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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
David Meyers
By David MeyersDec 09, 2021
David Meyers

David Meyers is the Executive Editor of The Fulcrum. Before launching The Fulcrum, David spent more than two decades at CQ Roll Call, a leading publisher of political news and information. During his time there, David served as managing editor of Roll Call (“the newspaper of Capitol Hill”) and as managing editor of member information and research, which included co-editing the definitive biographical directory of Congress, “Politics in America.” David went on to lead all of CQ Roll Call’s congressional research teams as vice president of research and content development before shifting to a revenue and strategy role as vice president of business operations for Roll Call, working with the advertising and editorial teams to develop new revenue models and expand the company’s events business. David lives in Fairfax, Va., with his wife, two daughters and rottweiler. A graduate of Tufts University, David is a past president of the Tufts University Alumni Association. He is also a past president of the Washington Press Club Foundation, which works to celebrate and advance the role of women and minorities in the media. David currently serves on the board of directors for Temple B’nai Shalom in Fairfax Station.

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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.

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Private Prisons and ICE Exploit Loopholes, Harm Communities

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(Photo by Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images)

Private Prisons and ICE Exploit Loopholes, Harm Communities

While Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) terrorizes Black and brown communities with racial profiling, kidnappings, inhumane treatment, fatal abuse, and killings, private prison investors are asking how ICE can detain more people to increase their profits. Private prison corporations have long profited from immigration enforcement, but they are expecting a financial windfall under the current administration. These corporations are politically and financially situated to rapidly increase detention capacity and cash in on the president’s goal of deporting one million people per year. Stopping these corporations from lining politicians’ campaign coffers is a necessary first step in ensuring that our government is accountable to the people it serves, rather than the corporations it contracts with.

ICE and private prison corporations have long had a symbiotic relationship. Ninety percent of ICE's detainees were already being held in facilities owned or operated by private prison corporations before President Trump began his second term. CoreCivic and GEO Group, two of the largest private prison corporations that lead the multi-billion dollar industry, have been contracting with immigration enforcement for decades. By 2023, ICE contracts accounted for 43 percent of CoreCivic’s revenue and 30 percent of GEO Group’s revenue. The majority of each corporation’s lobbyists have held government positions, and GEO Group’s board of directors “has extensive links with ICE.” The relationship between private prisons and ICE is the embodiment of the “'revolving door’ between the federal government and the private sector.”

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As live sporting events go, nothing comes close to the World Cup. I was in the stands when South Africa, my birth country, hosted the event in 2010 after decades of exclusion from global athletics. In June of this year, I had a full-circle moment when South Africa played in the knockout rounds for the first time, and I stood with my two American sons, arms around them, singing South Africa's anthem — the only national anthem that weaves multiple languages into a single, unifying song. Later in the week, I was in the stands again, cheering Spain's win over Austria, a country to which my only connections are a brief holiday…and the fact that my mother's family fled from there during the Inquisition.

The magic of the World Cup is that everyone in the stands wears the flags and shirts of countries that are “theirs” in some way. For some, it’s where they were born; for others, where they live or where their ancestors hailed from. For some, it is simply a country they have adopted for the afternoon. It is impossible to know how deep a person’s connection runs simply by looking at them. And next to a person waving one team’s colors is a stranger, family member, or close friend supporting the opposing team—or wearing the jersey of a team that isn’t playing that day at all.

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As part of a collaboration between The Fulcrum's NextGen initiative and Made By Us, The Fulcrum is publishing Letters to America, a series created through the Youth250 project that invites Gen Z to reflect on the nation’s past, present, and future as the United States approaches its 250th anniversary.

On June 4, 1876, on the eve of our Nation’s centennial, the Transcontinental Express completed its inaugural voyage across America’s newly constructed coast-to-coast railroad, traveling from the Atlantic to the Pacific in just 83 hours. This milestone marked the end of the Railroad Race and the beginning of the Gilded Age, epitomized by its rail barons and drastic wealth disparity.

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KENOSHA, Wis. —Community leaders, faith leaders and civil rights advocates gathered this month to condemn anti-immigrant posters that appeared across Kenosha, as police continue investigating who is responsible.

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