( NewsNation ) — At the start of the year, less than a third of Americans were satisfied with the way democracy was working in the U.S., and several states will be considering changing their electoral systems in November.
Ranked choice voting (RCV) — which allows voters to rank candidates by preference on their ballots — has emerged as a popular reform, and multiple states, including Colorado, Oregon and Nevada, have measures on the November ballot that, if passed, would establish statewide ranked choice voting.
At present, Alaska and Maine are the only states to use ranked choice voting for statewide elections, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) . However, it’s more common at the local level. As of the 2022 elections, it had been adopted in 62 jurisdictions, including San Francisco and New York City, according to the Ranked Choice Voting Resource Center (RCVRC) .
“That’s pretty common for electoral reforms,” said Ryan Kirby, director of policy at the RCVRC. “America is this laboratory of democracy, so we usually start things, and they build up.”