Summary
Voters across eight states, including Arizona, Colorado, and Nevada, rejected ballot measures for election reforms such as ranked choice voting (RCV) and open primaries, despite a $110 million push from advocates.
The movement, inspired by Alaska’s 2020 adoption of these reforms, failed to gain traction, with critics citing confusion and doubts over RCV’s benefits.
Some reforms succeeded locally, including in Portland, Oregon, but opposition remains strong.
Missouri got their anti-RCV proposal passed by billing it as an amendment declaring that non-citizens cannot vote. That’s right, they did it by banning something that was already against the law.
Maybe the way forward for election reform is to put it as a footnote in a proposition declaring murder to be bad.
“RCV is too confusing” say anti-RCV politicians deliberately wording RCV ballot measures to be as confusing as possible.
There’s still a lot of education that needs to be done on these topics, it’s all still pretty niche among the broader public.
Totally agree. In 2000, during the hanging chad debacle, I had a philosophy professor completely shift our class to the philosophy of voting. I found it endlessly fascinating and opened my thinking around voting. Here’s some good info on the topic: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/voting-methods/.
We should be pushing approval voting instead, the educational barrier is way lower and both RC and approval are a load better than FPTP.
both… are a load better than FPTP.
That’s exactly why we shouldn’t quibble over them too much.
In other words, now is a good time to make the argument you’re making. However, I also saw people making that sort of argument just before the election, after the decisions about what to put on the ballots had already been made, and in that context the argument come across as anti-RCV concern trolling.
“RCV is too confusing” say people who have no problem filling out sports brackets 🙄
