October 3, 2018
By Elizabeth Wilson
* The following blog post is part 2 in the Intern Insights series, of blogs written by the Oregon Sierra Club 2018 Summer Intern Team. Read part 1 by Maddie Rosser here, and read about each Intern here. *
As a voter, I am constantly torn between wanting to support the candidates who I find the most inspiring and feeling like I will be wasting my vote if I do. The United States is a two-party system, and we as voters have been held hostage by both the GOP and the democratic party. We are forced to vote for the candidate we think has a chance at winning, the lesser of two evils. It forces us to vote our fears, not our hopes.
Third party candidates have very little chance of winning, and when they have become real contenders in past elections it splits the votes and allows the candidate a plurality not a majority to win. This means we end up with elected officials who only had the support of a third of the population. That doesn’t sound very democratic to me.
But there are other options. I recently learned of Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) also known as Instant Runoff Voting. This system was implemented in Maine this year and has been used in several cities around the country (a list is below). It allows voters to rank candidates on the ballot in order of preference and does not allow any candidate to win without a majority (+50%). This way, if your first-choice candidate received the least amount of votes in the first round, the vote would be retallied using your second-choice candidate. This process would repeat until a candidate received a majority.
This way, no matter your political affiliation, you can feel free to vote your conscience and not worry about your vote not counting or giving the election to your worst nightmare.
The most baffling fact I discovered while researching the history of this voting system was that Ranked Choice Voting is in Oregon’s Constitution. It was just never implemented, most likely due to the power of big money in our political system.
This is the only fair form of voting I have seen, and my hope is that Oregon, and eventually the entire United States will adopt it so that we never get stuck with another official who the majority of the population does not stand behind, the best candidates have a fighting chance, and the people’s voices are not stomped out by fear.
One very helpful resource I found for getting involved and informed is Fair Vote: fairvote.org
Cities that use Ranked Choice Voting:
Berkeley, CA
Oakland, CA
San Francisco, CA
San Leandro, CA
Cambridge, MA
Minneapolis, MN
Saint Paul, MN
Santa Fe, NM
Tacoma Park, MD
Telluride, CO
Portland, ME
