STOP SETTLING FOR THE LESSER OF TWO EVILS

Have you ever been told that a vote for a third party candidate is a throw-away? Instead of voting for who you truly want, you end up settling for a lesser of two evils. At a certain point, you decide to sit the next one out. You probably wonder, why vote at all if the vote for who you want doesn’t matter.??

What if there was another way to vote??

An Introduction to Ranked Choice Voting (RCV)

Rank Choice Voting is a method of counting elections where voters can rank multiple candidates by preference.?

In the case that no candidate wins a majority of the vote during the first count, there is an instant “runoff,” where the candidate with the lowest votes is eliminated and the first choice votes for that candidate are then moved to those voters’ next choice. This process continues until a majority vote is reached.?

RCV is used, as of July 2023, in 51 jurisdictions in the U.S. including 2 states, 3 counties, and 46 cities. Maine and Alaska are the only states that have implemented RCV statewide, but as of the 2020 presidential election, Nevada, Wyoming, and Kansas used RCV for their primaries.?

RCV helps voters support their first choice candidates without the fear that their vote will be a waste. It also helps positively improve the way that campaigning and elections take place today. It is one of the voting reforms supported by the Forward Party.??

Instead of it being beneficial for candidates to bash their competitors in a standard “most votes wins” election, RCV encourages candidates to appeal to a broad range of voters and to align with other candidates in the hopes of being ranked second, or even third, on ballots that they normally would have lost altogether. This practice makes it more likely that candidates will use their campaigning to actually reach the voters and talk about real issues instead of playing blame games.

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