Democratic activists are looking to overhaul the party’s presidential primary process with ranked-choice voting.
Proponents of the idea have privately met with Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin and other leading party officials who want to see ranked-choice voting in action for 2028. Those behind the push include Representative Jamie Raskin, the nonprofit Fairvote Action, and Joe Biden pollster Celinda Lake.
Axios reports that ranked-choice supporters told a DNC breakfast meeting in D.C. that they believe it would unify and strengthen the party, prevent votes from being “wasted” after candidates withdraw, and encourage candidates to build coalitions. The publication quotes DNC members as being divided on the issue, with some being open and others thinking that it is best left to state parties.
The first step to get the voting fixed shouldn’t be ranked voting. It should be getting rid of winner takes it all. If a party gets 40% of the votes, and there are 10 representatives, it should get 4 of them, not 0.
What would happens is Dem states will do proportional allocation, republican states would stick with winner take all, and you end up with a permanent republican presidency.
States run elections, states also get to decide how to allocate their electors.
Anything short of a constitutional amendment will not work.
This is talking about the Democratic Primary. What you’re saying is definitely true if we were changing the allocation of Electoral College votes for the general election – for that, we need Congress to pass an Amendment (or maybe a regular law would suffice?)
Amendment. Or as the other comment alluded to, interstate compact: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact
That probably requires congrsssional approval. And even then, that last until the supreme court strikes it down. Or even if it doesn’t gwt struck down, its unclear if the next congress have the ability to revoke the previous session of congress’s approval of the interstate compact.
So many shenanigans.
You can solve that with state compacts which go into force when you hit a threshold where that’s not a risk
the electoral college experiment should be abandoned. It clearly didn’t serve the function it was intended to serve when it was implemented 200 years ago.
It actually largely has. It both reduced the numbers of people who needed to ride horses around to figure out the winner, and it helped keep power consolidated with the powerful.
A good chunk of our early democratic institutions were designed with a lot of influence by people who didn’t entirely trust their constituency and wanted to keep things from being too democratic. So you have several options for elected officials to disregard voters in most matters, and the president has the power to say “nah” to legislation.
Okay, but the entire idea was to allow the electors to basically go against the will of the people, if the people are a bunch of idiots and elect a despot wannabe. And when a despot wannabe actually got elected, the electors didn’t go against the idiot electorate.
Now all electors are party loyalists chosen by their party, nobody aint doing any faithless defection.