Henry Redman/States Newsroom
Supporters of ranked choice voting will be kicking off a statewide tour next week to provide further information on the topic in a bid to potentially place the issue before voters in 2026.
Starting Sunday, Rank MI Vote will host 40 town halls in 40 days in cities in metro Detroit, as well as Grand Rapids, Flint, Jackson, Kalamazoo, Lansing, Marquette and Traverse City. Rank MI Vote is a nonprofit modeled after Voters Not Politician, the group that successfully led statewide ballot initiatives introducing Michigan’s independent redistricting commission in 2018 and backed expanded voting rights in 2022.
Under ranked choice voting (RCV), voters rank candidates from first to last. If no candidate receives a majority of first-place votes, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated, and the second-place votes on those ballots are then distributed to the remaining candidates. That process continues until a candidate reaches a majority and is declared the winner. The group says RCV can overcome excessive partisanship and give voters more power in Michigan.
Is ranked-choice voting the next election reform for Michigan?
“One thing ranked choice does is help reduce the extremity in our politics,” said Ron Zimmerman, executive director of Rank MI Vote. “Because it requires a 50% winner, every candidate that runs in a ranked choice election has to appeal to a much broader swath of the community, and not just the two big candidates.”
Zimmerman says increasingly races only have two candidates, most always one from the Democratic Party and the other from the Republican Party.
“You don’t even have a third option, and those options are just getting too extreme,” he said.
Voters in East Lansing, Kalamazoo and Royal Oak approved initiatives last November that had been placed on the ballot by Rank MI Vote, although they can’t take effect unless state law allows for the use of RCV. The same goes for Ann Arbor, which approved a similar measure in 2021, and Ferndale, which did so in 2004.
Kat Bruner James is a former Ferndale City Council member and was a volunteer coordinator for the city’s 2004 effort, which was called instant runoff voting at the time. She told reporters during a Monday online briefing that it was born out of frustration from the 2000 election.
“The election of butterfly ballots and hanging chads among other various frustrations,” she said. “We considered focusing on a variety of different election reforms, and we settled on ranked choice voting. In part, because it’s so intuitive. We do it every day when we make decisions that have multiple options. When ordering at a restaurant, often there are several things on the menu that look pretty good. We might order our favorite, but we have a second choice in mind. Maybe it’s not our favorite, but it’s the next best thing if the waiter tells us that they ran out of our first choice. And this is the essence of how ranked choice voting works.”
Bruner noted that there is momentum building for RCV across the country, and pointed to last week’s introduction in Congress of the Ranked Choice Voting Act by U.S. Reps. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) and Don Beyer (D-Va.).
“If that act passes, it would institute ranked choice voting for all US congressional primaries and general elections starting in 2028,” she said. “Voters in Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon and the District of Columbia will be deciding whether to adopt ranked choice voting this November.”
It already has been implemented in Maine and Alaska, where it will be used in this fall’s presidential election.
RCV does create concerns among some election officials who think it would create delays in posting election results while they determine which candidates failed to reach the 50% threshold and then redistribute those votes accordingly. While the final results would come within the same timeframe, those delays could then contribute to disinformation and voter confusion.
Zimmerman, however, said the purpose of the town hall tour was to help the public understand the process behind RCV and the benefits it would bring.
“We absolutely recognize that going forward now, that we need to have more of a presence in making sure we’re getting accurate information on how ranked choice is getting explained in Michigan,” he said. “A lot of that happens through the media. I think [this press conference] is just the first part of making sure that we generate awareness about what we’re doing.”
Katie Fahey, a founder of Voters Not Politicians, the group that helped lead the 2018 effort to end gerrymandering, said one indication of the current system’s failure are the negative political ads on radio, television and social media.
“You cannot escape them and they are almost all focused on why you should be terrified of the other person winning. Ranked choice voting actually has candidates vying for people’s second choice,” she said. “[It] changes the incentives for how you run a campaign. It makes it more of an option to say, ‘Actually, me and this person running against me agree on this, but here’s why my policy is even better than theirs.’”
Fahey says that through that dynamic, RCV creates new coalitions that find areas of compromise, while focusing campaigns more on substance.
Ultimately, Rank MI Vote wants to pursue a citizen-led ballot initiative of a constitutional amendment in Michigan implementing ranked choice voting, with the town hall tour serving as a necessary first step.
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