Dear John, In three weeks, we will honor and celebrate Rob Richie and Cynthia Richie Terrell, two of our co-founders who have made a lasting impact on the electoral reform landscape. I’d like to share a bit about their impact, and how you can honor them by attending the 2024 FairVote Awards on June 3 in New York City. As young adults, Rob and Cynthia realized that their role in making government work for all was to change the way we vote for elected officials. In 1991, they volunteered for a campaign to bring RCV to Cincinnati. Soon after, they helped launch the organization now known as FairVote – dedicated to reforming American elections. In FairVote's early days, Rob and Cynthia worked closely with allies like Dolores Huerta of the United Farm Workers, law professor Lani Guinier, the New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg, and former independent presidential candidate John Anderson. Rob led FairVote for the next 31 years, helping catalyze major progress toward better elections and making ranked choice voting the nation’s fastest-growing electoral reform. Cynthia played key roles at FairVote before founding RepresentWomen, a burgeoning reform group leveraging RCV as a path to gender equity in politics. Their work led to this moment today, with FairVote set to launch our second multi-year strategic plan under our new CEO, Meredith Sumpter. Today, 13 million voters across 50 cities, counties, and states use ranked choice voting for their elections – including in New York City, the site of our awards event. The growth of RCV is due in large part to our coalition partners, and so many of these leaders will join us at the Awards on June 3.
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