Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

As RCV debuts in NYC, momentum builds across the country

New York voter

New York City will use ranked-choice voting for the first time in the special election for City Council on Feb. 2.

Liao Pan/Getty Images

As New York City prepares to use ranked-choice voting for the first time next week, momentum for the reform continues to build in other parts of the country.

The country's most populous city will use ranked-choice voting in at least four special elections for city council in the coming months, but the real test will be the hotly contested mayoral primaries in June.

Outside of the Big Apple, more than two dozen states have active campaigns advocating for ranked-choice elections. Following successes in Alaska and six cities across the country in 2020, more jurisdictions than ever before are considering making the switch to RCV.


In fact, campaigns were just announced in two more states. Better Ballot South Carolina kicked off this week, and Better Ballot Alabama will officially start in mid-February. Both are being advised by the national nonprofit Rank the Vote, which launched last year and has pro-RCV affiliates in 18 other states.

"Our mission is really to help people learn how to effectively organize themselves to educate other folks in their state about ranked-choice voting and build a community of people that are excited about the reform," said Nathan Lockwood, managing director of Rank the Vote.

Under this alternative voting system, voters rank candidates in order of preference. In the case that no candidate receives majority support, the election goes into an instant runoff in which the candidate with the least votes is eliminated and that person's support is redistributed to voters' second choices. This continues until one candidate crosses the 50 percent threshold.

Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter

Supporters of RCV say the voting reform will deter negative campaigning and bolster more consensus-driven politics, while also boosting the election prospects of women and people of color. Opponents argue the system is confusing and doesn't necessarily lead to better representation.

Ahead of RCV's debut in New York, members of the City Council's Black, Latino and Asian Caucus and other community organizations sued to delay its implementation, arguing city officials didn't have enough time to educate voters about the new system. But a state judge ruled last month the city could move forward with ranked-choice voting because a delay would disenfranchise military voters.

Rob Richie, CEO of FairVote, one of the leading ranked-choice voting advocacy organizations, said the voter education campaign in New York has been really robust, both among RCV advocates and the city government. It will likely take a few weeks for the results of NYC's upcoming elections to finalize, though, due to the state's process for counting absentee ballots.

"That's always nerve-wracking when you're trying to introduce a new system," Richie said. "But I am impressed by the local folks on the ground." He added that FairVote is partnering with Common Cause's New York chapter to conduct exit surveys on voters' experiences using ranked-choice voting.

RCV will premier in another state in 2022: Alaska. In last year's election, a narrow majority of voters approved a sweeping democracy reform ballot measure that included adopting RCV for all statewide elections — making Alaska the second state to do so after Maine. Massachusetts had a similar ballot measure last year, but it failed to garner enough support.

Now, following the 2020 election and with state legislative sessions starting, advocates are gearing up to push for ranked-choice voting in several other states.

In Utah, a Republican lawmaker is sponsoring legislation to adopt RCV for primary elections with more than two candidates. In Vermont, former Gov. Howard Dean is leading a campaign to bring the voting reform to Burlington, the state's largest city. And in Austin, Texas, voters may get the chance to decide whether RCV should be used for future mayoral and city council elections.

And on the federal level, advocates are hoping to get more momentum behind legislation that would promote the use of ranked-choice voting, such as the sweeping democracy reform bill known as HR 1. Another bill, dubbed the Fair Representation Act, would go further by requiring all elections for the House of Representatives to use RCV. That bill, introduced in 2019 but not yet in this Congress, would also establish multi-member districts in each state.

Richie said he thinks the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol is evidence of the country's deep polarization and will spur more conversations about voting reform this year.

"I think it's really got people thinking about why representatives act the way they do," he said. "And a lot of that is baked into the current ways we vote and the current ways we pick winners and the incentives that are created by that."

Read More

Artists recording "We Are the World"

"We Are the World" united American on a common cause. Let's try to do that again.

Write your song for America

We have only four weeks until Election Day, but there’s still time for you to write your song for America.

This election is so close and we are so divided as a nation that half of us are going to be unhappy with the result of the presidential election. The Fulcrum wants to counter the rancor and divide, so we are offering our readers the chance to write a song — one that celebrates our common bonds. A song that calls out to every American to express their patriotism, no matter who wins, through positive action.

Keep ReadingShow less
Adam Kinzinger speaking at the Democratic National Convention

Former Rep. Adam Kinzinger is among the many Republicans who have endorsed Kamala Harris.

Endorsements of presidential candidates speak volumes

Corbin is professor emeritus of marketing at the University of Northern Iowa.

There’s only a few weeks remaining before the 2024 presidential election comes to a close — that is, pending election certification, recounts, challenges and lawsuits. Ed Kilgore, political columnist for New York magazine since 2015, estimates that only 4 percent to 7 percent of the electorate is genuinely undecided.

However, there might be a bigger problem for both the Trump-Vance and Harris-Walz campaigns. That is, Pew Research Center’s analysis of the past three elections reveals 63 percent of Americans — an alarming number — are not dependable voters. Sometimes they vote and sometimes they don’t. These voters are referred to as irregular voters.

Keep ReadingShow less
Robert Talisse

'There's nothing inevitable or permanent about democracy': A conversation with Robert Talisse

Berman is a distinguished fellow of practice at The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, co-editor of Vital City, and co-author of "Gradual: The Case for Incremental Change in a Radical Age." This is the 12th in a series of interviews titled "The Polarization Project."

Robert Talisse, a professor of philosophy at Vanderbilt University, believes polarization is a problem that cannot be solved, only managed. He also believes the greatest threat to American democracy comes from within.

In Talisse’s diagnosis, American democracy suffers from a kind of autoimmune disorder. He makes the case that democracy can break down even when every participant in the process is operating in good faith to pursue their version of the common good. The reason this is so, Talisse argues over the course of a trilogy of books — “Overdoing Democracy,” “Sustaining Democracy” and “Civic Solitude” — is an occurrence that he calls “belief polarization.”

Keep ReadingShow less
Elderly woman on a train

A woman evacuating from Pokrovsk, Ukraine, in August looks out from a train car to say goodbye.

Oleksandr Magula/Suspilne Ukraine/JSC "UA:PBC"/Global Images Ukraine via Getty Images

On Ageism Awareness Day, consider the impact of war on older people.

Kilaberia is an assistant professor at New York University’s Silver School of Social Work and a public voices fellow with The OpEd Project.

We know the toll that war has on youth, but older adults are suffering displacement, too.

We have talked about age-friendly cities, age-friendly health care systems, age-friendly universities, age-friendly workplaces dementia-friendly communities. We are not talking about age-friendly or dementia-friendly humanitarian responses.

Tomorrow is Ageism Awareness Day and it offers us the opportunity to draw attention to the impact of ageism, particularly in the many war zones around the world.

Keep ReadingShow less