Petitioners Seek to Have Ranked Choice Voting Put on Royal Oak Ballot
(Mary Dupuis, June 26, 2023)
Royal Oak, MI – Voters in Royal Oak are being asked to sign a petition to bring Ranked Choice Voting to local elections.
Rank MI Vote is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization advocating for the implementation of Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) on ballots in Michigan.
According to its website, RCV is the key to ensuring candidates with “the best ideas, not the biggest bank accounts” have a fair shot at running in and winning an election.
On most ballots today, voters are instructed to choose one candidate for each position offered.
Advocates for RCV believe the “pick-one” plurality election system can instill voters with a fear of “wasting their vote” if they choose their actual favorite candidate instead of supporting a front-runner or a candidate from the two major parties.
They believe this makes the election process toxic by forcing candidates to beat down their opponents and exaggerate their differences, thus missing opportunities to reinforce where they’re similar.
With RCV, voters are given the opportunity to rank candidates on the ballot in the order of their preference (their first choice, second choice, third choice, etc).
In order for a candidate to win an election using RCV, ballots are counted in “instant runoff rounds.” This means that the candidates who received the fewest top-choice votes are eliminated and their supporters’ ballots are counted towards the next candidate indicated on each.
This process would then repeat until one candidate had the support of more than half of the voters. Since this is the case, candidates are driven to work hard to earn their opponents’ supporters’ second and third choices on the ballot.
Executive Director of Rank MI Vote, Ron Zimmerman, said RCV is meant to encourage candidates to find a common ground on issues rather than resort to mudslinging and other processes that could ostracize voters.
“When you just add that secret sauce, that sort of incentive to say, ‘Every candidate knows when they run in this race, they have to get 50% to win,’ they all are incentivized to run differently,” Zimmerman said. “They have to appeal to a much broader swath of the community, or the electorate, if it’s a statewide or federal position.”
RCV is also meant to strengthen the voting power of like-minded voters, as their votes will no longer be divided between multiple similar candidates.
In normal elections, some candidates can be pressured to drop out or be shamed as a “spoiler” for splitting the votes. According to a study linked on the organization’s website, RCV can help to solve this issue.
FairVote, a nonprofit organization advocating for RCV, conducted a study on four Bay Area cities with RCV ballots. It was found that women and people of color were running and winning office more often than in cities without RCV.
Currently, Rank MI Vote is leading campaigns in Royal Oak, Grand Rapids, Lansing/East Lansing and Kalamazoo. RCV has been passed in Ferndale and Ann Arbor, but is not implemented yet because the State of Michigan has not passed procedures. In Eastpointe voters do have RCV in place due to a Department of Justice consent decree.
Rank MI Vote’s efforts in Royal Oak are led with the goal of gathering enough signatures to enact the RCV method on ballots once the RCV election process is certified by the Michigan Bureau of Elections.
Canvassing began in April and will continue through the end of June 2023, with hopes of getting an initiative on the ballot in November.
“It’s going very well in Royal Oak,” Zimmerman said. “…We’ve always had sort of a concentration of supporters that are on our newsletter and follow us on social media that are from Oakland, especially in and around Ferndale and Royal Oak and Oak Park.”
Zimmerman said what made this year of canvassing different from those in the past was that they had a very experienced group of canvassers that were able to join the Royal Oak canvassers to show them how to best deliver a pitch and explain RCV.
He said they’re currently well over halfway to the 2,544 signatures needed for the campaign by July 24 to give the clerk enough time to verify them all. However, they hope to have all of them by the end of June.
“We’re looking to submit over 2,800 good ones, at a minimum, to make sure we have enough buffer and things like that,” Zimmerman said.
He emphasized the importance of community members knowing the organization is staunchly nonpartisan, looking to reform the system itself instead of dictate beliefs.
“We all are coming from different points,” Zimmerman said. “We don’t talk about politics a whole lot. But we do talk about how can we keep reforming the system so we can help reduce the amount of corruption.”
Those interested in signing the petition can find Rank MI Vote at the Royal Oak Farmers Market on Saturday mornings from 8 a.m. to 12 p.m.
They can also visit the Royal Oak campaign page on Rank MI Vote’s website and submit their name and address through an email link. From there, canvassers will come right to their door with the petition to sign.
As time goes on, Zimmerman said Rank MI Vote hopes to get RCV on ballots across the entire state.
“We’re getting this momentum going, because our goal is to go statewide by 2026,” Zimmerman said. So we’re trying to pass 10 or 12 cities, so that in 2026, we can go statewide.”
Learn more about Rank MI Vote at https://rankmivote.org/royal-oak/
See previous Oakland County Times coverage of RCV (also known as Instant Runoff Voting) at https://oaklandcounty115.com/?s=ranked+choice+voting.
