Voters line up outside of a Takoma Park, Md., polling place. Takoma Park is one of 17 jurisdictions nationally that allow noncitizens to vote in local elections. (Jose Luis Magana/The Associated Press)

Policy, politics and progressive commentary

Preventing people who are not United States citizens from casting a ballot has reemerged as a focal point in the ongoing Republican drive to safeguard “election integrity,” even though noncitizens are rarely involved in voter fraud.

Ahead of November’s presidential election, congressional and state Republican lawmakers are aiming to keep noncitizens away from the polls. They’re using state constitutional amendments and new laws that require citizenship verification to vote. Noncitizens can vote in a handful of local elections in several states, but already are not allowed to vote in statewide or federal elections.

Some Republicans argue that preventing noncitizens from casting ballots — long a boogeyman in conservative politics — reduces the risk of fraud and increases confidence in American democracy. But even some on the right think these efforts are going too far, as they churn up anti-immigration sentiment and unsupported fears of widespread fraud, all to boost turnout among the GOP base.

While Republican congressional leaders want to require documentation proving U.S. citizenship when registering to vote in federal elections, voters in at least four states will decide on ballot measures in November that would amend their state constitutions to clarify that only U.S. citizens can vote in state and local elections.

Over the past six years, Alabama, Colorado, Florida, Louisiana, North Dakota and Ohio have all amended their state constitutions.

In Kentucky — which along with Idaho, Iowa and Wisconsin is now considering a constitutional amendment — noncitizens voting will not be tolerated, said Republican state Sen. Damon Thayer, who voted in February to put the amendment on November’s ballot. Five Democrats between the two chambers backed the Republican-authored legislation, while 16 others dissented.

“There is a lot of concern here about the Biden administration’s open border policies,” Thayer, the majority floor leader, told Stateline. “People see it on the news every day, with groups of illegals pouring through the border. And they’re combined with concerns on election integrity.”

U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson expressed similar concerns last month when he announced new legislation — despite an existing 1996 ban — that would make it illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections. During a trip to Florida to meet with former President Donald Trump, the Louisiana Republican said it’s common sense to require proof of citizenship.

“It could, if there are enough votes, affect the presidential election,” he said, standing in front of Trump in the presumptive presidential nominee’s Mar-a-Lago resort. “We cannot wait for widespread fraud to occur, especially when the threat of fraud is growing with every single illegal immigrant that crosses that border.”

That rhetoric is rooted in a fear about how the U.S. is changing demographically, becoming more diverse as the non-white population increases, said longtime Republican strategist Mike Madrid. Though this political strategy has worked to galvanize support among GOP voters in the past, he questions whether this will be effective politically in the long term.

“There’s no problem being solved here,” said Madrid, whose forthcoming book, “The Latino Century,” outlines the group’s growing voter participation. “This is all politics. It’s all about stoking fears and angering the base.”

Noncitizens are voting in some elections around the country, but not in a way that many might think.

Where noncitizens vote

In 16 cities and towns in California, Maryland and Vermont (along with the District of Columbia), noncitizens are allowed to vote in some local elections, such as for school board or city council. Voters in Santa Ana, California, will decide in November whether to allow noncitizens to vote in citywide elections.

In 2022, New York’s State Supreme Court struck down New York City’s 2021 ordinance that allowed noncitizens to vote in local elections, ruling it violated the state constitution. Proponents have argued that people, regardless of citizenship status, should be able to vote on local issues affecting their children and community.

During the first 150 years of the U.S., 40 states at various times permitted noncitizens to vote in elections. That came to a halt in the 1920s when nativism ramped up and states began making voting a privilege for only U.S. citizens.

The number of noncitizen voters has been relatively small, and those voters are never allowed to participate in statewide or national elections. Local election officials maintain separate voter lists to keep noncitizens out of statewide databases.

In Vermont’s local elections in March, 62 noncitizens voted in Burlington, 13 voted in Montpelier and 11 voted in Winooski, all accounting for a fraction of the total votes.

In Takoma Park, Maryland, of the 347 noncitizens who were registered to vote in 2017, just 72 cast a ballot, according to the latest data provided by the city. And in San Francisco, 36 noncitizens registered to vote in 2020 and 31 voted.

Voter turnout among noncitizens is low for two reasons, said Ron Hayduk, a professor of political science at San Francisco State University, who is one of the leading scholars in this area. Many noncitizens in these jurisdictions do not realize they have the right to vote, and many are afraid of deportation or legal issues, he said.

Registration forms in jurisdictions that allow noncitizens to vote in local elections do acknowledge the risks. In San Francisco, local election officials warn that the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement or other agencies could gain access to the city’s registration lists and advise residents to consult an immigration attorney before registering to vote.

“Immigrants were very excited about this new right to vote, they wanted to vote, but many of them did not ultimately register and vote because they were concerned,” Hayduk said.

While there are some noncitizens participating in a handful of local elections, they’re not participating illegally in any substantial way in state and national elections.

Though there’s room for legitimate debate about whether noncitizens should be allowed to vote at the local level, there is no widespread voter fraud among noncitizens nationally, said Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.

In 2020, federal investigators charged 19 noncitizens for voting in North Carolina elections. A national database run by The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, shows that there have been fewer than 100 cases of voter fraud tied to noncitizens since 2002, according to a recent count by The Washington Post.

Trump continues to falsely assert that he was the rightful winner of the 2020 presidential election and that he had more of the popular vote in 2016. He has claimed without evidence that voter fraud was to blame, including in part from noncitizens.

With illegal immigration near the top of major issues for voters ahead of November, Trump and his movement sense they have momentum with the public to tie immigration concerns with their continued election claims, Olson said.

It’s a way of keeping Democrats on the back foot, by falsely accusing them of allowing immigrants to come into the country illegally so they can vote, he added.

“The imaginings that there is some sort of plot by an entire major political party is just remarkably evidence-free,” he said.

Fighting ‘the left’

Although voter fraud among noncitizens is not happening widely, states should still add protections to their voting systems to prevent that possibility, said Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican.

Raffensperger has been a major proponent of a Peach State law that requires documentation to verify the citizenship status of voters. In 2022, he announced that an internal audit of Georgia’s voter rolls over the past 25 years found that 1,634 noncitizens had attempted to register to vote, but not a single one cast a ballot.

“I will continue to fight the left on this issue so that only American citizens decide American elections,” Raffensperger wrote in a statement to Stateline.

Meanwhile, lawmakers in Missouri, North Carolina, South Carolina and West Virginia are actively considering legislation that would add ballot initiatives for November to prevent noncitizen voting. Those bills are at various points in the legislative process, with many having already passed one chamber.

During a committee hearing last week, Republican Missouri state Sen. Ben Brown said the state’s constitutional language is vague enough to allow cities to let noncitizens vote. While presenting his bill, he cited California’s parallel constitutional wording and how cities such as Oakland and San Francisco allow noncitizens to vote in local elections.

Most state constitutions have similar language around voter eligibility, saying that “every” U.S. citizen that is 18 or over can vote. The proposed amendments usually would change one word, emphasizing that “only” U.S. citizens can vote, eliminating an ambiguity in the text that has left room for cities in several states to allow noncitizen participation in elections.

It’s a “pretty simple” fix, said Jack Tomczak, vice president of outreach for Americans for Citizen Voting, a group that works with state lawmakers to amend their constitutions so that only citizens can vote in state and local elections.

“It does dilute the voice of citizens of this country,” Tomczak said. “And it also dilutes the nature of citizenship.”

This story was originally published in Stateline, which is is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.

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A woman inserts her ballot into a drop box on Nov. 2, 2020, in Salt Lake City. Utah, unlike many Republican-led states, continues to embrace voting by mail and has rejected efforts to limit access. (Photo by Rick Bowmer/The Associated Press)

Policy, politics and progressive commentary

When it comes to voting by mail, Utah is not your typical deep red state.

In 2020, when many states scrambled to implement mail-in voting so voters had a safe way to cast a ballot during the pandemic, Utah already had a system.

Republican conspiracy theories questioning the integrity of voting by mail in the tumultuous aftermath of the 2020 election never rang true for most Utahns. They’d been testing the system for years and found it trustworthy and convenient.

In Utah, that appreciation has stuck in the four years since, despite several legislative attempts by Republicans to curb residents’ access to mail-in ballots.

Again this year, members of the Republican supermajority in Salt Lake City joined Democrats in rejecting attempts to curb the state’s universal vote-by-mail system. The failed bills would have added a new deadline for turning in ballots and required voters to request mail-in ballots rather than having them sent automatically.

There’s a different story playing out nationally. Former President Donald Trump, the presumptive 2024 Republican nominee, has — without evidence — lambasted the voting process as being rife with fraud and has blamed it for rigging elections for his opponents. Republican lawmakers around the country have listened to him.

Republican-led states have restricted access to voting by mail through tighter deadlines, limiting who can request a mail-in ballot and eliminating drop boxes. Utah, though, continues to back its approach to ballot access, as bipartisan opponents turned aside efforts to restrict mail-in voting.

The mistrust of an unfamiliar voting method that dominated other red states’ politics never landed fully in Utah, said TJ Ellerbeck, executive director of the Rural Utah Project, a group that advocates for Native American and rural voters.

“Most average voters in Utah don’t think that there’s anything wrong that needs to be fixed,” Ellerbeck said. “The ideas that are put forth by a handful of legislators in states across the country just really don’t reflect what people actually think about our voting system.”

Some of the Republican lawmakers behind proposed mail-voting restrictions in Utah concede that point, even as they try to navigate the prevailing mood in their party. In order to restore confidence in elections, the argument goes, voting rules must be tightened.

Republican state Rep. Norm Thurston, for example, proposed a measure that would have required that mailed ballots get to county clerks on Election Day, instead of merely being postmarked by Election Day. That would have cut into potential voters’ time to make their decisions and added uncertainty in rural areas with slower mail service.

“In Utah, I don’t know that we have a particular problem,” Thurston said in an interview.

“But one of my concerns is making sure that our voters have confidence that our voting process is not flawed or vulnerable,” he said. “We want people to know our process is solid and that people can have trust in how things are going to turn out.”

In Utah, though, voter confidence is high.

According to a January poll commissioned by the Sutherland Institute, a Utah-based conservative think tank, 76% of likely 2024 voters in the state think the vote-by-mail process produces fair outcomes.

“There’s a political momentum on the Republican side to put more restrictions on it,” said Derek Monson, chief growth officer at the Sutherland Institute. “But it’s up against this experiential reality that people like it, they’re familiar with it, they’re confident in it.”

In the large, rural state, whose southeastern end includes a slice of the Navajo Nation, voting by mail allows remote voters who may be hours from a polling place to conveniently cast their ballots. Even before the pandemic, Utah was one of four states (Colorado, Hawaii and Oregon were the others) where nearly all voters used mail-in ballots, keeping only a handful of vote centers open for people to drop them off in person. Today, Utah is the sole Republican state among the eight states (plus the District of Columbia) that send mail-in ballots to every voter.

“We have a very vibrant voting system in Utah,” said Katharine Biele, president of the League of Women Voters of Utah. “We have been able to prove that we are a model for the nation on mailed ballots.”

So far, Utah has resisted attempts at making major changes to its vote-by-mail system. But voting rights advocates are not breathing easy.

“Utah is not immune,” said Ellerbeck. “It’s a fight we’re winning, but we haven’t won.”

There are some members of the legislature who, like Thurston, want to add limits in the name of improving accuracy and integrity of elections. Utah wouldn’t be alone among states that have tighter rules around voting by mail, even in states led by Democrats.

He got the idea for his legislation, he said, during a National Conference of State Legislatures summit. There, he heard that blue Colorado, which also has a vote-by-mail system, requires that ballots be received by county clerks by 7 p.m. on Election Day.

“We were trying to figure out if there is a way that we can accelerate the finalization of the election with the goal of giving more people confidence that our election processes is safe,” said Thurston, who added that he returns his ballot early through a drop box, not trusting the mail.

Hundreds of supporters of voting by mail showed up at the committee hearing for his bill in January; they argued that a change in long-standing procedure could confuse and potentially disenfranchise voters who have slow mail in rural areas.

After the bill was held in committee by a unanimous vote, including by Thurston, committee leaders didn’t take up another bill that would have limited voting by mail.

Thurston said he understood the concerns local election officials and voters voiced about changing deadlines, acknowledging that it might require a “massive” voter awareness campaign, which could be expensive and difficult.

Similar objections were raised in 2022, when one Republican lawmaker attempted to scrap the state’s vote-by-mail system and return to in-person voting. That bill also failed to advance out of committee, with several Republicans joining Democrats to defeat it.

Voting by mail remains at risk in many other states.

Last month, the Republican-led Arizona House passed a bill that would limit mail-in voting to people with disabilities, military members and older people, with limited exceptions for people temporarily out of the state. The bill is awaiting a committee hearing in the state Senate.

Meanwhile, at least two dozen other states are exploring further limits this year, though few if any have been signed into law. Last year, 14 states enacted 17 restrictive voting laws that included banning ballot drop boxes, requiring more information to receive mail-in ballots and shortening deadlines for turning in absentee ballots, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, a New York-based voting rights advocacy organization.

Even in Utah, new hurdles to voting have emerged in recent years.

In 2022, Republican Gov. Spencer Cox signed into law a measure that requires 24-hour video surveillance of ballot drop boxes. Voting rights advocates opposed the bill, arguing it would limit some locations for drop boxes in heavily rural areas, especially on the Navajo Nation, where there is sporadic electricity, said Ellerbeck, of the Rural Utah Project.

And in Utah County, the second most populous in the state, County Clerk Aaron Davidson, a Republican, decided the county would no longer pay postage for mail-in ballots.

The move aims to encourage voters to use ballot drop boxes, instead of relying on the mail. It will also save the county $110,000 a year, he said. Nineteen Utah counties don’t provide postage for mail-in ballots, Davidson pointed out, while 10 others do, including Salt Lake County, home to more than a third of Utahns.

Davidson made the announcement while speaking in favor of Thurston’s legislation during the committee hearing in January. He told Stateline, though, that he had softened his position on mail-in ballot deadlines after hearing testimony from clerks in smaller, more rural counties who worried delays in the mail could make it harder to make an Election Day deadline.

“Society has just got more complex, and people need that ability to vote by mail,” Davidson said. “But I do believe it needs some more restrictions.”

This article was originally published in Stateline, which like the Nevada Current is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.

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Water levels at major reservoirs such as Lake Mead have rebounded slightly after major storms quenched the parched region. But water experts are calling for long-term solutions to the Colorado River crisis. (Photo: Ethan Miller/Getty Images)

Policy, politics and progressive commentary

Despite a megadrought, states in the West have been able to avoid drastic cuts to their allocations of Colorado River water this year not only because of surprising storms but also thanks to generous financial incentives from all levels of government that have encouraged people to conserve.

The temporary Colorado River water-sharing agreement that Arizona, California and Nevada announced in May depends on an injection of $1.2 billion from the federal government. Some of the 30 tribal nations in the river basin also are getting federal dollars. The Gila River Indian Community, for example, will receive $233 million from the feds over the next three years, mostly to conserve water.

Fueled by the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the feds will spend a total of $15.4 billion for drought resiliency programs over the coming years, mostly for large-scale projects for water storage and recycling but also to persuade people to use less water.

Water experts worry that paying people to conserve isn’t a long-term solution; states must make long-term investments and rethink water-sharing agreements if the Colorado River is to survive, they say.

But in the meantime, the money is helping to sustain the river basin. Conservation spurred by federal dollars has spared the seven Western states whose 40 million residents depend on the Colorado River’s water from painful cuts, said Michael Cohen, a senior researcher at the Pacific Institute, an Oakland, California-based water think tank. (Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming comprise the upper basin, and Arizona, California and Nevada make up the lower basin.)

The federal government has a long history of sending money when disasters such as a hurricane or earthquake hit, Cohen said. The drought is no different.

“It’s hugely important,” Cohen said. “This is an example of the United States actually getting out in front to say let’s try to offset or at least reduce the demand on this very stressed water system.”

For years, some Western states and localities have offered money to farmers to not irrigate their crops and to residents who rip out grass lawns and install water-efficient appliances.

In Arizona, cities such as Gilbert and Scottsdale offer residents up to $800 and $5,000, respectively, to tear out their grass lawns. Peoria and Surprise will pay residents hundreds of dollars to encourage them to plant native desert plants and shrubs in their yards instead of grass.

For the past 20 years, Las Vegas has offered rebates for residents to tear out their grass lawns and replace them with plants more appropriate for a desert climate. The effect has been staggering.

In 2002, the city used more than 300,000 acre-feet of water annually. (An acre-foot is a common measurement in the water industry that amounts to 326,000 gallons.) This year, it will use less than 200,000, in large part due to the incentives, said Cohen, at the Pacific Institute.

“Incentivizing people has worked,” he said. “But the bigger question is whether we’re going to get to the level of reductions necessary to stabilize the system. And that remains to be seen.”

Upcoming negotiations

The Bureau of Reclamation, the federal agency that manages the Colorado River basin, is asking states for long-term proposals to conserve water to prepare for a drier future exacerbated by climate change.

The agency went to states last year and laid out two options to protect the Colorado River from the effects of a two-decade megadrought that is worse than anything the region has seen in 1,200 years: Either they voluntarily reduce water use and get compensated, or the feds would force those cuts by fiat.

Under the agreement announced in May, Arizona, California and Nevada — the lower basin states — will reduce their water use by 3 million acre-feet over the next three years. The region avoided disaster this year because of an especially wet winter and recent summer storms that swept through the Southwest. But the deal was easier for those states to make because of federal money.

That was just a short-term fix, said George Frisvold, a professor of agricultural economic policy at the University of Arizona.

“They’re treading water, pardon the pun,” he said. “It’s going to be challenging.”

The region’s broader conservation strategy might change, however. In the years to come, there will be more scrutiny over what the feds got from those billions spent, Frisvold said. Money to encourage conservation may start coming more from localities than from the federal government, he added.

States are preparing for negotiations on a long-term Colorado River water-sharing agreement that would kick in after 2026. A crucial challenge: what role agriculture will play in conserving Colorado River water.

Money for agriculture

Western agriculture, a major part of the region’s economy and a key contributor to the country’s food supply, consumes more Colorado River water than any other user.

To conserve more water, farmers have used federal and local dollars to line canals, install drip irrigation systems and fallow fields to temporarily halt crop growth on sections of their land.

Farming is getting more efficient in the West partly through financial incentives, said Mike Wade, executive director of the California Farm Water Coalition, a Sacramento-based nonprofit that represents agricultural interests.

He pointed to California’s Imperial Valley, where Southern California’s urban water users have for the past two decades paid inland farmers to transfer a half-million acre-feet of their share of Colorado River water to cities.

“It’s a win-win situation,” he said. “It’s not taking people out of business. It’s covering the costs of business temporarily interrupted to achieve conservation savings in the Colorado River.”

Wade calls it a model for other Colorado River states, a way to prevent mandatory cuts that might threaten peoples’ livelihoods and instead invest in communities and businesses. In the long term, however, he said that these investments must come from local governments.

But there is disagreement over whether paying farmers is the right path forward.

It is not a sustainable solution, said Mark Gold, director of water scarcity solutions at the Natural Resources Defense Council. The payments are just getting the Colorado River basin through 2026, when states must negotiate new terms for sharing the water.

“There needs to be a very different mindset,” he said. “Paying farmers not to farm is just not an efficient nor sustainable way to save 2 [million] to 4 million acre-feet of water a year.”

This past wet winter bought a two-year reprieve on having to make difficult decisions, he said.

Moving forward, the region needs to get beyond short-term incentives, said Katherine Wright, a research fellow at the Property and Environment Research Center, a conservation nonprofit that emphasizes market-based solutions. Inflation Reduction Act money will run out eventually, but the underlying problem is not going away, she said.

As the population continues to grow in cities in the Southwest, Wright sees a long-term solution in private transactions between, for example, farmers and cities to transfer water allocations without federal money.

“We need to do something in the short term, because cities need water and they don’t have water, and it’s unrealistic that we’re going to change a policy today,” she said. “More broadly, it’s a call for facilitating conversations between farmers and tribes and cities. What can we do in the long term to address water scarcity?”

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Voters in Nevada will consider a similar ballot question in 2024. Several top Democratic officials in the state oppose it. (Photo: Jeniffer Solis/Nevada Current)

Policy, politics and progressive commentary

Over the past decade, ranked choice voting has become increasingly popular. From conservative Utah to liberal New York City, 13 million American voters in 51 jurisdictions — including all of Alaska and Maine — now use the system, under which voters rank candidates based on preference, leading to an instant runoff in a crowded race.

This year, Democrats and Republicans in power pushed back.

Arguing that ranked choice voting is too complicated for voters to understand, Democrats in the District of Columbia and Republicans in states such as Idaho, Montana and South Dakota took steps to prevent adoption of the voting system.

Earlier this month, the D.C. Democratic Party filed a lawsuit to block a ballot initiative that would adopt ranked choice voting and allow voters without a party affiliation to cast ballots in primaries. The lawsuit argued in part that ranked choice voting might confuse voters, which “could ultimately suppress the voice and influence of voters of color for decades to come.”

If ranked choice voting survives the lawsuit, voters will consider the measure next year. Two of D.C.’s neighbors — Takoma Park, Maryland, and Arlington, Virginia — have used the voting system. A November hearing has been scheduled.

Voters in Nevada will consider a similar ballot question in 2024. Several top Democratic officials in the state oppose it.

In April, Montana Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte signed into law a measure that preemptively bans localities from adopting ranked choice voting.

It’s a “complicated process,” Montana Republican state Rep. Lyn Hellegaard said in a state Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in March. Hellegaard, who sponsored the bill, argued that the voting system could delay vote counting by weeks because of the state’s large size.

“It throws voters into a game of odds, rather than informed choice,” she said at the hearing. “This scheme of voting would only solidify the distrust Montanans have in our elections.”

Republican lawmakers in Idaho and South Dakota enacted similar measures this year; Florida and Tennessee banned ranked choice voting last year. Republican-led legislatures approved proposals to ban it in Arizona and North Dakota, but the bills were vetoed by, respectively, Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs and Republican Gov. Doug Burgum.

Understanding the opposition

In ranked choice voting, voters rank candidates for an office from first to last. If no candidate receives a majority of first-place votes, the candidate with the least support is eliminated, and the second-place votes on those ballots are distributed to the remaining candidates.

The process continues until one candidate reaches a majority.

Proponents of the system argue it encourages candidates to appeal to a broad swath of the electorate, while also leading to a more diverse candidate pool and less negative campaigning.

But the challenge to the status quo has led to opposition from people in power, said Deb Otis, director of research and policy at FairVote, a nonpartisan organization leading the advocacy effort to adopt ranked choice voting.

“Sometimes, when we see party opposition, that can be a reflection of elected officials who know how to campaign, know how to win under the old system, not quite ready to want to throw that system out yet,” she said in an interview.

Republican opposition to the system revved up after the 2022 midterm elections, when former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin lost her congressional bid, blaming her loss on ranked choice voting. Voters in the state had adopted the method in 2020 through a ballot initiative.

Democrat Mary Peltola had plurality support after the first round of voting and eventually won after several rounds of tabulation.

“Ranked choice voting is the weirdest, most convoluted and most complicated voter suppression tool that Alaskans could have come up with,” Palin said in November, according to the Anchorage Daily News. “And the point is, we didn’t come up with this. We were sold a bill of goods.”

Former President Donald Trump, whose lies about the 2020 election continue to influence the GOP, has railed against ranked choice voting in Alaska.

“You never know who won in ranked choice. You could be in third place, and they announce that you won the election,” Trump claimed at an Anchorage rally last summer. “It’s a total rigged deal. Just like a lot of other things in this country.”

But there is nothing for conservatives to fear about ranked choice voting, said Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.

It’s not a ploy by Democrats, he said, contrary to what he’s heard from Republicans. The Virginia GOP even used ranked choice voting in 2021 to nominate now-Gov. Glenn Youngkin, he pointed out in an April column.

“If you look at the history and how it’s worked, you realize that it’s neutral between sides of the spectrum,” he told Stateline. “Finding a party candidate who better represents a wide range of voters in that party is good for whatever party adopts it.”

Still, he added, it might be hard to shake some of this conservative opposition, which he said has become more vocal and organized in recent years.

In Idaho, activists are gathering signatures for a ballot initiative that, if approved by voters, would adopt ranked choice voting statewide. Republican Attorney General Raúl Labrador, whose office is tasked with writing the titles of ballot initiatives, was ordered by the Idaho Supreme Court this year to re-write one that portrayed the idea negatively.

Labrador hasn’t been shy about his disdain for ranked choice voting.

“Let’s defeat these bad ideas coming from liberal outside groups,” he tweeted in May.

What’s next?

Despite this opposition, several other states are poised to adopt ranked choice voting in the coming years, said FairVote’s Otis, who argued it is “the fastest growing election reform in the country,” and could be used by Republicans in some states in next year’s presidential primaries.

Indeed, there were far more bills in state legislatures this year that supported ranked choice voting (74) than opposed it (17), with a handful of bills that would amend existing laws or commissioning studies of the voting system, according to Ballotpedia. There also was a substantial increase in the number of bills, rising from 44 bills in 2022 to 106 this year.

Ranked choice voting also was expanded in Burlington, Vermont, and adopted in Redondo Beach, California, this year.

Voters in Oregon will decide in November 2024 whether to adopt ranked choice voting. The measure was placed on the ballot by the state legislature — the first time this has happened in the country.

The ballot question is the culmination of a multiyear effort with a diverse coalition of voters of color, labor unions, youth groups and agricultural organizations, said Mike Alfoni, executive director for Oregon Ranked Choice Voting, which is leading the ballot initiative campaign.

“It isn’t this frightening overhaul of the system that would disrupt everything that is going on,” he said. “It’s simply an upgrade that gives voters more choice and has better outcomes, especially with open seat races.”

All but two Republicans opposed the measure in the legislature, which Alfoni blamed on the deep partisan divisions of Oregon politics. If approved, the state would implement the system by 2028.

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