It’s an age-old question: If you vote early for a candidate who drops out before election day, does your vote still count? It depends on the election system you use.

Senator Michael Bennet and Representative Dean Phillips just reintroduced the Voter Choice Act in Congress, with Senator Angus King as a co-sponsor. The bill empowers communities with the option to reform their own elections by providing funding and technical support to state and local governments that want to switch to ranked choice voting (RCV).

In the last few years, more and more cities have started to experiment with ranked choice voting in their municipal elections. This November, there will be a historic number of cities using RCV for their elections -- from mayor to city council to school board. In Utah alone this year, 23 cities chose to opt-in to an RCV pilot program.

In this month’s St. Petersburg municipal elections, Boris Vishnevsky, a member of the liberal Yabloko party, faced a shocking challenge: two other candidates changed their names to Boris Vishevsky in order to confuse voters and split the vote to prevent the original Vishnevsky’s victory.

Canada’s electoral system of single-member parliamentary districts that are won with a simple plurality of votes has repeatedly failed Canadian voters, denying them fair representation at the federal level.

Many factors likely influence how a voter uses their rankings in a ranked choice voting (RCV) election. As of 2021, the median portion of voters who choose to use multiple rankings on their ballot is 68%. In this post we briefly discuss two factors that affect rank usage: voters’ perceptions of candidate strength and a candidate or party messaging encouraging or discouraging use of rankings.

We are on the precipice of one of the worst redistricting bloodbaths in American history. Today the U.S. Census Bureau released data to let states draw Congressional and legislative maps that will shape politics for the next decade. States across the country - right, left, and center - are getting ready to gerrymander.

This year, FairVote’s Rob Richie, Ben Oestericher, Deb Otis, and Jeremy Seitz-Brown wrote a 10-page article for Politics and Governance about how the use of ranked choice voting (RCV) ballots in presidential primaries both preserves the right of voters to elect their party’s nominee while encouraging candidates to build a majority coalition within their party and reflect its values in order to secure the nomination.

In June, Maine Governor Janet Mills signed LD 1363, a bill that addressed a number of election issues, among which are valuable clarifications on how ranked choice voting (RCV) will work in presidential primaries and how its results will be reported in the 2024 general election for president.

Single-winner districts lead to millions of Americans being underrepresented -- including blue-state Republicans, red-state Democrats, independents, women, and communities of color -- because they are locked into gerrymandered winner-take-all congressional districts that are consistently won by candidates of the plurality group. The Fair Representation Act (FRA) would create proportional multi member districts, solving this problem and improving representation across the political spectrum.