As FairVote continues its advocacy for ranked choice voting (RCV) in the United States, it is instructive to analyze how the system is playing out around the world. Having already reported on this year’s results in Malta, Northern Ireland, and Scotland, we turn to Australia to see how RCV fared.

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.

Step on up, ladies and gentlemen, to find out who will win a race with the fewest number of votes?

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.