PROVIDENCE — Is it time for electoral reform in Rhode Island?
A special Senate commission that has been studying non-plurality voting methods and run-off elections is set to unveil its final report at a 2 p.m. meeting, but it doesn’t appear that a clear consensus was reached on how to move forward.
The commission was tasked with exploring different voting options from the state’s current system, which allows the candidate who receives the most votes to win their party primary or the general election, even if they don’t receive the majority of total votes in the race.
The idea is that we are occasionally electing people who don’t come close to earning more than 50 percent of the overall vote, like Lincoln Chafee’s gubernatorial election in 2010 (36.1 percent) or Gina Raimondo’s in 2014 (40.7 percent).
With Republicans increasingly struggling to gain traction in statewide races, Democratic primaries are often considered more competitive than general elections. But those races are often settled with lower voter turnout, and with the winner getting far less than 50 percent of the vote (current Governor Dan McKee won the Democratic primary last year with 32.8 percent of the vote before breezing to victory in the general election).
The senate commission looked at a handful of alternatives:
⚓ Ranked-choice, which is used in three states (Maine, Hawaii, and Alaska) and allows voters to rank candidates in order of their preference. The candidate with the fewest No. 1 votes is eliminated, and that process continues until someone earns a majority of votes.
⚓ Top two open primary, which allows all candidates to appear on the same primary ballot (regardless of political party), with the top two advancing. In theory, that could have given us a McKee vs. Helena Foulkes general election matchup last year. California and Washington use this method.
⚓ Run-off elections, which allow a second election to occur if no candidate receives more than 50 percent of the vote. This is the method we’ve seen used in Georgia in recent US Senate elections.
⚓ Approval voting, which allows voters to vote for any number of candidates they find acceptable. The candidate with the most votes wins. No state has implemented this measure, but St. Louis, Missouri, uses it.
Stepping back: It doesn’t appear 2024 will be the year for election reform in Rhode Island. Neither House Speaker Joseph Shekarchi nor Senate President Dominick Ruggerio mentioned it in multiple interviews with different news outlets in the last week.
The commission did float an interesting idea of having the Rhode Island Foundation (or another independent organization) survey Rhode Islanders about their voting preferences.
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