Ranked Choice Tennessee envisions a future where more Tennesseans can participate in elections using ranked choice voting (RCV). Our activities fall into two main categories: civic education and advocacy. We work with election administrators, policy makers and the public to share best practices and help facilitate successful RCV elections.
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The biggest moment yet for ranked-choice voting, next year's election for mayor of New York, is facing big pushback from politicians in the city who argue the system would disenfranchise nonwhite voters.
Fifteen members of the City Council's Black, Latino and Asian Caucus have launched a bid to delay the use of ranked elections. The nation's biggest city voted a year ago to become the largest jurisdiction in the country to embrace the system, which has emerged as a favorite innovation in the world of democracy reform because of its capacity to promote consensus candidates and diffuse polarizing politics.
Alaskans have narrowly approved a sweeping revamp of their election rules, delivering one of the year's biggest victories to democracy reformers.
Adoption of the ballot initiative immediately pushes the nation's most expansive and remote state to a central place of honor for "good governance" groups, because the measure embraces two of their main goals: elections that are less monopolized by the major parties and campaign financing that's more transparent.
The victory became clear only Tuesday night, two weeks after the voting ended, thanks to the state's uniquely slow pace for tabulating mailed ballots. Because of the pandemic they accounted for two out of every five votes in Alaska this fall, and counting them reversed what looked like a likely defeat for the package. But with nearly complete results, the proposal has prevailed by 3,700 votes out of 343,000 cast — a margin of 1 percentage point.
Voters in Massachusetts, including those who cast early ballots at Fenway Park, came out against ranked-choice voting in the Bay State.
Proponents of ranked-choice voting have failed in their attempts to bring the alternative election system to Massachusetts and are confronting a potential defeat in Alaska as well.
The twin setbacks would amount to a big reversal of fortune for one of the darling ideas of democracy reform: Allowing voters to list candidates in order of preference, then reallocating the secondary choices of the poorer performers until one person emerges with majority support. Maine is now the only state using ranked elections almost exclusively
But a switch to so-called RCV for municipal elections was approved in two cities in California, two in Minnesota and one in Colorado. And voters in St. Louis voted to embrace another alternative election format for local primaries called approval voting.
