Martin Austermuhle / DCist/WAMU
The D.C. Board of Elections on Friday unanimously ruled that a proposed initiative that would ask residents if ranked choice voting and open primaries should be adopted in city elections can be placed on the ballot.
The decision clears a major hurdle for proponents of the initiative, allowing them to move on to the next part of the process: collecting signatures from 5% of registered voters in the city, including 5% from those in five of the city’s eight wards, to actually get the measure on the ballot in 2024. That amounts to more than 26,000 valid signatures.
The initiative — which was first unveiled in May by the Make All Votes Count D.C. campaign — proposed that D.C. adopt partially open primaries in which independent voters would be able to cast ballots in the partisan primary of their choice. (In D.C., primaries are held for Democratic, Republican, and Statehood Green candidates for office, and only voters registered with those parties can participate.)
More notably, the initiative would introduce ranked choice voting starting in 2026. Under that system, voters can rank candidates in order of preference; if no one candidate wins an outright majority, the worst-performing contender is dropped and votes are recalculated using voters’ second choices, and so on until one candidate wins a majority of support.
Proponents argue that ranked-choice voting moves away from the current system where winners in crowded fields can win with a...
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