As recently as June, backers of an alternative balloting method known as approval voting were confident of their biggest expansion yet. But after losing to a rival proposal, they are now regrouping and developing new strategies for the next election cycle.
“Seattle could have gotten a wonderful reform, just like St. Louis did,” said Aaron Hamlin, executive director of the Center for Election Science. The people of St. Louis voted to make the switch to approval voting in November 2020, and now CES and its allies are working to go statewide in Missouri.
A victory in Seattle would have been a big step forward for approval voting, and it was on track for success until ranked-choice voting was added to the ballot, according to Hamlin.
Over the summer, the Seattle City Council decided to put an approval voting initiative on the November ballot but then added a ranked-choice voting option. The two-part measure asked voters first to vote whether they want to make a change and then which of the two options they prefer.
The first question barely passed, at 51 percent, but RCV overwhelmingly topped approval voting on the second question.
“With approval voting on the ballot on its own it was polling at 70 percent,” Hamlin said. “It’s highly likely it would have passed.”
Advocates for RCV say they had a long-running effort going in Seattle and were not merely trying to jump ahead of CES and the long groups working for approval voting. But Hamlin claims members of the city council “immediately began talking among themselves and decided to add RCV to the ballot” and then the media didn’t treat both sides equally.
“A lot of the news outlets that were local did not critically look at RCV but they did look at approval voting,” he said. “It was pretty one-sided, it felt pretty unfair throughout the campaign.”
Prior to the change, Seattle followed the model used for statewide elections, using a “top two” primary system in which voters pick one candidate and the pair with the most votes advance to the general election.
In an approval election, voters can mark the names of as many candidates as they wish and the two with the most support advance. Advocates say such a system allows voters to support both third-party candidates as well those affiliated with the major parties, giving them more choice.
“We need to allow voters to select more than one candidate, for a more accurate reflection of their sentiments and approval of the choices,” Hamlin recently wrote in The Hill.
Ranked-choice voting also allows people to vote for more than one candidate, but with the added step of ranking the candidates. If someone receives a majority, they advance. But if no one receives a majority, the person with the fewest votes is eliminated and those ballots are reallocated to voters’ second choices.
Seattle is the 18th most populous city in the nation and would have been a big step for approval voting, which is currently used in St. Louis (70th) and Fargo, N.D. (219). RCV is used in New York and San Francisco, statewide in Alaska and Maine, and in dozens of other cities and counties.
Missouri would be the first statewide adoption of approval voting.
“Having Seattle would have made the next bid easier,” said Hamlin, but he believes CES is building relationships with strong groups.
“With statewide campaigns, we look at making sure we have sophisticated partners who have experience with ballot campaigns and strong connections in the community,” he said. “We expect that to put approval voting on the map.”
CES is working with Show Me Integrity on the Missouri proposal. The group has a number of other priorities, including campaign finance reform, expanding the use of absentee ballots and improving political transparency.
In April, St. Louis passed a Show Me Integrity proposal to improve accountability and transparency for the city’s board of aldermen.
Hamlin said was not able to discuss other statewide campaigns at this time.
A golden tray sits on the Resolute Desk as President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on American nuclear innovation in the Oval Office at the White House on July 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump is signing multiple executive orders targeting the nuclear energy sector and easing rules for new reactors and nuclear fuel supply chains.
Trump’s hubris rivals the fallen heroes of ancient Greek mythology
In January, the New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.
“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” has made ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.
Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that solely belonged to supreme beings.
Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.
In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.
Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.
Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.
He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals? “TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China — from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?
But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.
This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by“Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.
King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.
At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.
Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proved to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proved much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.
But they haven’t — and won’t anytime soon — because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, outrage of Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.
If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory — giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.
Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”
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Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.