Maine's statewide use of RCV is historic, but not first.

The House Committee on Administration voted this week to advance H.R. 634, the Election Assistance Commission Termination Act, to consideration by Congress. The bill proposes eliminating the Election Assistance Commission, an agency designed to safeguard and improve administration of elections in the United States.

News outlets are now calling Georgia’s Senate race for Republican incumbent Johnny Isakson, who will be elected to his third term as Georgia’s Senior Senator. Isakson has defeated both Democrat Jim Barksdale and Libertarian Allen Buckley. There was a time earlier in the campaign where the result was not so clear-cut, and Georgia may have had to conduct a statewide runoff election for Senator due to the majority vote requirement enshrined in their constitution for all public offices.

D.C. Council Member David Grosso, Independent, was re-elected to his At-Large D.C. Council seat today. Council Member Grosso is a big supporter of ranked choice voting in D.C., having introduced the “Instant Runoff Voting Amendment Act” in 2014 and 2015.

Last year was the 50th Anniversary of the March on Selma and the passage of the seminal Voting Rights Act of 1965, which changed the course of minority voting power in American politics, and just last week celebrated its 51st Anniversary. To honor that legacy, the Cumberland Law Review at the Stamford School of Law in Birmingham, Alabama dedicated an issue of its most recent volume to the history, impact, and future of the VRA, to which FairVote contributed an article about adopting ranked choice voting in multi-winner districts for Congress.

Earlier this summer the Supreme Court agreed to review Bethune Hill v. Virginia State Board of Elections, a case challenging the use of race in the 2011 redistricting of Virginia’s 100-seat House of Delegates. Virginia claimed to be trying to comply with the Voting Rights Act, by insisting that certain districts had to have at least 55% black voting age population. However, as redistricting experts like Justin Levitt have pointed out, this approach is a bad caricature of what the Voting Rights Act requires

The Supreme Court yesterday took up a case challenging North Carolina lawmakers' use of race while redrawing the state's congressional districts in 2011. The case, McCrory v. Harris, is an appeal by the state challenging a lower court finding that two districts were illegally packed with black voters. It joins another racial redistricting case already on the court's docket out of Virginia.

Earlier this week the ACLU of Ohio, the League of Women Voters of Ohio, the Fair Elections Legal Network (FELN), and Bernie Sanders’ Presidential Campaign each took action against the Ohio Secretary of State for his attempts to restrict 17-year-old voting in that state’s March 15 presidential primary.

Using ranked choice voting, especially when there are so many nominees, is the best way to select a film that has the broadest support among all voters. Spotlight may not have been the most talked-about film or the most divisive film, but it did earn broad enough support, perhaps in second or third choices, to clinch the victory.

For this tenure, PricewaterhouseCoopers has successfully tabulated the results and delivered the winners for the Oscars without a single breach in the secrecy of the process.