An Election Reformer’s Reflections on the Election Results
by Celeste Landry of the LWVBC Voting Methods Team
The post-election headlines are making much ado about the failure to adopt Instant-Runoff (ranked) Voting in Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon and Arizona. In all but Oregon, the reform was paired with a choose-one all-candidate primary open to all voters, modeled after Alaska’s Final-4 Voting. (Alaska voters narrowly – by 664 votes – retained Final-4 Voting.) Voters also rejected primary election reforms in Montana and South Dakota and banned ranked voting in Missouri.
A few municipalities had voting methods questions on their ballot. Washington, DC, opened its partisan primary elections to unaffiliated voters and will start using Instant-Runoff Voting (IRV). Oak Park, IL, voted to adopt IRV to elect Village President, and Bloomington, MN, fended off an IRV repeal attempt. In the Oregon town of Oakridge, voters rejected a measure to adopt STAR (Score Then Automatic Runoff) Voting. I had hoped that STAR Voting – the most expressive of the popular voting methods – would be adopted for its first government elections.
I spent much of this past year actively following the ballot measure that eventually became Prop 131, to use Final-4 Voting for some CO partisan elections. For instance, I testified regularly at the Title Board, which determines ballot language. Then I worked to educate voters on what Prop 131 would do.
Prop 131 wasn’t perfect. It could have been written better, but I supported the final measure. LWVBC member Neal McBurnett and I even wrote a rebuttal of US Senator Bennet’s anti-Prop 131 statement. The rebuttal pushed back against inaccurate claims. Unfortunately, the pro campaign also mischaracterized Prop 131 at times.
The Prop 131 proponents didn’t work with the county clerks to write the measure; in the last days of the legislative session the clerks supported a bill amendment that will delay implementation of any statewide ranked voting method for years.
The bad election news for voting methods reformers is usually presented as “bad for Ranked-Choice Voting (RCV),” but as Voter newsletter readers know, there are many forms of RCV. Prop 131 and other rejected state measures proposed changing our single-winner voting method. A more impactful electoral reform would be to change to multi-winner elections using a proportional voting method for elected bodies like legislatures or councils.
In the same election that saw so many rejections of single-winner IRV, Portland, OR inaugurated 4 successful multi-winner ranked voting contests, each to elect 3 council members. The result: the most diverse and representative council that Portland has ever had. Cambridge, MA has been using this form of RCV, known as Single Transferable Vote (STV), since 1941. (Boulder used STV from 1917 to 1947.) In the recent election, Oak Park, IL, also adopted STV to elect Village Trustees.
The US Fair Representation Act would similarly use STV to elect US Representatives with each congressional district electing up to 5 members (the more members per district, the more diverse and representative the delegation) and IRV to elect US Senators and any state’s sole US Rep (think of Alaska and Wyoming). US Rep Joe Neguse is a co-sponsor of the Fair Representation Act.
In Sept 2022 more than 200 scholars called for “multi-member districts with more proportional representation.” The letter doesn’t mention which kind of proportional voting method. Some big names who signed include Lee Drutman, Francis Fukuyama, Steven Levitsky (How Democracies Die), Nancy MacLean (Democracy in Chains), Miles Rapoport (100% Democracy), Larry Sabato, and Matthew Shugart.
Because the tabulation and auditing process for STV poses new challenges, some proportional voting advocates like Lee Drutman’s Fix Our House organization are more excited about the simpler Party List systems used in other countries. A non-STV proportional system would also get around the bans on ranked voting in states like Missouri, Florida and Idaho.
Graphic from https://protectdemocracy.org/work/proportional-representation-explained/
Two weeks ago Rep Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (WA-3) and Rep Jared Golden (ME-2) introduced House Resolution 1573 to establish a Select Committee on Electoral Reform to “consider alternatives like multi-member districts with proportional representation, …”
FairVote is the national organization most associated with RCV. “It was founded in 1992 as Citizens for Proportional Representation to support the implementation of proportional representation in American elections.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FairVote) Perhaps now is a good time for FairVote to return to its original mission and stop focusing so much on single-winner IRV.
One of the two LWVBC Voting Methods Team goals is working toward proportional representation in council elections, with the Boulder City Council as a main target.
LWVCO is, meanwhile, making progress on a Primary Election Reform study, headed by LWVBC member Marcus Ogren. The study is considering many voting methods, not only Instant-Runoff Voting. In our polarized political climate, structural reform is more important than ever. Our work continues.