Ranked choice voting is helping voters across the country
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Hi Friend,

 

It’s hard to believe it’s already May. For us here at Unite America, it’s been
busy and this year is flying by at such a breakneck speed with a lot of
exciting progress.

 

We don’t expect you to keep track of everything, because of course, that’s
what this update is here for — to help you keep up with things you might have
missed .

 

Here are three things to think about this week:

A BIG victory over the weekend
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ICYMI: Austin, Texas, the 11th biggest city in the US, became the latest
municipality to adopt ranked choice voting, after a ballot initiative passed
over the weekend. If implemented, the reform has the potential to save the city
as much as a million dollars per cycle, and help increase turnout by 70%.Ranked
choice voting provides voters with more choice, voice, and power in their
elections, and will help to put Austin voters first. 


In our blog this week
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, UA’s Policy Manager extraordinaire Beth Hladick breaks down reformers’ latest
victory, as well as what this might mean for Texas at large. Over the weekend,
a hundred miles down the road, more than nine candidates in TX-06 ran for an
open seat. The top-two finishers (who will head to a runoff) earned a combined
33% of the vote.



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Catch up with NYC
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Something else you might have missed? There’s buzz around New York City’s
upcoming mayoral election — the city’s largest foray into ranked choice voting
since voters approved the reform in 2019. With a deep and diverse field of
candidates, high stakes, and intense media attention,ranked choice voting is
already helping to empower New York voters, and forcing candidates to build a
broad coalition of support from communities across the city to help ensure
majority support. 


We’re not alone in taking notice. As Katrina vanden Heuvel writes for The
Washington Post
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, “Candidates have openly discussed their personal second choices. Activist
groups have issued joint endorsements of competing candidates. Some of these
competing candidates have even appeared together at shared promotional events.”



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What the California recall effort means for reform
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Like I said — a lot happening these days. This week, Californians turned in
enough petition signatures to prompt a recall election for their governor,
Gavin Newsom. As Steven Hill and Larry Diamond write inCalMatters
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, recall efforts in California have been fraught in the past; in 2003 (the last
time California recalled their governor) there were 135 candidates running to
replace him. 

 

Eager to avoid another situation in which a candidate can win with less than
50% support, the authors urge California to change how their elections are
conducted. Instead of a first-past-the-post election, they argue that
California should apply their top-two nonpartisan system — or better yet,
expand to top-four — to the recall election, requiring any winner to have
majority support. 

 

“Beyond fixing a defective recall process, RCV could be combined with
California’s current “top two” primary to make all our state elections more
democratic,” they write. “The current system, in which the top two primary
finishers face off in a November general election, already suffers from split
votes, spoiler candidates and occasionally strange results.”



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Brett
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Brett Maney
Senior Communications Manager
Unite America
Join the effort to put voters first
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