Advocates for changes to the voting system agree that plurality balloting needs to be replaced with something better. But there’s disagreement on which of the “better” systems is best.
And usually the backers of different proposals, whether intentionally or not, stay out of each other’s way, working in different cities and states. But there’s an odd situation developing in Seattle, where supporters of ranked-choice voting are hoping to compete with a ballot measure to institute approval voting in America’s 18th most populous city.
In June, Seattle Approves, a nonprofit organization pushing for approval voting, secured enough petition signatures to put the proposal on the ballot in November.
"Seattle’s leaders must represent everyone," said Sarah Ward, co-chair of Seattle Approves. "Initiative 134 will make Seattle’s elections as representative as possible, so that its leaders represent the entire electorate. This initiative puts voters first.”
But Washington for Equitable Representation, a coalition of organizations pushing for RCV across the state, including for federal elections, wants the Seattle City Council to offer a “parallel” option in November. A member of the city council has taken the first step to making that happen by introducing a bill to put RCV on the November ballot.
“As proposed in Seattle, approval voting could be a voting rights disaster. Affluent voters already wield disproportionate power in our politics, and under approval voting, those affluent voters would have the power to pick the two candidates for the general election, presenting a false choice to the more diverse, representative voters that show up in November. That’s not democracy,” said Kamau Chege, executive director of the Washington Community Alliance and a member of WER. “Seattle voters deserve ranked-choice voting, which would level the playing field and guarantee everyone the freedom to pick their first-choice and backup-choices.”
Logan Bowers, another co-chair of Seattle Approves, is concerned that the decision-making process is being hidden from the public.
“The whole process is secret because the ethics laws prevent them from having public deliberations. For example, if the deliberations were public, they could consult voting experts on the construction of the alternative,” Bowers said. “But we know the council is deep underwater with the general public and if history is any guide, it’s pretty common for elected officials to help themselves rather than help the voters when drawing districts or writing voter law.”
Under the approval voting system, voters may mark as many names as they wish on a ballot with the person who receives the most support winning the election. In Seattle’s case, approval voting would be used for primaries and the two candidates with the most votes would advance to the general election regardless of party.
The system’s backers say approval voting is superior to RCV because the ballot is simpler to use and to implement.
In an RCV system (also known as instant runoff voting), voters rank candidates by order of preference. If no one receives a majority, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated and that person’s support is redistributed to voters’ second choice. The process continues until someone has a majority of support. RCV’s supporters say it guarantees the winner has received backing from the majority of voters, results in more representative elections and encourages less divisive campaigning because candidates need to appeal beyond their base.
In traditional plurality or “first past the post” voting, the candidate with the most votes wins even if they do not get a majority of support.
Approval voting is currently used for municipal elections in Fargo, N.D., and St. Louis. Ranked-choice voting is used statewide in Maine and Alaska, in New York City and San Francisco, and about 50 other cities.
FairVote, a national nonprofit organization that advocates for ranked-choice voting and is allied with (but independent from) the Washington coalition, is focused on an “affirmative case” for RCV.
"Just this year, RCV legislation has been debated in nearly half the states, while RCV is being used by Democrats and Republicans in important contests in states like Alaska, Maine, and Virginia. There will also be at least sevenRCV measures on the ballot in cities and counties across the country in November,” said Will Mantell, press secretary for FairVote. “There's no shift in strategy towards approval voting or effort to undo its implementation in St. Louis and Fargo, though it may face challenges in winning and sustaining its wins.”
According to Mantell, the push for RCV in the Emerald City isn’t a reaction to the approval voting initiative.
“In the case of Seattle, there is a deep, long-standing, and diverse coalition supporting RCV, and we aren't surprised that they have city council allies who want to see RCV presented as an option to voters," he said.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.