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John,

We have founded a new nation, recovered from a civil war, brought civil rights to all, and put a man on the moon.

Time and again, Americans have been told that making big change is impossible. Tell that to the foot-soldiers who marched for justice across the South, or the suffragists who went on hunger strikes to give women the right to vote. They refused to accept that it could not be done. They simply asked how?

When I look at our nation today, I see great division – but also a hunger to reconnect around our common purpose, and examples of Americans showing how to come together on behalf of fairness and inclusion. Working through the challenges our constitutional democracy faces will require focusing resolutely on what the health and well-being of the American people require. We must restore our faith in democracy and each other.

How? One important step is adopting ranked choice voting. In this moment, I am especially thrilled to be FairVote’s board chair, and to help build support for the important work this extraordinary team is doing. Our politics looks so frozen and dysfunctional in part because our elections make it easy for candidates to “win” without an actual majority, especially in primaries. 

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As we all know, ranked choice voting asks candidates to talk to everyone and build real coalitions. It rejuvenates the art of persuasion. That’s the opposite of what we have now, when all-important primaries might be won with as little as 20% of the vote, incentivizing candidates to exacerbate outrage and stoke division. 

Just look at what’s happening in Alaska, one of the most exciting laboratories of our democracy, where the top four finishers in an open primary move on to a general election that uses ranked choice voting. Winners need to campaign to everyone, and always earn a majority. Once in office, lawmakers know they have a mandate to lead. In Alaska, they have come together to form cross-partisan coalitions to deliver for the health and well-being of Alaskans. 

Alaskans showed their support for this reform by defending it in November, when extreme partisans sought to repeal it and return to the old ways.

Meanwhile, Portland, OR citizens eager to make their city work again embraced ranked choice voting for mayor, and a proportional form of ranked choice voting for City Council. In their first use of RCV, Portlanders elected their most diverse set of representatives ever. The Council reflects people of all neighborhoods and races, business owners and progressives, homeowners and renters. The members will now share a table and a common purpose.

This is a bright spot in our politics. Change can be a long, hard slog – but change is of our own making. Many of us can recite the beginning of the second sentence of the Declaration of Independence by heart: “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” that we are endowed “with certain unalienable rights,” among them “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

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But it doesn’t end there. The Declaration is really the reformer’s guide to good government: We build a government that protects our unalienable rights. When government becomes dysfunctional and unrepresentative, we have the right – and responsibility – to refashion it to ensure our collective safety and happiness. 

Alaska and Portland have done this. So have Maine and Washington, DC, and communities from Massachusetts all the way to Utah. Every community can.

We don’t have to agree on every issue. What we do need is to forge new ways of talking to one another. We can. We must. We will. It is our moment to ask how? It is FairVote’s moment for these invaluable reforms to revitalize our shared pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness. I hope that you will take this moment to make a generous gift to fund FairVote’s work of building an ever-more-perfect union.

Onward,

Danielle Allen

FairVote Board Chair