Reform Milestones with FairVote’s Rob Richie: Ranked Choice Voting’s First Three Decades

The Purple Principle

“It’s a thrilling year. It’s a tense year. I am a believer that this is a marathon,” says Rob Richie, Co-Founder and longtime Director of FairVote, the nation’s foremost catalyst for ranked choice voting elections. “There's moments of excitement– of cresting hills, of victories and sometimes defeats.”

In this Purple Principle episode, Richie recounts the highs and lows throughout the steady progression of ranked choice voting in US elections since co-founding FairVote three decades ago. For example, the successful implementation of RCV elections in Portland paved the way for the nation’s first statewide ballot passage by Maine voters in 2016. That was followed by Alaska as part of Top Four voting reforms in 2020.

“Alaska and Maine, interestingly, those two states are ones where independents have done particularly well,” says Richie. “We've had governors be elected in both states as independents, and they're states that were always on the reform radar.”

In 2024, ranked choice voting has moved off the radar and onto ballots in multiple states– as a stand alone reform in Oregon and as part of Top Four or Five election reforms in Nevada, Colorado and Idaho. In the same period, though, nearly a dozen GOP dominated state legislatures have outlawed RCV.

Does that make it critical for RCV to pass in multiple states this election year? Richie, now a Senior Advisor to Fairvote, thinks RCV has a logic and a momentum all its own aside from election results.

“Younger Americans, 50% of them do not identify with the major parties at this point,” says Richie. “So we’re going to get away from two choice politics and Ranked Choice Voting will be part of that. But whether it happens doesn't depend on November.”

Tune in to learn more about the first thirty years of RCV in the USA, from college campuses to city, town and county elections, and now to multiple state ballots in the same election cycle. And check out Fairvote.org for much more info on RCV.

The Purple Principle is a Fluent Knowledge production; original music by Ryan Adair Rooney.