delivered on its promise – selecting a consensus winner that represents the majority of Academy voters. That’s varied depending on the year and the evolving composition of Academy voters, from groundbreaking choices like “Parasite,” “Moonlight,” and “Nomadland,” to crowd-pleasing but less artistically challenging movies like “CODA” and “Green Book.”
While Best Picture is the only Oscar winner chosen using RCV, its “multi-winner” form – proportional RCV as introduced in FairVote’s new video – is used to identify five nominees in almost all categories, including other marquee selections like Actor, Actress, and Director. When you see such a diverse range of films and actors nominated, keep in mind that nearly every Academy voter gets at least one of their “passion choices” nominated for the final Oscar vote.
Back in the political world, Portland (OR) just became the largest city to adopt proportional RCV for city council elections in the modern era – and it’s long been used abroad in national elections in Australia, Ireland and Malta, and at least one local election experienced by every voter in New Zealand, Northern Ireland and Scotland.
This gold standard for representation has also been embraced by political scientists, with 200 scholars recently signing an open letter to Congress saying that proportional, multi-member districts should be used for U.S. House elections to increase the diversity of representation and reduce gridlock and toxicity. And in a comparative assessment by 14 political scientists of the potential impact of 37 structural reforms, proportional ranked choice voting was found to have the greatest positive impact on US democracy.
What comes next?
The US is a big country, and looking at the chessboard of political reform, I see opportunity everywhere. Take the recent mayoral election in Chicago, with a nine-candidate field and the top finishers earning only 33 percent and 22 percent of the vote, respectively. With so many spoiler candidates and split votes, it’s possible a third candidate was more popular. Now voters will have to trudge out to the polls five weeks later for a runoff and endure an avalanche of more negative, mudslinging campaign ads between the top two survivors on the island. With the Illinois city of Evanston overwhelmingly passing RCV last year, RCV is getting well-deserved shoutouts for future Chicago elections.
Or consider Denver, which is about to hold its first-round election for mayor on April 4th. With 17 candidates running, it’s a near-certainty that no candidate will win a majority, meaning voters will have to pick again two months later on June 6 between the top two finishers. With so many candidates, Denver will see spoilers and split votes galore. It will be a roll of the dice to determine if the final two are really the most popular. With a growing number of Colorado cities using RCV, a growing chorus is calling for RCV Denver.
Philadelphia will also elect a new mayor this year, with the Democratic primary in May. 12 Democrats are running, including a slew of former city councilors. There’s no runoff - whoever finishes atop the heap in a plurality election will be heavily favored in November. Again there’s a rising call for RCV.
There are a lot of ways that RCV could improve such elections. For example, what if Denver and Chicago used it in their primary to narrow their large fields to four candidates, then used RCV again to pick a majority winner from the final four? That would be a nonpartisan version of Alaska’s election system, which worked well last November to allow voters to vote their conscience instead of their fears, and ensured that the candidates preferred by the majority prevailed.
Or how about using RCV in Georgia. Three U.S. Senate races in 2020 and 2022 required second runoff elections that together required more than 100 million dollars in taxpayer money and triggered campaign spending as much as ten times that amount -and still had lower turnout than in November.
Right now, you can help the RCV movement as it works towards a big goal: win RCV in 500 American cities in the next five years. State and local organizations in 40 states are already working to bring RCV to their communities. They need help canvassing voters, gathering signatures for referendums, meeting with legislators, and writing opinion pieces to get in the news. They’re forming partnerships with community groups to win RCV in voting rights cases, as was done in recent years in the California cities of Albany and Palm Desert.
The best way you can help the movement is to join an RCV organization near you. Your community could be the next to adopt RCV. Together we can reimagine voting as ranking – and a means where your voice is better heard and your views better represented at a time when we must come together in support of American democracy.
Rob Richie @Rob_Richie