Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

Ranked-choice voting on the ballot in two Washington counties

Voters in Vancouver, Wash.

Voters cast ballots in Vancouver, Wash., in 2020. In the future, they may be able to use ranked-choice voting for local elections.

Nathan Howard/Getty Images

Voters in Clark County, Wash., will get the opportunity in 2022 to decide whether to move to ranked-choice voting for future elections.

The county’s Charter Review Commission, which is empowered to put initiatives on the ballot, voted Tuesday to move forward with an RCV proposal after surveying residents.

Clark, the fourth largest county in Washington, is the second to put RCV on the ballot next year. The charter commission in San Juan, one of the state’s smallest counties, made the same decision earlier this year.


“We are so glad the Charter Review Commission took this step to allow voters to decide how they want to elect their officials,” said Lisa Ayrault, executive director of FairVote Washington, which advocates for RCV. “FairVote Washington looks forward to working with community organizations to educate voters about how ranked-choice voting can improve Clark County elections.”

Ranked-choice voting is an alternative to the traditional method of casting ballots. Rather than the candidate with the most votes being declared the victor, an RCV election uses an instant runoff system to ensure the winner has a majority of votes.

How it works: Voters can rank multiple candidates in order of preference. If no candidate gets a majority of first-place votes, the person with the fewest is eliminated and their support is redistributed to voters’ second choices. That process continues until someone has a majority.

Advocates for RCV say the system gives more candidates an opportunity to compete and it encourages a more civil election because candidates must appeal to a broad collection of voters in order to get second- and third-place votes.

Opponents claim the system is too complicated, although voters who recently used it for the first time in other jurisdictions have given RCV positive  reviews.

President Biden won Clark County by 4 percentage points in 2020. Democratic candidates carried it in three previous elections as well, but by just two-tenths of a point in 2012 and 2016, when no one cracked 50 percent. Its largest city, Vancouver, borders Portland, Ore.

Elsewhere in RCV news

  • A new coalition is trying to get open primaries and ranked-choice voting on the ballot in Nevada next year. The proposed ballot initiative has been filed with the secretary of state. Following a legal review, proponents would then need to gather petition signatures to put their concept in front of voters. As a proposed constitutional amendment, it would need to be approved in both 2022 and 2024 before taking effect.
  • In Eureka, a city of 27,000 people on the Northern California coast, the local government voted to move to RCV elections, possibly as soon as 2022.
  • And in Utah, where more than 20 cities used RCV for the first time this year, legislators blocked an effort to allow additional voting options, such as approval voting. In that system, voters can support multiple candidates but do not rank their selections.

Read More

Is Bombing Iran Deja Vu All Over Again?

The B-2 "Spirit" Stealth Bomber flys over the 136th Rose Parade Presented By Honda on Jan. 1, 2025, in Pasadena, California. (Jerod Harris/Getty Images/TNS)

Jerod Harris/Getty Images/TNS)

Is Bombing Iran Deja Vu All Over Again?

After a short and successful war with Iraq, President George H.W. Bush claimed in 1991 that “the ghosts of Vietnam have been laid to rest beneath the sands of the Arabian desert.” Bush was referring to what was commonly called the “Vietnam syndrome.” The idea was that the Vietnam War had so scarred the American psyche that we forever lost confidence in American power.

The elder President Bush was partially right. The first Iraq war was certainly popular. And his successor, President Clinton, used American power — in the former Yugoslavia and elsewhere — with the general approval of the media and the public.

Keep ReadingShow less
Conspiratorial Thinking Isn’t Growing–Its Consequences Are
a close up of a typewriter with the word conspiracy on it

Conspiratorial Thinking Isn’t Growing–Its Consequences Are

The Comet Ping Pong Pizzagate shooting, the plot to kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer, and a man’s livestreamed beheading of his father last year were all fueled by conspiracy theories. But while the headlines suggest that conspiratorial thinking is on the rise, this is not the case. Research points to no increase in conspiratorial thinking. Still, to a more dangerous reality: the conspiracies taking hold and being amplified by political ideologues are increasingly correlated with violence against particular groups. Fortunately, promising new research points to actions we can take to reduce conspiratorial thinking in communities across the US.

Some journalists claim that this is “a golden age of conspiracy theories,” and the public agrees. As of 2022, 59% of Americans think that people are more likely to believe in conspiracy theories today than 25 years ago, and 73% of Americans think conspiracy theories are “out of control.” Most blame this perceived increase on the role of social media and the internet.

Keep ReadingShow less
Why a College Degree No Longer Guarantees a Good Job
woman wearing academic cap and dress selective focus photography
Photo by MD Duran on Unsplash

Why a College Degree No Longer Guarantees a Good Job

A college education used to be considered, along with homeownership, one of the key pillars of the American Dream. Is that still the case? Recent experiences of college graduates seeking employment raise questions about whether a university diploma remains the best pathway to pursuing happiness, as it once was.

Consider the case of recent grad Lohanny Santo, whose TikTok video went viral with over 3.6 million “likes” as she broke down in tears and vented her frustration over her inability to find even a minimum wage job. That was despite her dual degrees from Pace University and her ability to speak three languages. John York, a 24-year-old with a master’s degree in math from New York University, writes that “it feels like I am screaming into the void with each application I am filling out.”

Keep ReadingShow less