The Stein-Ware campaign on ranked choice voting

I haven't seen much reason for ranked choice voting ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked-choice_voting_in_the_United_States ), but this November 4th Stein-Ware campaign email distinguishes between RCV and “limited-choice voting” being pushed by the Democratic Party in recent years.  The Green Party's Jill Stein and several other presidential candidates are on the ballot in North Carolina and others, such as the Party of Socialism and Liberation's Claudia De la Cruz, have official write-in status.

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If you’re like us, you’re probably sick and tired of hearing the propaganda that voting for Jill Stein and other Green candidates means you’re “spoiling the election” or “wasting your vote.” The political and media establishment promotes “spoiler” hysteria to scare people away from voting for what they actually want, and to keep people voting for a two-party system that doesn’t serve their interests. But what they don’t want people to know is that there’s a simple upgrade to our voting system that would make “spoiler” hysteria obsolete: Ranked-Choice Voting.

For years now, polls have shown that a huge majority - roughly 60% - of Americans believe the two-party system doesn’t represent them, and we need a new major party. Yet despite their unpopularity, the same two parties maintain a stranglehold on power by campaigning on the same message: “The other party is worse, so you have to vote for us as the lesser evil.” Instead of earning votes by working to improve voters’ lives, they can extort votes by threatening that the other side will be worse.

This two-party trap has led our country to a bad place: endless war and genocide, social and economic breakdown, climate collapse, and a democracy on life support. But it doesn’t have to be this way, and ranked-choice voting can change the game.

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With ranked-choice voting (RCV) you can vote for your favorite candidates without any worry about "wasting your vote," "splitting the vote" or "spoiling" an election. It’s simple: You can rank your 1st choice, 2nd choice, and so on, and if your 1st choice doesn't win, your vote goes to your 2nd choice. This process continues until one candidate wins a majority - and they can't win with less than 50%, which has happened in 4 of the last 8 Presidential elections.

Decade after decade of lesser-evil voting has enabled both establishment parties to do less and less for the people and cater to the demands of their wealthy elite donors. RCV can break this vicious cycle by freeing people to vote FOR what they actually want, rather than AGAINST what they fear. That would give voters real choice and real power.

In the Green Party, we’ve been fighting for ranked-choice voting for decades, but the politicians in power refuse to pass it because they don’t want you to have a real choice. And that’s one more reason they don’t deserve your vote. In fact, there’s been a concerted effort to suppress RCV by politicians like CA governor Gavin Newsom, who in 2019 vetoed a popular bill to expand use of RCV in California.

Despite establishment opposition, the movement for RCV has made steady progress, passing forms of RCV in over 50 cities and counties across the country, as well as the state of Maine. Communities that use RCV have higher turnout and happier voters. That's because RCV is a win-win-win for voters: it promotes majority rule, discourages negative campaigning, and means voters don't have to worry about "splitting the vote."

RCV is a gamechanger, but it’s also just a first step towards revitalizing our democracy to empower the people. Another critically-needed reform is proportional representation for legislative elections, a type of system used in most democracies around the world where if a party gets 25% of the vote, they take 25% of the seats. Proportional representation produces governments that are more representative and responsive, and allows for healthy multi-party democracy where the true diversity of a society can be fairly represented.

As the movement for RCV gains momentum, however, we have to be careful about attempts to co-opt voters’ enthusiasm for changing the broken system. In recent years, we’ve seen a well-funded effort to conflate RCV with “Top 4” primaries, which began in CA and WA as “Top 2” primaries. Now there are ballot measures in several states that include variants of “Top 4,” which are marketed as “open primaries,” along with a distorted and diluted form of RCV.

The problem is, similar to “Top 2,” the “Top 4” system requires “jungle primaries” that put candidates of all parties together and eliminates all but the top 4 vote-getters, which massively tilts the playing field towards well-funded, establishment-backed candidates with the resources to turn out a large primary vote. To make things worse, these primaries don’t even use RCV, making them no better than elections under the existing broken system.

A better name for “Top 4” primaries would be “limited-choice voting,” when what we need is the opposite: more voices and more choices. But this well-funded “reform” appears to be aimed at co-opting the movement for RCV to further entrench the two-party system and pay-to-play politics. And while genuine RCV can be a stepping stone to proportional representation, “Top 4” would perpetuate the system of single-seat elections, which would be an obstacle to enacting proportional representation.

For all these reasons, in 2024 we fully support ballot measures for genuine ranked-choice voting in Oregon (Measure 117) and multiple cities including Washington DC (Initiative 83), Richmond CA (Measure L), Oak Park IL and Peoria IL; and we oppose measures for “Top 4” primaries in Colorado (Proposition 131) and Idaho (Proposition 1), and “Top 5” in Nevada (Question 3).

It’s clearer than ever that we urgently need a voting system that frees us all to vote for what we want, not just against what we fear. Democracy needs a moral compass, and that compass is our values. If we can't vote our values, we're lost at sea.

It's time to break free from the 2-party trap and bring real democracy to America with ranked-choice voting. Every vote for our campaign helps to build the demand for a world where we can all forget the “lesser evil,” and vote for the greater good like our lives depend on it - because they do.

Thank you for everything you do to power up this movement for real democracy!

In solidarity and gratitude,

The Stein/Ware 2024 Team