Next week, the results of the New Zealand Labour Party's leadership election will be announced. The New Zealand Labour Party is the latest political party to use ranked choice voting (RCV) to determine its leader. This article documents the tried and true use of RCV in internal party elections in New Zealand, Canada, the United Kingdom and Scotland. International experience augurs well for the use of RCV in party elections within the United States, especially the Republican Presidential Caucuses in Iowa.

With the 2014 midterm elections almost upon us, FairVote takes time out to compare several pundits' forecasts of the US House results with our own Monopoly Politics projections.  In doing so, we demonstrate the endemic lack of competition for US House seats.

At the end of an unusual election campaign, New Zealand's Mixed-Member Proportional Representation (MMP) electoral system has delivered Kiwis a strong mandate for the current government, with the first time a single party has  won a majority of seats  since the nation replaced  U.S.-style plurality voting elections with MMP in 1993. The election also demonstrated many of the advantages that such fair representation voting systems have over the single-member plurality systems so often used in American elections. 

Hot on the heels of electoral reforms last year, small Caribbean island nation Trinidad and Tobago has abandoned plurality voting in favor of runoff voting in its national elections. FairVote is keeping close watch on Trinidad and Tobago, as political parties, legislators and citizens continue to discuss voting systems, including ranked choice voting and fair representation voting, and agitate for reform.

Having tentatively thrust off their military dictatorship, Myanmar actively debates adopting Proportional Representation for its legislature. (Photo Credit: Htoo Tay Zar, Wikicommons)

Australia's Senate is elected by a method of ranked choice voting that forces voters to rank every candidate on the ballot. But after a variety of quirky minor parties have made their way into the Senate, it might be time to allow voters the freedom to not rank all candidates.