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Category: Ranked-choice voting

Notes on preferential voting in America, emphasizing developments from about 1990 to present.

How to have two votes in DC’s at-large elections

There is controversy about the new electoral system in DC. Michael Brice-Saddler reports for the Washington Sun:

For decades, the at-large ballot carried simple instructions: vote for no more than two candidates. Under the new system, voters face a grid prompting them to rank candidates across columns from first to fifth choice. Yet because each ballot contains only one active vote at a time, a voter’s second choice may never be counted.

The new math has forced candidates to reshape their messaging in the home stretch, with contenders aggressively pleading for first-choice votes. The change has also bred friction among voters accustomed to casting two distinct picks, leaving even politically plugged-in residents puzzling over their ballots.

One way for voters to have two “active votes” — or potentially as many as they want — would be to use free-list PR (FLPR). Also known as PR with panachage, FLPR lets voters cast an arbitrarily large number of candidate votes. These then determine how many seats each party gets as well as which candidates get them.

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Coalition formation in Portland’s first STV election

I have a new report with Kevin Kosar and Jaehun Lee, jointly published by the American Enterprise Institute and Manhattan Institute:

Portland, Oregon, first used its new proportional ranked-choice voting electoral system to elect city council members in November 2024.

A variety of groups endorsed candidates in this nonpartisan election.

Analyses of these groups’ endorsements point to the emergence of four political blocs: national progressivism, pro-business pragmatism, local progressivism, and laborism.

It is not yet clear what style of politics will emerge in future elections. Possibilities include local multi-partism, local bi-partism based on coalition parties, and continued fluidity, including within the blocs themselves.

Portland’s urban politics may prove unstable and feature shifting alliances among these groups in the run-up to subsequent elections.

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