Nick Troiano

Ranked choice voting is used in other circumstances.

And in our view, it's most powerful when it's combined with a reform to the primary system.

So Alaska's reform is a top four primary reform plus ranked choice voting in the general election.

And other places like New York City or Maine are what we would think of as partial reforms because they only have ranked choice voting and they don't really have any other kinds of reforms to the primary system that could improve governing incentives by widening the electorate.

Well, there's two parts to the ranked choice voting process.

There's the part where voters show up to the voting booth or get their ballot in the mail and they fill out their ballot.

And that part is simple, which is you have the option of ranking your candidates or you can just vote for your favorite.

And in all of our exit polling, we found that 80 plus percent of voters say that they find this simple to do.

And that number goes up over time as people get used to it.

The second part is how the votes are tabulated.

And that is done by election administrators.

They have a range of options for how they do it.

And some jurisdictions in the country, particularly those that have been using it for a decade or more, have found ways that

This can be an instantaneous process, and it can be fully transparent, which is to say they release the cast vote records so that there is a way that anyone can audit the results.

There is a way to make sure that there's results delivered on election night, and there's ways of displaying the results that make it intuitive for people to understand exactly what happens at each round of the tabulation.

The charge sometimes that it's a complicated or confusing system is really used by opponents to say, let's not change the way that the elections are currently working because the current way works for them.

It works for the two major parties.

It works for the incumbent politicians.

They're afraid of change.

You know, election reforms like the ones we champion have been used successfully in America and abroad for many years, and it's a necessary part of what it's going to take to foster a more functional and representative government.