This is the eighth installment of an ongoing Q&A series.
As Democrats take power in Washington, if only tenuously, many democracy reform groups see a potential path toward making the American political system work better. In this installment, FairVote President and CEO Rob Richie answers our questions about 2020 accomplishments and plans for the year ahead. His organization advocates for more equitable election methods and in recent years has led the fight for ranked-choice voting. Richie's responses have been edited for clarity and length.
First, let's briefly recap 2020. What was your biggest triumph last year?
As the long-time national leader on ranked-choice voting, it was remarkable for FairVote to experience its magnificent progress nationwide — with those gains often led by state leaders, but rooted in our analysis and direct support as needed. The movement's victories and momentum included the ballot measure win in Alaska to use RCV for all general elections, the historic use of RCV in five Democratic presidential primaries and three Republican state conventions, six city ballot measure wins, and at least 17 editorial-board endorsements.
Of course, nothing could quite top reaching the final of The Fulcrum's Democracy Madness!
And your biggest setback?
Ranked-choice voting lost on the ballot in Massachusetts. It feels different to win 45 percent of the vote rather than the 52 percent in the 2016 victory in Maine. But there was remarkable hope in that result, nevertheless: 80 percent of Massachusetts voters under 30 backed RCV. Even in this temporary setback, you can see the future coming.
What is one learning experience you took from 2020?
We need RCV to solve real problems we face today. More than 3.3 million presidential primary votes this year were "wasted" — they were cast for candidates who dropped out before election day. If we're going to expand early voting, we also need to protect voters with RCV.
We also know ranked-choice voting can win on the ballot — it's won 13 of 14 times in the past five years, including in two states. But ballot measures need good targeting and timing — and more broadly, can often be avoided. As more lawmakers learn RCV can be a win-win solution to problems in our politics, we expect a rapid uptick in legislative victories.
Now let's look ahead. What issues will your organization prioritize in 2021?
We're excited to be in Year One of a new strategic plan that is governed by a holistic approach to how FairVote and our growing coalition of reform partners can win the Fair Representation Act in Congress and ranked-choice voting across all 50 states in the coming decade. For 2021, that means starting to engage with Congress on changes to advance RCV, expanding the national coalition of groups and thinkers ready to prioritize our reform goals, and supporting the RCV movement around the nation with educational products, media work and funding.
How will Democratic control of the federal government change the ways you work toward your goals?
It's hard to get things passed in Congress no matter who's in charge. That said, we have passionate congressional allies ready to help and we're deeply impressed by the organizing efforts behind legislation like HR 1 and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. We'll engage with those coalitions, while prioritizing bills that advance RCV with bipartisan support.
What do you think will be your biggest challenge moving forward? And how do you plan to tackle it?
Our biggest challenge is what makes our work so compelling: Our elected leaders in Washington are disincentivized from enacting the very reforms that will heal our democracy. The state of our democracy is the single most urgent problem to fix, given its ripple effect across everything else. Because we want ranked-choice voting and ultimately the Fair Representation Act to win across all states, we need political leaders to trust that the fact that one party backed it in one state doesn't mean another party shouldn't back it elsewhere. We'll be transparent and uncompromising in our commitment to working with elected leaders of any party ready to support our reform vision.
The good news is that our elected leaders feel the same concerns for the future of our country — they want to live in a strong democracy where they are rewarded for representing their constituents. And validators from across the political spectrum are stepping up in support of ranked-choice voting in an unparalleled way. But we can't underestimate the gridlock in Washington, even when we see a way out of it.
Finish the sentence. In two years, American democracy will ...
... face deepening partisan rancor and disputes over what fair elections even means — yet more beacons of hope will show the way forward for necessary structural reforms
Eric Trump, the newly appointed ALT5 board director of World Liberty Financial, walks outside of the NASDAQ in Times Square as they mark the $1.5- billion partnership between World Liberty Financial and ALT5 Sigma with the ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell, on Aug. 13, 2025, in New York City.
Why does the Trump family always get a pass?
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to defend or explain a lot of controversies for the Trump administration: the Epstein files release, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about possible conflicts of interest between President Trump’s family business and his job. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy deal Trump’s son Eric signed with the UAE’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon.
Shortly before Trump was inaugurated in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in the Trump-owned World Liberty, a then newly launched cryptocurrency outfit. A few months later, UAE was granted permission to purchase sensitive American AI chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “the deal marks something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.”
“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before,” Blanche replied, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.”
Blanche went on to boast about how the president is utterly transparent regarding his questionable business practices: “I don’t have a comment on it beyond Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons. They don’t do so in secret. We don’t learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it when it’s happening.”
Sadly, Stephanopoulos didn’t offer the obvious response, which may have gone something like this: “OK, but the president and countless leading Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they dubbed ‘the Biden Crime family’ and insisted his business dealings were corrupt, and indeed that his corruption merited impeachment. So how is being ‘transparent’ about similar corruption a defense?”
Now, I should be clear that I do think the Biden family’s business dealings were corrupt, whether or not laws were broken. Others disagree. I also think Trump’s business dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden was alleged to have done. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and Republicans is the relevant political standard, and by the deputy attorney general’s own account, the Trump administration is doing “exactly the same thing,” just more openly.
Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a cop or judge, “Yes, I robbed that bank. I’ve been completely transparent about that. So, what’s the big deal?”
This is just a small example of the broader dysfunction in the way we talk about politics.
Americans have a special hatred for hypocrisy. I think it goes back to the founding era. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in “Democracy In America,” the old world had a different way of dealing with the moral shortcomings of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, never mind kings, were entitled to behave in ways that were forbidden to the little people.
In America, titles of nobility were banned in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (the obvious exceptions of Black people, women, Native Americans notwithstanding) no one has access to special carve-outs or exemptions as to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, particularly in secret, feels like a betrayal against the whole idea of equality.
The problem in the modern era is that elites — of all ideological stripes — have violated that bargain. The result isn’t that we’ve abandoned any notion of right and wrong. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up weaponizing the principles, using them as a cudgel against the other side but not against our own.
Pick an issue: violent rhetoric by politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption and so on. With every revelation, almost immediately the debate becomes a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B points out that Team A has switched positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone is missing the point.
Sure, hypocrisy is a moral failing, and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual one. But neither changes the objective facts. This is something you’re supposed to learn as a child: It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing or saying, wrong is wrong. It’s also something lawyers like Mr. Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the hypocrisy of the prosecutor — or your client’s transparency — means your client did nothing wrong would earn you nothing but a laugh.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.