The Hottest Political Reform of the Moment Gains Ground

ST. PAUL, Minn. — At 8 a.m. this past March, on a day that almost anywhere but St. Paul, Minn. would have been considered terrifyingly cold and windy, the advocates and the opponents of a plan to revamp Minnesota’s elections squared off at the State Capitol complex where the House Elections Committee was about to convene. “Squared off” perhaps casts these mostly aging militants in too un-Minnesota a light: They held signs and milled around on opposite sides of the crowded space. Still, it seemed like quite a show of passion for an innovation better known to political scientists than to voters.

At issue was ranked choice voting, a wonky reform that advocates are convinced will help drain the toxins from our national politics. Ranked choice voting allows voters to list their top three or more candidates, eliminates the last-place finisher and then redistributes votes to the remaining candidates until one emerges with a majority. The approach has been quietly making gains across the country, but it burst into the public consciousness last year after it helped a centrist Democrat thwart Sarah Palin’s bid for Congress in Alaska.

Though a limited number of cities in Minnesota already use ranked choice voting, the bill before the committee would extend the system to all state and federal elections and give all municipalities the option of adopting the reform. Alaska and Maine also have ranked choice voting, though in both states it was adopted through voter referendums; Minnesota would be the first to establish ranked choice voting through the legislative process.

I asked a white-haired gentleman in the orange T-shirt sported by the pro-ranked choice voting team why he had braved the elements to show his support. His name was John Olsen, and he hailed from the prosperous Twin Cities suburb of St. Louis Park, which for the last four years has elected local officials through ranked choice voting. Olsen told me that something that defied the laws of our bitterly divided politics had happened under the new system: “If you put a sign on your lawn for a candidate, one of the other candidates will still knock on your door to say, ‘Could I convince you to make me your second choice?’” Ranked choice voting, he said, had forced candidates to reach out beyond their base.

The other side — the blue T-shirts — ridiculed the claim that ranked choice voting had fostered incentives for moderation. Jonathan Aanestad, chair of a group called Minnesota Elections Integrity Solutions, told me that the innovation had proved hopelessly confusing to voters and insisted that various municipalities were now seeking to repeal it. Ranked choice voting, he asserted, “was imposed on Minnesota by a group with $1.3 million in outside dark money.” That group was FairVote Minnesota, whose T-shirts Olsen and others were sporting. I asked Aanestad where he thought the money had come from. “George Soros,” he said. Aanestad eventually conceded that Soros had not actually donated to FairVote, but he insisted that his “committees” had given to other committees that in turn gave to FairVote — a baseless claim that suggests even genteel Minnesota does, in fact, need a vaccine against extremist rhetoric.

As a technical intervention in the mechanics of elections, ranked choice voting hardly feels like the antidote to the democratic erosion that afflicts the United States, not to mention democracies around the world. Some political scientists regard it as the kind of bauble that entrances reformers desperate for easy solutions to hard problems.

That is not, however, the way it looks on the ground in Minnesota.

Jeanne Massey, the executive director of FairVote Minnesota, is the maestro behind the elaborate political campaign to pass the bill. She has spent almost 15 years persuading Minnesotans of the merits of ranked choice voting and wearing down the resistance of legislators; her efforts culminated in a massive get-out-the-vote drive for ranked choice voting-friendly candidates in the 2022 midterms. Should the bill pass this year — hardly a certainty — Massey and FairVote and their statehouse allies will lift ranked choice voting from a darling of democracy nerds to the most potent of the proposed reforms to the American electoral system.

“Our organization door-knocked more than 30,000 doors, and I door-knocked a large chunk of those,” Massey told me. “Those voters are very concerned. They saw this extremism as anti-American, anti-them and they’re very worried about what that means for our country.”

Massey is convinced that most Minnesotans, and most Americans, yearn for the kind of political reforms that will break the fever of polarization. She regards ranked choice voting as an immensely important reform, but also a less steep hill to climb than more ambitious proposals, including abolishing the Electoral College, making the Senate less drastically unrepresentative or establishing “multi-member districts” in which voters would choose three to five representatives, quite possibly of different parties.

Larry Diamond, a prominent political scientist and democracy scholar at Stanford, argues that in the ideal case, ranked choice voting would be paired with nonpartisan primaries, as is the case in Alaska. But unlike Alaska, Minnesota doesn’t allow for voter referendums; the need to pass a bill effectively ruled out nonpartisan primaries, which are anathema to all but the most high-minded lawmakers. Even passing ranked choice voting would be a remarkable achievement: Not many politicians are eager to upend the system that got them elected in the first place.

It was Diamond who told me about Minnesota and about Jeanne Massey, who he described as a “Tocquevillian” figure, a citizen-activist devoting her life to the struggle to rescue American democracy. Massey’s sense of urgency is palpable; yet the cause she champions is threatened both by the bitter partisanship she has targeted and by the resistance of legislators who feel threatened by change.

I spent two days last month more or less continually in Jeanne Massey’s company. She is the kind of leader you would like to have for your advocacy organization no matter what it advocated. Trim, brisk, compact, with an air of surface composure that barely muffles the furious engine thrumming within, Massey is a triple-tasker who responds to texts and emails and phone calls while issuing orders to aides and lobbyists. While she was leading her volunteers from the state House to the state Senate during testimony, she became so impatient that she broke into a speed-walk, and then a dead run, in her black ankle boots, leaving us to wander the maze of basement hallways on our own.

Massey’s relentlessness is a matter of legend. When a supporter stopped by for a fist bump at the alcove in the Senate building where she had set up momentary headquarters, Massey pressed him, as she pressed everyone she met, to show up at the FairVote rally later that day. “She’s like a friendly Mafia,” he said with a knowing grin. The only time Massey lost her temper with me was when she demanded that I disregard a criticism of an important Democrat that I had heard from a FairVote official. “That would hurt us,” she snapped, as if the obligation to advance the cause extended to everyone, including journalists.

Unlined, ever so slightly silver, Massey proudly admits to 61 years of age. She was working as an urban planner in Minneapolis when the ranked choice voting light bulb went on. She had been disturbed by the number of elections, including in the 2000 presidential race, in which the winner had not gained a majority of votes but won thanks to a third party. In Minnesota, with its tradition of independent parties, such victories were common, and included Jesse Ventura, the former professional wrestler who was elected governor in 1998 with 37 percent of the vote. Massey is a liberal Democrat; it may not be a coincidence that all these beneficiaries were Republicans or at least non-Democrats.

“It just hit me that these were consequential elections,” Massey said, “and it’s wrong, and there’s a simple, eloquent, easy fix.” She knew that San Francisco had already begun using ranked choice voting. In 2009 she approached FairVote Minnesota, an outgrowth, though an independent one, of a national ranked choice voting advocacy body also known as FairVote, with a proposal to put ranked choice voting on the ballot in Minneapolis. Massey ran the campaign in her spare time. The ballot measure carried, Minneapolis instituted ranked choice voting and in 2012 Massey became FairVote Minnesota’s full-time executive director.

In the ensuing years, most of the “charter” cities in Minnesota that enjoyed the legal authority to hold ballot initiatives adopted ranked choice voting. (One, Duluth, voted it down.) A national breakthrough came in 2018 when Maine, despite fierce Republican opposition, voted by referendum to adopt the system statewide. In 2021 Alaskans voted to adopt both ranked choice voting and nonpartisan primaries, the political science gold standard.

In the meantime, Donald Trump had happened. However one felt about candidates winning without majorities, ranked choice voting’s potential to reduce extremism and encourage broad-based appeals suddenly made it feel much more urgent. And Minnesota had run out of new cities to enroll. In 2020 Massey approached her board with an audacious plan to identify state legislators and candidates of either party who would embrace ranked choice voting and do everything possible to put them over the top in the coming election.

Maureen Reed, a retired physician who chairs the board, recognized the logic. “I was not an emergency room physician,” she told me over lunch in the Rathskeller, the vaulted basement restaurant of Minnesota’s stately Capitol. “I did internal medicine and geriatric care. I was trying to keep people healthy.” In her own search for root causes, Reed had migrated from medicine to public health to public policy. Her own work on health care had convinced her that “the rhetoric of hyper-partisanship has led to gridlock.” The board authorized Massey’s plan. The organization received large gifts for its lobbying and education program from local, regional and national foundations; by far the biggest, $1,755,000 over three years plus $150,000 for More Voices Minnesota, FairVote’s PAC, came from John Arnold, a Houston hedge fund manager and philanthropist. Arnold is indeed located out-of-state, but the funds were publicly disclosed. He does not appear to have any connection to George Soros.

The Covid-era election of 2020 proved to be a warm-up exercise. In the 2022 election, FairVote dispensed $140,000 in political donations to Democratic candidates, a significant sum for statewide races, while also conducting its energetic door-knocking campaign. Ranked choice voting was hardly the chief issue that year; abortion and criminal justice issues in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death mattered far more. But FairVote’s money and energy helped flip the state Senate and produced a “trifecta” — a Democratic House, Senate and governor. Many of those Democrats have reason to feel grateful to FairVote. While I was trailing Massey across the State Capitol, I asked why state Sen. Heather Gustafson had agreed to speak at the rally the next day. “She’s a big supporter,” Massey explained. “We targeted swing districts” — including hers. (Gustafson did not, in fact, show up for the rally.)

The trifecta made ranked choice voting legislation possible — but just barely. Though prominent moderate Republicans in the state, including former U.S. Sen. Dave Durenberger and ex-Gov. Arne Carlson, endorsed the idea, the Minnesota GOP, like the party almost everywhere, has become both more conservative and more truculent. Today’s Republicans treat almost all facially neutral political reforms, whether eliminating gerrymandering, reducing the influence of money or instituting nonpartisan primaries, as a plot to elect Democrats. It’s no surprise, then, that not a single Republican legislator in the state has publicly supported ranked choice voting.

When I asked Mark Koran, a Republican member of the state House and leading critic, why he opposed the bill, he first told me about the out-of-state dark money, though without repeating the Soros canard. Koran disputed the ranked choice voting talking points. “There’s a claim that we can create a kinder, gentler electoral system,” he said. But in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, he said, progressive candidates had run inflammatory campaigns. Minnesota already had high turnout and a wide diversity of candidates, he added. Why fix what isn’t broke? If there was a problem, he said, it was “transparency.” Outside dark money, he claimed, had been deployed to defeat county prosecutors prepared to investigate vote fraud. Koran told me about the 2008 U.S. Senate race in which Democrat Al Franken had defeated Republican Norm Coleman thanks, he said, to “11,000 fraudulent votes,” including 340 ineligible felons. That was the real electoral issue — and no one was looking at it.

Jeanne Massey had lined up a star witness for the House Elections Committee hearing — Mary Peltola, the Alaska Democrat who had defeated Palin for Congress last year. Peltola had won only 10 percent of the votes in the state’s open primary, but that had been enough to vault her into the general election, where she defeated Palin largely because 15,000 people who had voted for more moderate Republican Nick Begich had listed Peltola rather than Palin as their second choice. At the same time, Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who had voted to impeach Trump for inciting the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, finished in a virtual dead heat with Trumpist Kelly Tshibaka and then retained her seat thanks to votes she received after a Democrat was eliminated. Alaska was providing proof of concept — and vindication of the fears on the right.

The room in which the committee met had tables, chairs and microphones in the center with seats rising up on either side. As if by an unspoken prior design, the blue shirts filled one set of seats and the oranges the other. The hearing thus bore an odd resemblance to a college football game, though refs do not typically have to silence fans as the presiding member did to the blues during testimony from an ranked choice voting opponent. Democratic state Rep. Cedrick Frazier, the sponsor of the bill in the House, spoke first. Frazier, who is Black, argued that ranked choice voting encourages ethnic and racial minorities, as well as other outsiders, to run for office since they might win in later rounds.

Then Peltola took a seat beside him. A native Yup’ik, Peltola has a warm smile and an air of gentle dignity. She spoke of the lawn-placard dynamics of ranked choice voting. “I could not afford to alienate my opponents’ supporters,” she said, “because second- and third-choice voters were critical in determining who would win. I could not take any vote for granted or write any voter off.” In testimony later that morning before a state Senate Committee, Peltola made a striking point about nonpartisan primaries. “I would not have made it out of a primary,” she said, “because I’m not liberal enough.” With partisan primaries, she complained, “We go farther to the right and farther to the left.”

Peltola seems to be a new kind of politician made possible by a new kind of system. When we spoke that afternoon, she told me that Democratic office-holders in Alaska had been just as hostile to the new system, and above all to nonpartisan primaries, as Republicans had: “We have many of our stalwart party folks who are vehemently opposed to ranked choice voting because so much of their power has been diluted.” Party, to her, is the bane of democracy. “My personal belief is that these very partisan systems led us to an insurrection,” she told me. “It takes two to tango.” Peltola had expressed her disdain for convention by refusing to disparage her opponents or even to run a negative ad. When she won, she hired the chief of staff of the Republican she had replaced, the late Don Young. Peltola says that 60 percent of Alaskans are politically unaffiliated: She is their tribune.

It’s hard to believe that ranked choice voting can do everything that its partisans attribute to it — prevent unpopular figures from winning, allow previously marginal candidates to get elected, subdue the power of political parties and reduce polarization and extremism. Some of these things may not even be worth achieving. Real majorities, after all, have elected illiberal populists in India, Brazil, Poland and Hungary; Trump would have been no less dangerous a figure had he won 50.1 percent rather than 46.1 percent of the vote in 2016.

Massey stoutly insisted that Trump couldn’t have won a majority, but that’s the kind of blind-faith assumption that progressives often make about their fellow Americans. That said, the case that Koran and his Republican colleagues have mounted against ranked choice voting, which is chiefly that it’s too confusing for voters, is not terribly convincing either; as Maureen Reed likes to say, even her 4-year-old grand-nephew knows how to rank things. The harder question is whether ranked choice voting has and will achieve as much as the activists and beneficiaries think it can.

Political scientists have their doubts. A 2021 study by Lee Drutman and Maresa Strano on the cities and states that use ranked choice voting concludes that “the benefits of RCV outweigh the downsides,” but that those benefits “appear to be more marginal than many had initially hoped.” While accepting that “elections with RCV are more civil, and less nasty,” they write that “it is unclear whether the system has any impacts on who votes, who runs, or how governing works.” Drutman and Strano found little evidence that ranked choice voting tips elections to more moderate candidates, but some signs that it helps women and minorities. They caution that ranked choice voting may simply be too new for its effects to fully register. Jonathan Rauch, an expert on democracy at the Brookings Institution, is less equivocal about ranked choice voting. “I predict that you will find that in most places it would make a modest difference,” he told me. “I think it’s been way overhyped and you can add as many ‘ways’ there as you’d like.”

And yet … shouldn’t ranked choice voting work, above all in drawing the poison from our elections? Larry Diamond has written that the system could pull American politics out of its “death spiral” by giving candidates incentives to “craft broader appeals.” (Diamond advocates a suite of reforms, including eliminating the Senate filibuster, instituting mandatory national voting, full federal funding of elections, nonpartisan primaries and the like.) That was Peltola’s experience; and she’s not alone. In 2021, the Virginia Republican Party decided to choose its gubernatorial nominee by ranked choice voting rather than by traditional primary. This had the ancillary virtue, at least for moderates, of diminishing the prospects of Amanda Chase, who had defended the Jan. 6 rioters and called herself “Trump in heels.” The election attracted 17 candidates, in part, according to Chris Saxman, a GOP state legislator, because entering was so much cheaper than a traditional primary or convention would have been. Glenn Youngkin, a relatively moderate businessman, emerged victorious and then went on to win the governorship in an upset.

What really mattered, according to Saxman, was that ranked choice voting “toned down the negative attacks.” The effect was that “the party came out much more unified much quicker.” Youngkin had very low unfavorable ratings. Saxman feels certain that he would not have won had the party held a typical primary or convention. And yet, he concedes, his fellow Republicans have no interest in drafting state legislation to institute ranked choice voting. Ranked choice voting, he says, has become a target of “fearmongering by conservatives,” who warn that it will lead to the election of anti-Trump figures like Lisa Murkowski.

Jeanne Massey gets steamed when she hears the academic critique. She knows ranked choice voting works, and she wants those scholars to knock on some doors with her.

“What I want to ask the academic community to do,” she told me, “is to stay the course on strategy because their dream world will never happen without people like us laying the groundwork for ultimately a much better proposal.”

Today ranked choice voting, tomorrow nonpartisan primaries and multi-member districts. Ranked choice voting is, in fact, slowly gathering momentum. Nevada is halfway through the process of approving ranked choice voting through a referendum. Utah, an almost Democrat-free state, has municipal ranked choice voting; last year the state House, but not the state Senate, passed a bill for a statewide system. Half a dozen states are now considering such legislation. On the other hand, the congressional Democratic caucus in Washington voted down the use of ranked choice voting to choose its leadership posts. Dean Phillips, a moderate Democratic congressman from St. Paul and a self-described Massey convert, helped lead the failed effort. “The only thing Democrats and Republicans agree on,” he told me, “is protecting this duopoly.”

Back at the state House hearings, Mary Peltola was followed by a businesswoman who testified that the business community likes ranked choice voting, a young Black man who said that ranked choice voting would elect more people of color and a transgender college student who celebrated the election of the first two Black trans members of the Minneapolis City Council. This might not have reassured Republican members of the committee that ranked choice voting was the politically neutral, good-government reform that FairVote insisted it was.

Then came Minnesota’s secretary of state, Steve Simon. Though a Democrat, Simon had informed Massey in December that he did not think the state’s electoral machinery was prepared to handle ranked choice voting. FairVote had accommodated his concerns by agreeing to include in the bill a task force, with substantial representation from election officials, that would establish rules for the new system. But Simon still wasn’t mollified.

“Minnesota is not yet ready for statewide ranked choice voting,” he testified bluntly. Maine and Alaska, Simon pointed out, had highly centralized electoral systems; Minnesota’s was run at the county level. Changes in “the basic architecture” of the system might be needed. Nor, Simon added, were Minnesota’s other cities ready to adopt ranked choice voting, as the legislation would have allowed them to do; he would like to see the whole thing postponed.

Simon’s language was harsh enough that when it was repeated on the Senate side, state Sen. Kelly Morrison, a co-author of the ranked choice voting bill, noted that she would have appreciated “advance warning” — Minnesotan for “You screwed me over.”

But Massey had known what was coming. When I had arrived in town two days before the hearings, she had told me that she was home “working on an amendment.” Massey hates admitting adverse information and so declined to tell me that the bill was facing real resistance and would likely see changes. In fact, as I learned later, skeptical House Democrats had already insisted on amending the bill in order to incorporate Simon’s concerns. Massey was working on a counter-amendment that Cedrick Frazier, perhaps wisely, decided not to submit.

The original bill created a task force to recommend statewide standards for ranked choice voting so the new system could be used in the 2026 elections. As amended by Democratic state legislators, the task force would be “assessing the adoption and implementation” of ranked choice voting — meaning that it could ultimately reject it entirely. The new language also eliminated starting dates for both statewide and municipal ranked choice voting and included more election administrators and fewer community members on the task force.

This was a bitter pill, if not a catastrophe. Massey insisted that a new amendment to strengthen the bill could still be passed once it had emerged from committee. Forward is her only gear; whenever I pressed Massey on the dicey politics, she deployed either of two favorite expressions: “It’s an ongoing conversation” or “We’re going to get there.” It’s possible that “there” might be a bill, but not nearly the bill the advocates want. Simon’s testimony could chill some of the Democratic fence-sitters; advocates might have to live with the bill as amended. If a stronger bill emerged from one house, wavering Democrats in the other could defect in the reconciliation process.

It’s hard enough to pass political reforms that Republicans believe will help Democrats — which is to say, any and all of them. The odds get even steeper when you propose to change the system under which every legislator, of each party, was elected.

It may very well be, as Maureen Reed told me, that even the beneficiaries of the current system “all say they hate it.” Decent, reasonable legislators of both parties really do hate the violence, physical as well as rhetorical, that has enveloped American politics. They really do fear that our democracy is under threat. But is a system shaped by such perverse incentives capable of reforming itself? We will need many, many Tocquevillian activists to get there.