On Saturday, May 21, Republican voters in Virginia’s 10th Congressional District selected their party’s nominee, Hung Cao, using ranked choice voting (RCV). The 10th is the second district in Virginia to use RCV for its primary this month, after their neighbors in the 11th district used RCV on May 7.

On Saturday, May 14, Minnesota gubernatorial candidate Dr. Scott Jensen won the endorsement of the state’s Republican Party in a multi-hour process that would have benefited from ranked choice voting (RCV).

On Saturday, May 7, Republican voters in Virginia’s 11th Congressional District used ranked choice voting (RCV) to nominate Jim Myles as their 2022 candidate for U.S. House. This is the first use of RCV to nominate a congressional candidate in Virginia’s 11th, which comprises most of Fairfax County, the City of Fairfax, and part of Prince William County.

On Saturday, May 7, Republican voters in Virginia’s 11th Congressional District used ranked choice voting (RCV) to nominate Jim Myles as their 2022 candidate for U.S. House. This is the first use of RCV to nominate a congressional candidate in Virginia’s 11th, which comprises most of Fairfax County, the City of Fairfax, and part of Prince William County.

Nearly three million voters went to the polls Thursday in Northern Ireland’s Assembly elections and Scotland’s local elections. Both contests demonstrated the promise of the single transferable vote, known in the United States as proportional ranked choice voting (PRCV).

Thank you to everyone who joined us last week’s Twitter Space: “Our Redistricting Nightmare, and How to Avoid It in 2030!” It featured Washington Post reporter Colby Itkowitz; Common Cause National Redistricting Director Kathay Feng; Cato Institute Senior Fellow Walter Olson; and was moderated by FairVote’s Social Media Associate Matthew Oberstaedt with excellent questions written by FairVote Senior Fellow David Daley.

Between partisan gerrymandering and geographical sorting, more and more congressional districts are safely red or blue. This means that in a red district, whoever wins the Republican primary will win the general election with ease. The same can be said for the winner of the Democratic primary in a blue district.

Whenever a candidate takes office without support from a majority of voters, we are left wondering if things might have turned out differently if the race were narrowed to a contest between the two frontrunners. Unfortunately, from 1946 to 2021, 128 of the 1,092 gubernatorial elections nationwide - or 11.7 % - were won by candidates who won less than 50 percent of the vote.

It’s worth saying upfront:, nowhere does our Constitution outline specific processes for holding elections. The ‘Elections Clause’ leaves the decision to the states, while also giving Congress the power to intervene. A longer account reveals that single-member district plurality elections were not even how the founders necessarily envisioned elections. 

San Bernardino experiences similar racial disparities in voter turnout as several of its neighbors in California. This research demonstrates how the practice of contingent runoff elections exacerbates those trends and how ranked choice voting (RCV) can help close the gap and empower more voters.