Voters are evenly split on whether Massachusetts should become the second state to conduct most elections using ranked-choice voting, a decision they will make in November.
With 36 percent for the switch and 36 percent against it, 28 percent remain undecided in a poll released Tuesday — mainly because they are confused by the alternative election method or haven't yet tried to figure it out.
The numbers don't augur well for proponents of ranked elections, because support for ballot measures tends to fade as Election Day nears. At the same time, there's minimal organized opposition to bringing co-called RCV to the state, giving advocates continued hope of winning over the skeptical or ignorant in the next dozen weeks.
"I wouldn't be discouraged if I were a proponent because there is a lot of time and there's nobody making ... strong, well-funded counterarguments," Evan Horowitz of the Center for State Policy Analysis at Tufts University told WBUR, the public radio station in Boston that commissioned the poll. "But I do think it's a reason to kind of reassess how much outreach has to be done."
The Yes on 2 campaign — which has bipartisan leadership headlined by former Democratic Gov. Deval Patrick and former Republican Gov. Bill Weld — says it's raised more than $2 million to push the referendum and will launch its advertising campaign after Labor Day.
Advocates argue the system produces more consensus-driven politicians, tamps down negative campaigning, weakens the polarized red-blue hold on elective offices and boosts the prospects of womenand candidates of color. The poll suggests that none of those arguments has won over the electorate yet.
"On each one of these things, you see a lot of people saying either 'It will make no difference to that' or 'I don't know whether it would,' " said Steve Koczela of MassINC, which conducted the poll of 501 likely voters last weekend. (It had a 4.4-percentage-point margin of error.)
The measure would switch primary contests and general elections for Congress, statewide executive positions, the Legislature and some countywide posts to RCV starting in 2022. Neighboring Maine is the only other state where the system is in such wide use, but it's also being used for local elections in a score of cities across the country — with New York joining the list next year.
Massachusetts, however, was in the vanguard of ranked elections because the city council and school board of Cambridge has used the system since 1941.
In RCV contests, voters are permitted to list candidates in order of preference. One who receives a majority of the top rankings wins outright. Otherwise, the one with the fewest first-choice votes is eliminated, those ballots are redistributed based on their second place designations, and this "instant runoff" process repeats until one candidate has a majority of support.
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.