Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

Kennedy should have been in the debate – and states need ranked voting

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Voters should be able to take the measure of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., since he is poised to win millions of votes in November.

Andrew Lichtenstein/Getty Images

Richie is co-founder and senior advisor of FairVote.

CNN’s presidential debate coincided with a fresh batch of swing-state snapshots that make one thing perfectly clear: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. may be a longshot to be our 47th president and faces his own controversies, yet the 10 percent he’s often achieving in Arizona, Michigan, Nevada and other battlegrounds could easily tilt the presidency.

Why did CNN keep him out with impossible-to-meet requirements? The performances, mistruths and misstatements by Joe Biden and Donald Trump would have shocked Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas, who managed to debate seven times without any discussion of golf handicaps — a subject better fit for a “Grumpy Old Men” outtake than one of the year’s two scheduled debates.


Voters should be able to take the measure of someone poised to get millions of votes that could decide the race, and it’s not like Kennedy’s presence could have made the debate less substantive. Indeed, he might have filled in the debate’s gaps on issues like climate change, poverty and foreign policy.

The major parties can’t wish Kennedy — nor his impact — away. Even earning 5 percent of votes could shift the election. In every state but Alaska and Maine, candidates can win every electoral vote without a majority. A string of states could be won with barely 40 percent of the vote.

Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter

The major parties generally take one of two approaches to minor parties. They either cynically boost them when expected to hurt their opponent, as Donald Trump did when praising Cornel West and Jill Stein last month, or try to knock them off debate stages and ballots while shaming their supporters.

It’s playing with anti-democratic fire to simply write off Kennedy and other candidates. Imagine the rancor if the Electoral College is decided by a single state’s quirk – Georgia free-market backers leaving Trump for Libertarian Chase Oliver, or Arab Americans in Michigan abandoning Biden for Stein or West over the war in Gaza.

There’s a middle ground for 2024 debates — and a permanent solution offered by ranked-choice voting, which is being pioneered at the state level in Alaska and Maine.

Debates offer unique opportunities to educate voters, not just play to major-party campaign interests. Kennedy should have his shot at the September debate if he’s on the ballot in most states and polling in double digits. Trying to marginalize him will only feed his populist appeal. Biden and Trump should explain why they’re the better choice — not just against each other, but as compared to Kennedy and other candidates likely to earn millions of votes this November. Sunshine is always better for democracy than darkness.

Longer-term, the voters — and frankly the parties — should embrace our nation’s values of choice and majority rule. Increasingly proven in state and local elections, ranked-choice voting enables voter choice while upholding majority rule. If more states adopted RCV, there would be no reason to fear more choices on the ballot — which voters so clearly desire and, even moreso after this debacle of a debate. And there would be no reason to deny a podium to a candidate supported by one in every 10 voters.

RCV is simple. Voters get to rank the candidates in order — for example, Kennedy first and Trump second, or Kennedy first and Biden second. If someone wins over 50 percent of first choice votes, they’re the winner. But if no one claims a majority, the lowest candidates are dropped and an instant runoff ensues. If you ranked one of the top candidates first, your vote stays with them. If your candidate is eliminated, your ballot goes to your second choice.

Maine and Alaska will vote for president with RCV, ensuring a head-to-head final “instant runoff” no matter how many candidates make their ballots. In those states’ recent House and Senate races, third parties were welcome. The “spoiler” claim melted away.

The time has come for the rest of the nation to join them. Spoiler fears are hardly new — and given the widespread dissatisfaction and frustration in our system, it’s only likely to increase as a feature of our system in 2028 and beyond.

While so much of what ails our democracy feels hard to fix, we can cure the spoiler problem with common sense. Kennedy can debate and people can see him for themselves. And with ranked-choice voting, we can embrace greater choice and make this the last time “spoiler math” decides the White House.

Read More

Electoral College map

It's possible Donald Trump and Kamala Harris could each get 269 electoral votes this year.

Electoral College rules are a problem. A worst-case tie may be ahead.

Johnson is the executive director of the Election Reformers Network, a national nonpartisan organization advancing common-sense reforms to protect elections from polarization. Keyssar is a Matthew W. Stirling Jr. professor of history and social policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. His work focuses on voting rights, electoral and political institutions, and the evolution of democracies.

It’s the worst-case presidential election scenario — a 269–269 tie in the Electoral College. In our hyper-competitive political era, such a scenario, though still unlikely, is becoming increasingly plausible, and we need to grapple with its implications.

Recent swing-state polling suggests a slight advantage for Kamala Harris in the Rust Belt, while Donald Trump leads in the Sun Belt. If the final results mirror these trends, Harris wins with 270 electoral votes. But should Trump take the single elector from Nebraska’s 2nd congressional district — won by Joe Biden in 2020 and Trump in 2016 — then both candidates would be deadlocked at 269.

Keep ReadingShow less
People holiding "Yes on 1" signs

People urge support for Question 1 in Maine.

Kyle Bailey

The Fahey Q&A: Kyle Bailey discusses Maine’s Question 1

Since organizing the Voters Not Politicians2018 ballot initiative that put citizens in charge ofdrawing Michigan's legislative maps, Fahey has been the founding executive director of The PeoplePeople, which is forming statewide networks to promote government accountability. Sheregularly interviews colleagues in the world of democracy reform for The Fulcrum.

Kyle Bailey is a former Maine state representative who managed the landmark ballot measure campaigns to win and protect ranked choice voting. He serves as campaign manager for Citizens to End SuperPACs and the Yes On 1 campaign to pass Question 1, a statewide ballot initiative that would place a limit of $5,000 on contributions to political action committees.

Keep ReadingShow less
Ballot envelopes moving through a sorting machine

Mailed ballots are sorted by a machine at the Denver Elections Division.

Hyoung Chang/The Denver Post

GOP targets fine print of voting by mail in battleground state suits

Rosenfeld is the editor and chief correspondent of Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

In 2020’s presidential election, 17 million more Americans voted than in 2016’s election. That record-setting turnout was historic and even more remarkable because it came in the midst of a deadly pandemic. A key reason for the increase was most states simplified and expanded voting with mailed-out ballots — which 43 percent of voters used.

Some battleground states saw dramatic expansions. Michigan went from 26 percent of its electorate voting with mailed-out ballots in 2016 to 59 percent in 2020. Pennsylvania went from 4 percent to 40 percent. The following spring, academics found that mailing ballots to voters had lifted 2020’s voter turnout across the political spectrum and had benefited Republican candidates — especially in states that previously had limited the option.

Keep ReadingShow less
Members of Congress in the House of Representatives

Every four years, Congress gathers to count electoral votes.

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

No country still uses an electoral college − except the U.S.

Holzer is an associate professor of political science at Westminster College.

The United States is the only democracy in the world where a presidential candidate can get the most popular votes and still lose the election. Thanks to the Electoral College, that has happened five times in the country’s history. The most recent examples are from 2000, when Al Gore won the popular vote but George W. Bush won the Electoral College after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling, and 2016, when Hillary Clinton got more votes nationwide than Donald Trump but lost in the Electoral College.

The Founding Fathers did not invent the idea of an electoral college. Rather, they borrowed the concept from Europe, where it had been used to pick emperors for hundreds of years.

Keep ReadingShow less