According to the civics class model of American democracy, every two years voters pick a representative in Congress from the nominees of the two major parties. With two candidates, the winner is guaranteed to have the support of the majority. To provide even more choice, voters pick the party nominee in primary elections. American elections are open to any political party, but Americans by tradition consistently prefer Democrats and Republicans. As this analysis of the 2016 election returns for the U.S. House of Representatives demonstrates, almost every element of the civics class model is at odds with the facts.

The story of ranked choice voting in Ann Arbor, Michigan is one of conflict, compromise and collapse. It’s the story of a group of college students—radical in their political beliefs and newly emboldened by the Vietnam war—who formed a third party and aggressively challenged establishment politics. It’s also the story of an election night as dramatic as any, a contest decided by a handful of votes that elected the city’s first (and, to date, only) black mayor. And finally, it’s a story of powerful backlash, swift enough to repeal RCV in Ann Arbor just two years after its adoption.

The power and prominence of the office of the President is wholly unique in the American political system. This warrants greater scrutiny to presidential elections. However, no national minimum standard exists for ensuring the integrity of presidential elections. Each state may choose to adopt any post-election verification process or none at all, and no recourse exists for candidates. A minimum national standard is long overdue.

This report proposes to increase order and reliability in presidential recounts with federal legislation that respects state control over elections while establishing procedures for a timely and less contentious recount process.

Ohio has a rich history of being an electoral battleground. Consequently, it also has a deep record of being the frontline for struggles encompassing voter disenfranchisement, gerrymandering, and fair representation issues. Historical examination of this struggle reveals that Ohio’s communities have a history of using ranked choice voting (RCV) as a means to combat the partisan interests that have long swamped the state. Ohio should look to its past use of RCV for solutions to its current election woes.

Ranked Choice Voting in 2018: A Mid-Year Report

In the first half of 2018, nearly half a million voters ranked their choices in elections for the most important offices in their communities. First, on March 6, voters in Santa Fe, New Mexico elected their first full-time mayor in an open seat race among five candidates. Then, on June 5, voters in San Francisco elected a new mayor in a hotly-contested special election to fill the empty seat after the tragic death of Mayor Ed Lee late last year. Finally, on June 12, voters in Maine ranked their choices in state and congressional primary elections, with crowded fields in both the Republican and Democratic contests for governor and one congressional primary.

This white paper examines various ways of measuring RCV’s impact in Santa Fe, San Francisco, and Maine. It begins with a short narrative describing the elections in all three jurisdictions, and then considers various metrics, all of which show that RCV is consistent with a healthy, competitive political culture. Key findings include:

• Voter turnout surpassed expectations in all three jurisdictions.
• Implementation of RCV was smooth and inexpensive.
• Voters used the ballot well, ranking their choices and making few errors.
• Outcomes were fair, with winners demonstrating both strong core support and broad support in their communities

The most common voting methods, for electing only one winner, in the United States are single-choice plurality and two-round runoff elections. They have given us a politics in which voters have too few choices, a democracy in which turnout suffers and winners may be insufficiently accountable to the electorate. More and more Americans realize the problems inherent in these methods, and ranked choice voting (RCV, also known as “instant runoff voting”) has emerged as a better way to conduct elections. With the growing realization that we should change the status quo, however, other voting methods are getting attention.

In this short report, FairVote assesses the impact of a proposed charter amendment in Santa Clara on the voting rights of Santa Clara's Asian American and Latino communities. The amendment, which will be on the ballot on June 5, 2018 as Measure A, would institute the use of multi-winner ranked choice voting for Santa Clara's City Council. Specifically, the city would divide into two multi-winner districts, and each would elect three members to the City Council.

The analysis concludes that based on the demographics of each district and voter turnout in prior elections, Measure A would result in dramatically increased political power for communities of color in Santa Clara. Asian American voters would have the power to elect one candidate of choice in each district, and Latino voters would have the power to elect a candidate of choice in one of the two districts. It further analyzes an alternative proposal: multi-winner ranked choice voting in citywide elections for all six seats simultaneously. This would have a similar impact, with potentially better representation of the distinct views of Santa Clara's South Asian and East Asian communities, though it would involve the elimination of staggered elections.

In this report, we quantify how well voters have interacted with this form of an RCV ballot over the 68 RCV elections that took place in San Francisco from 2004-2016. The report breaks contests down into categories based on how competitive they were and analyzes the rates at which voters ranked candidates; the rates at which they skipped the contest entirely; and two types of voter errors (skipped rankings and overvotes). It measures how RCV performs in San Francisco on these and other metrics compared to non-RCV contests in the city. We find that San Francisco voters have generally made effective use of this form of an RCV ballot despite its limitations, especially compared to the prior system based on two-round runoffs.

In this short report, FairVote assesses the election rates of people of color in the California Bay Area before and after the adoption of ranked choice voting. We show that people of color hold office at a higher rate under ranked choice voting than under the prior system. We also demonstrate that people of color win office more often since the adoption of ranked choice voting across three different ways of categorizing districts: plurality-minority (districts where one ethnic minority group is the largest in the district); white-plurality (districts where ethnic minority groups are collectively in the majority, but whites are the largest single group); and white-majority.