Many of you went to the voting booth on Tuesday a couple of days ago and voted. How often have you gone to vote and wished you could rank all the candidates from favorite to least favorite instead of just voting for the better of two evils? Throughout the United States, there is a growing movement to change to Ranked Choice Voting instead of a first past the post system. Most states use the first-past-the-post system. Whoever gets a plurality of the votes wins the election. I will give an example from my area: this past summer, the Philadelphia Democratic Party held a primary election for the mayor’s office. Now, remember this is Philadelphia, and whoever wins the Democratic primary most likely will become the mayor because Philadelphia is a very democratic city. Cherelle Parker won the Democratic primary with 32.6% of the vote. That means with this first past the post system, the next mayor of Philadelphia will likely be Parker. So she became mayor with only 32.6% of the democratic party, and now she will most likely be the next mayor of the sixth largest city in the United States. That is not even a majority of the democratic party, let alone a majority of the city. This is why I am firmly in favor of ranked-choice voting. Instead of just voting for one person and having whoever gets the most votes win, ranked-choice voting is quite different. In ranked-choice voting, you rank all candidates from favorite to least favorite. This confuses some people, but I hope it is clear. I will give you an example in 2020.

The way that I would have done it is to vote for Howie Hawkins, the Green Party candidate at one; Joe Biden, the Democratic Party candidate, my number two; Jo Jorgensen, the Libertarian Party candidate, number three; and Donald Trump, the Republican Party candidate. Now, if nobody gets a majority of the votes, whoever receives the most minor support in those people’s votes switches to their number two. So, back to my example, if in 2020, Trump gets 45% of the vote and Biden 43% of the vote, Jorgensen gets 7% of the vote, and Hawkins receives 5% of the vote. Then Hawkins would get taken out, and every person who voted for Hawkins as their first choice would vote and then move to their second choice. So, my vote switches from Hawkins to Biden. This keeps going till a candidate reaches the majority of the votes. This means you must vote a second time in a runoff, like what happens in Georgia. That is not the case. You vote once, and they go down the rankings as needed.

Some states already do this for everything except for the presidential election. Alaska and Maine are the two primary states that use ranked-choice voting. Now, Republicans might say that ranked-choice voting favors Democrats, which on paper might look like that, but that is not the case. Republicans say that ranked-choice voting got a Democrat elected to the House in deep red Alaska, and also why a Democrat keeps winning in a plus 11 red district in Maine. So that does seem to help democrats, but those two members of the House, Mary Peltola (D-Alaska) and Jared Golden (D-Maine), are some of the most moderate members of Congress. These two members do not just follow their parties. They stay true to the districts that elected them. This system is a fair way of getting members elected to represent their districts better. Also, it again forces candidates to get a majority of the vote and not just a plurality. After you read this, you will better understand ranked-choice voting and push to try to get this system across the country.