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With ranked-choice voting (RCV) you
can vote for your favorite candidates without any worry about "wasting
your vote," "splitting the vote" or "spoiling" an election. It’s
simple: You can rank your 1st choice, 2nd choice, and so on, and if
your 1st choice doesn't win, your vote goes to your 2nd choice. This
process continues until one candidate wins a majority - and they can't
win with less than 50%, which has happened in 4 of the last 8
Presidential elections.
Decade after decade of lesser-evil
voting has enabled both establishment parties to do less and less for
the people and cater to the demands of their wealthy elite donors. RCV
can break this vicious cycle by freeing people to vote FOR what they
actually want, rather than AGAINST what they fear. That would give
voters real choice and real power.
In the Green Party, we’ve been
fighting for ranked-choice voting for decades, but the politicians in
power refuse to pass it because they don’t want you to have a real
choice. And that’s one more reason they don’t deserve your vote. In
fact, there’s been a concerted effort to suppress RCV by politicians
like CA governor Gavin Newsom, who in 2019 vetoed a popular bill to
expand use of RCV in California.
Despite establishment opposition,
the movement for RCV has made steady progress, passing forms of RCV in
over 50 cities and counties across the country, as well as the state
of Maine. Communities that use RCV have higher turnout and happier
voters. That's because RCV is a
win-win-win for voters: it promotes majority rule, discourages
negative campaigning, and means voters don't have to worry about
"splitting the vote."
RCV is a gamechanger, but it’s also
just a first step towards revitalizing our democracy to empower the
people. Another critically-needed reform is proportional
representation for legislative elections, a type of system used in
most democracies around the world where if a party gets 25% of the
vote, they take 25% of the seats. Proportional representation produces
governments that are more representative and responsive, and allows
for healthy multi-party democracy where the true diversity of a
society can be fairly represented.
As the movement for RCV gains
momentum, however, we have to be careful about attempts to co-opt
voters’ enthusiasm for changing the broken system. In recent years,
we’ve seen a well-funded effort to conflate RCV with “Top 4”
primaries, which began in CA and WA as “Top 2” primaries. Now there
are ballot measures in several states that include variants of “Top
4,” which are marketed as “open primaries,” along with a distorted and
diluted form of RCV.
The problem is, similar to “Top 2,”
the “Top 4” system requires “jungle primaries” that put candidates of
all parties together and eliminates all but the top 4 vote-getters,
which massively tilts the playing field towards well-funded,
establishment-backed candidates with the resources to turn out a large
primary vote. To make things worse, these primaries don’t even use
RCV, making them no better than elections under the existing broken
system.
A better name for “Top 4” primaries
would be “limited-choice voting,” when what we need is the opposite:
more voices and more choices. But this well-funded “reform” appears to
be aimed at co-opting the movement for RCV to further entrench the
two-party system and pay-to-play politics. And while genuine RCV can
be a stepping stone to proportional representation, “Top 4” would
perpetuate the system of single-seat elections, which would be an
obstacle to enacting proportional representation.
For all these reasons, in 2024
we fully support ballot measures for genuine ranked-choice
voting in Oregon (Measure 117) and multiple cities including
Washington DC (Initiative 83), Richmond CA (Measure L), Oak Park IL
and Peoria IL; and we oppose measures for “Top 4”
primaries in Colorado (Proposition 131) and Idaho
(Proposition 1), and “Top 5” in Nevada (Question 3).
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