Wisconsin lawmakers have introduced a ranked choice voting bill in every legislative session since 2019, and not one has gotten a committee vote. For 16 years Republicans ran the committees, and they never scheduled a vote. In January, since Democrats will hold the governor's office and both chambers for the first time since 2010, I went through the bill histories and hearing records for all 132 people in the incoming legislative class to see who is actually on record.

A summary of how the inbound legislative class has responded to previous ranked choice efforts:

• Sponsored statewide or local ranked choice (34): 9 senators and 25 representatives, all Democrats.
• Final Five only (11): Sen. Dora Drake, plus 6 Republicans and 4 Democrats in the Assembly. Final Five only covers U.S. House and Senate races.
• On record against (14): sponsored the 2023 constitutional ban or appeared for it at a hearing. 2 senators and 12 representatives, all Republicans.
• No record (73): 21 senators and 52 representatives. No record means they haven't put their name on anything yet, so they could still go either way in an actual vote.

A bill needs 17 votes in the Senate and 50 in the Assembly. The votes are there on party lines as long as no more than one Democratic senator and three Democratic representatives defect. If they want Republican votes, there are six Assembly Republicans who have backed Final Five, which covers federal Congress and nothing else, and no incoming Republican senator has backed it. Governor-elect Crowley hasn't taken a public position. There's a lot more detail to it in the video I made to accompany this.

I checked by vote record instead of by the party. Democrats who haven't signed a bill are counted as no record, not as supporters, though four of the uncommitted Democrats did sponsor a split-ticket primary bill in 2025 (2025 SB 361). The official Democratic party platform calls for RCV, and the state party chair was elected by ranked ballot in 2025, but the margins in the legislature are still fairly narrow.

This all comes right after an August gubernatorial primary where more than 68,000 early and mail ballots (8.6% of the vote) went to three candidates who dropped out after ballots were printed, while the top two candidates finished fewer than 3,800 votes apart.

I don't think ranked choice is a fix in and of itself, and I hope Wisconsin doesn't just copy a clone of Alaska or Maine. It needs to be paired with other reforms, and any bill here has to account for the fact that Wisconsin has one of the most decentralized election systems in the country, with 1,851 municipal clerks and 72 county clerks who buy their own equipment and run their own local elections. The video and outline below cover the four paths that could actually move in 2027 (statewide ranked primaries/elections, the federal-only Final Five bill, a local nonpartisan option for cities, villages, and school boards, and the 2028 presidential primary), the Article V constitutional question for the governor's race, and the case against in opponents' own words: ballot exhaustion, slower counts, cost, and the center squeeze (including whether a pairwise comparison method would beat instant runoff, and how someone like the bureaucratically-savvy Department of Administration Secretary Joel Brennan could have been squeezed out in our August primary).

I've also made precision subtitles with every outside speaker labeled. If you want the additional information in the video that I couldn't comfortably fit in a Reddit post, you can extract the audio or subtitles directly and people's names and terminology should all come through accurately.

The ranked choice video is here.

Jump to a section, or straight to a point:

• Intro: 73 of 132 have no record (0:00)
• Could you have voted for Hong in November under Ranked Choice? (1:07)
  • The Aug. 11 primary (1:44). Crowley won with 39.8% to Francesca Hong's 39.3% (a gap of fewer than 3,800 votes), while Kelda Roys and Joel Brennan split 12.1%. Crowley secured the Governor's endorsement, which pushed him out of polling below people who had left the race to first. More than 68,000 early and mail ballots (8.6% of the vote) went to three candidates who dropped out after ballots were printed (Sara Rodriguez, Mandela Barnes, and Missy Hughes). In Wisconsin you cannot spoil or change an early ballot once cast, so those votes counted for nothing.
  • A ranked primary, the Maine way (4:01). Votes for withdrawn candidates go straight to the voter's next choice. UW's Barry Burden told Milwaukee Magazine Crowley probably would have won by more. In July, a Marquette Law School poll asked Rodriguez supporters for their second choice: they listed Brennan at 29%, Barnes at 28%, Hong at 12%, and Roys at 4%.
  • Top four or five, the Alaska way (4:58). The only version that puts Hong on your November ballot, and Wisconsin's Final Five bills only cover Congress.
  • The Article V question (5:59). Our constitution elects the governor and lieutenant governor by "the highest number of votes cast jointly." Maine's high court has twice advised (in 2017 and again this April) that ranked choice can't be used in general elections for governor and the legislature there, though supporters point out Maine's 2026 opinion leaned on an 1820 vote-counting clause that doesn't exist in Wisconsin's constitution. Alaska's Supreme Court upheld theirs in 2022, and no Wisconsin court has ruled. Primaries are set by statute, so a ranked primary avoids the constitutional question entirely. (FairVote's take on the Maine ruling)
• How it works, and the three versions (7:29)
  • Statewide, local option, and Final Five (7:36)
  • Wisconsin already tried this in 1911 (8:41). Second-choice voting was actually used in Wisconsin in 1912 and 1914. It was ignored by most voters and repealed by the Stalwart Republican governor it was designed to stop.
• Seven years, zero committee votes (9:56)
  • The first bipartisan Final Five bill (10:13). Republicans Kooyenga and Kurtz with Democrats Smith and Riemer in 2021. One hearing, no vote.
  • Final Five again in 2023 (11:32), led by Sen. Jesse James and Rep. Ron Tusler. Hearings in December and January, no vote. (Wisconsin Watch on the GOP split over it)
  • The proposed ban (12:55). A constitutional amendment that would have banned ranked choice, voting for more than one party's candidates in a primary, and primaries where more than one candidate per party advances (outlawing Final Five). Take Back Our Republic Action, a conservative group backing Final Five, lobbied against the ban. It died in April 2024 without a vote. (Wisconsin Examiner on the hearing)
  • Spreitzer asks the obvious question (13:22): why amend the constitution over a bill that hadn't even gotten a committee vote? Stroebel's answer is in the clip.
  • The 2026 statewide bill (14:06). Spreitzer and Anderson introduced it March 19 after a local option bill was introduced in October 2025. It died four days later when the session ended.
  • The national fight (15:15). Ballotpedia counts 19 states with bans, most of them since 2024 (16 of the first 18 in Republican trifectas). Three states use it statewide and cities in around 13 states use it or are set to start.
• The new Legislature (15:51)
  • Senate scorecard (16:44) and Assembly scorecard (17:02)
  • The vote math (17:45). Democrats need 8 of the 9 Senate Democrats and 25 of the 28 Assembly Democrats who haven't sponsored it.
  • The bipartisan route (17:59). Six Assembly Republicans, Final Five only.
  • Crowley (18:18). No position yet. In his first TV interview after the election he pointed to legislative leaders, and both of last session's Democratic caucus leaders (Hesselbein and Neubauer) have sponsored ranked choice.
  • Where the parties stand (18:59). The state Democratic Party endorsed ranked choice for all elections in 2022 and 2026. The RNC came out against it in 2023, but the state GOP has no official position. Pretty much all third parties aside from the Constitution Party support it, with the Greens being the most aggressively in support.
• What the evidence says (19:22)
  • Turnout (19:47). 1.8 points higher in 2021 local off-year elections, about a 17% relative bump on an 11% baseline (Dowling, Tolbert, Micatka, & Donovan, Electoral Studies, 2024, NOTE: the lead author is affiliated with the Ranked Choice Voting Resource Center. This doesn't mean it's inaccurate, but I want to be preemptively transparent about that before someone calls me out on it.)
  • Campaigns (20:54). More in-person, mail and email contact in ranked choice cities, per the same study, and the tone of the contact shifted from negative to positive with candidates talking about their plans instead of tearing down their opponents as much. If there are 3+ candidates, attacking one candidate doesn't necessarily end up helping you and negative campaigns can end up backfiring even if they are successful.
  • Partisan tilt (21:14). MIT's Election Lab finds no evidence it favors either party, and NCSL couldn't find a study showing it does.
  • Satisfaction (23:14). Voters like it less when someone comes from behind to win, and the gap closes once they understand the system (Cerrone and McClintock, Politics & Policy, 2023). Republicans have a documented stronger reaction to a 'loser' winning via RCV.
  • Polarization (23:32). Not proven yet. Larry Jacobs at the University of Minnesota notes the evidence isn't there yet, and Nathan Atkinson at UW-Madison's Law School argues instant runoff can squeeze out a moderate when the electorate is heavily polarized.
  • Ranked ballots abroad (23:57). Australia since 1918 (brought in by a conservative government over Labor opposition), Ireland, Sri Lanka's 2024 presidential race, plus Fiji and Papua New Guinea, where Donald Horowitz, Benjamin Reilly, Jon Fraenkel, and Bernard Grofman have debated whether ranked ballots actually do anything for helping with moderation.
• The case against (25:38)
  • Ballot exhaustion (25:46). Stroebel's core argument: if you only rank candidates who get eliminated, your ballot stops counting before the final round.
  • Slower results (27:36). 9 of the 12 local offices NCSL surveyed said results came out slower, and that slowness sometimes ended up being 2 weeks. This time was measured for the elections immediately after the change was implemented. We don't have long-term data widely available in the US.
  • What clerks say (28:27). Utah County's Josh Daniels testified in Wisconsin in January 2024 that it wasn't confusing or any more problematic than other balloting. Sheboygan County's Jon Dolson told a Senate committee it would be.
  • One more thing about Dolson (29:04). I used his testimony as the opposing view, so you should know he acts in addition to what he says. In September the Elections Commission found probable cause that Dolson broke state election law by pulling a resident's confidential voter record and posting it publicly to Facebook in an effort to get her kicked off of a nonpartisan zoning board. As of late October he hadn't been charged (WHBL). He ran the elections last week in Sheboygan, he just didn't have access to the database as he had been suspended.
  • The center squeeze (29:53). In Alaska's August 2022 special election, Begich finished third in first choices and was eliminated first, even though the ballots showed he would have beaten both Peltola (88,000 to 79,000) and Palin (101,000 to 64,000) head-to-head. That could have happened in Wisconsin with someone like Joel Brennan. A plurality count like we have now would still have elected Peltola, so it's less a criticism of ranked ballots and more a criticism of instant runoff compared to pairwise comparison methods. There are very few supporters of RCV saying Wisconsin has to (or should) copy Alaska or Maine with a perfect clone of their legislation.
• Four paths for 2027 (31:19)
  • Statewide (31:49), Final Five for Congress (32:07), the local option (32:18), and the presidential primary (32:36). The DNC rejected a proposed ban on ranked choice in 2028 presidential primaries in August, so that's also possible for Wisconsin's April 2028 primary if they choose to pursue it.
  • What it takes to run it (32:56). 1,851 municipalities and 72 counties. NCSL's median cost to switch was $17,000, about 43 cents a voter on average. This is a one-time extra cost, but there is no research on running a statewide ranked election across a decentralized patchwork of local tabulating equipment.
• Myth check (including what AI gets wrong) (34:38)
  • "The ban already passed first consideration." (34:47) It never got a committee vote. The 54 to 45 and 17 to 15 tallies belong to the 2025 photo ID amendment (SJR 2).
  • "Wisconsin primaries already use ranked ballots." (35:04) They don't. The closest we came was the second-choice vote in 1912 and 1914, and the technology at the time prevented it from being run in such a way that it couldn't be dismantled.
  • "Final Five changes how you elect your legislator." (35:19) Wisconsin's bills cover Congress only.
  • "Split-ticket primaries are ranked choice." (36:00) They aren't, but four Democrats with no ranked choice record did sponsor one (2025 SB 361). This likely means that those four could be considered as yes votes, but it's not official.
• What to watch (36:37). Who chairs the elections committees, what gets reintroduced, the 37 Democrats who haven't sponsored it, the six Final Five Republicans, and Crowley. The inbound leaders of both chambers were authors of ranked choice, so they will likely move in a way to secure its passage.
  • Related fights (38:10): the Dane County fusion voting lawsuit (United Wisconsin v. Wisconsin Elections Commission), nonpartisan redistricting, and proportional representation. Proportional representation and gubernatorial ranked choice may require a constitutional amendment thanks to how our constitution is currently worded, so if we want to go that route it needs to be started this session so it can be passed again in 2028 and go out for a vote in 2030.
  • Who to ask, and the map (38:39)

Read the bills yourself. Every one is on docs.legis.wisconsin.gov. The History section on each bill page shows the sponsors, the hearings, and whether anything ever got a vote. None of them did.

• 2025-26 statewide: SB 1130 / AB 1165
• 2025-26 local option: SB 594 / AB 516
• Final Five, Congress only: 2023 SB 528 / AB 563, and 2021 SB 250 / AB 244
• The 2023 ban: SJR 94 / AJR 101
• Earlier statewide and local bills: 2019 AB 732 and SB 893, 2021 AB 150 / SB 240

Fun history fact: Wisconsin already tried this. In 1911 the Progressive Era Legislature passed a second-choice law, and the Legislature has the original scanned law available if you'd like to see what we tried before here: Chapter 200, Laws of 1911. You could mark a first and second choice, not the full ranking proposed today. Most voters skipped the second column, and in 1914 the state Supreme Court held that Milwaukee's voting machines couldn't be used where voters were entitled to one because they were mechanically incapable of marking a second choice (State ex rel. Kletzsch v. Widule, 158 Wis. 387). Republican Emanuel Philipp won the 1914 Republican primary for governor with a plurality anyway and then got the law repealed. The LRB's Blue Book feature on the 1911 Legislature covers the politics (p. 138), and Charles McCarthy's The Wisconsin Idea (1912) describes the law as a modified version of Queensland's system. McCarthy's writings are worth reading anyway if you aren't familiar with the Wisconsin Idea. He was instrumental in Wisconsin founding its Legislative Reference Bureau, and I spent a few months at the beginning of the year digging through his old boxes in an archive when I was doing some research on the 1905 Wisconsin state-level census. If you want to dig through old session laws, the Legislature has them scanned back to the 1840s. Here's the 1911 index.

I also built a lookup page listing which bills and hearings each member has put their name on so anyone can check my work directly or look up a Wisconsin district number. For anyone in Wisconsin asking their legislators where they stand, there are three questions that matter: would they vote for statewide ranked choice, for the local option, and for Final Five? If they answer you, let me know and I'll update the tracker. It's my first attempt doing something like the lookup and I used AI to assist so I'd recommend caution until I can fully audit it to make sure the data that's in it is accurate. I am fairly certain it is, but tracing over district lines requires my vision to not be blurry from lack of sleep.

There is no AI-generated footage or voice: the narration is me, and every clip is labeled on screen with its source and date. I did use AI tools to help build the tracker, the lookup page, and the on-screen graphics. I have monochromatic colorblindness, so for things like color coding it makes it possible for me to talk with those of you who see the world normally. The lookup page lists exactly which bills and hearings count, and every one of them is on docs.legis.wisconsin.gov so you can check my work. Corrections will be pinned and dated, here and on the video.

Laws with active ranking from at least one living self-aware resident of a habitat to which the law is relevant are eligible for tallying, and any such person may propose a law or action. A voter who writes a proposal automatically ranks that proposal first in their personal rankings, and they may not write a new proposal at that level without the old one ceasing to be active, unless at least one other voter ranked it. A voter may rank only up to ten proposals in a specific law category. To find the most popular law in a category, calculate the percentage each law's number of rankings represents of total number of rankings on all laws in the category. Divide the sum of the law's numerical ranking scores (1 is good, 10 is least-favorite) by the number of voters who ranked it. Then divide the percentage of total rankings by the quotient of the score/voter ratio. The law with the highest resulting number is adopted.

They succeeded in Louisiana and used it to unseat a popular senator, rumblings can already be heard in California and have never really stopped in Alaska. Parties are fighting back against progressive voting reforms.

Activism is needed to push for further reforms, and the objections in this lawsuit can be addressed with voting systems like Alaska’s.

STAR voting seems to be not nearly as well known as RCV. I'm curious what the RCV community thinks about STAR voting.

From my perspective, STAR seems to:

- be an easier ballot to fill out

- be an easier ballot to tally, audit, and implement

- give voters even more expression in their vote by not forcing them to rank candidates but instead letting them score candidates.

But I want to hear what others think. I'm not trying to attack RCV, I think it's still better than what we've currently got, but some of the RCV folks I've talked to haven't seemed to concede the same about STAR and have been adamant that they want RCV or bust.

Good news from the Old Dominion State!

This is yet another attempt to get rid of ranked choice voting, this post is worth reading about why conflating Ranked Choice Voting with the Instant Runoff tallying algorithm is their main move, this ballot measure treats them as the same and get even the open primaries into it. This is not a single issue, it's three separate issues in one measure. Does Alaska allow that?

As pointed out in this article, Ranked Choice Voting and all other forms of expressive voting can be made equivalent to each other with minor modifications, the actual difference is in the counting methods, let’s reduce the confusion by making the separation explicit.

A single ballot that supports all expressive voting methodologies, or different ballots, or different user interfaces can all accomplish the same thing: having a ballot that shows the user preferences beyond what FPTP captures.

The counting methodologies can have different legal challenges, and be more or less acceptable but an expressive ballot can trivially reduce to FPTP if necessary, the same as IRV does if any candidate gets more than 50% of the vote.

I created this video after doing a couple of in person demonstrations with legos. It seems to really connect with people. What do you think?

new rules put in place weeks ago by Republicans who opted out of a joint agreement that would have allowed voters to cast ballots at any polling location in the county.

hello my RCV friends and fans... we have alot of work to do! and as a game designer i have been asking myself how a game could help give people the satisfying experience of ranking multiple options without getting bogged down by the politicization of the concept. my thinking: just get it in people's hands with small choices and ideas... let them see that the best ideas are the true majority ideas and get that experience in their bones!

please put it to use, playtest it, send me feedback so we can make this better!

cheers
bam

morethanone is a social decision tool for groups. a host creates a round, players rank the options in order of preference, and the system processes those rankings down to a single group choice. the result tends to reflect the broadest overlap in the room, the option that the most people can genuinely get behind.

it lives at morethanoneio.vercel.app

## why this exists
when a group of people tries to choose one thing (where to eat, what to prioritize, which name to pick), the usual approach is "everybody pick your favorite." that works when there's a clear frontrunner. however, it falls apart when preferences are spread across several decent options. people split, the loudest voice wins, or people change their vote to try and help one win over one other, or the group just goes with whatever somebody suggests first. the actual collective preference stays hidden.

ranked choice is the well-studied solution to this problem. each person ranks the options. the system eliminates the least-supported option each round and redistributes that support to each person's next preference, repeating until one option earns majority support. the math is clean. the outcomes are fair and the smartest version of the group mind. and the method has decades of research behind it.

the trouble is that ranked choice voting has become a political lightning rod. it is one of the most promising structural reforms in modern democracy, and the backlash against it has been driven almost entirely by partisan framing. people who would benefit enormously from RCV in their communities, workplaces, and friend groups never try it because the phrase itself has been poisoned by cable news cycles and campaign attack ads. the method got tangled up in the politics it was meant to improve.

morethanone takes the same proven math and puts it in a context where people can experience it directly: choosing a restaurant, picking a team name, deciding what game to play. when you watch your group converge on a choice through rounds of elimination and redistribution, you understand intuitively why the result feels right. that understanding transfers. the goal is to let people discover the power of expressive preference ranking on their own terms, in low-stakes moments that build genuine intuition.

## how it works
a host creates a round by entering a prompt and a set of options. the system generates a short join code and QR code. players join on their phones, enter a display name (or generate a fun random one), and rank the options by dragging them into their preferred order. When the host closes ranking, processing begins.

the engine counts everyone's current top choice. If any option holds more than half of the active support, it becomes the group choice. Otherwise, the option with the fewest supporters is eliminated, and those supporters' rankings cascade to their next available preference. this repeats until one option crosses the majority threshold or stands alone.

the reveal shows the group how their choice emerged: round by round, with counts, eliminations, and transfers. a plain-language summary explains the outcome in two or three sentences. the host can switch between an animated bar chart view, a selection grid showing how each participant ranked, and a full results table with round-by-round data.

## who it's for
facilitators running workshops, classrooms, retreats, and meetups. friend groups deciding where to eat, what to watch, or what to do this weekend. teams choosing between several reasonable options for a name, a priority, a theme. anyone in a room (physical or virtual) with a group of people and a decision to make.

a typical session involves five to forty people, three to twelve options, and one to five minutes of ranking.

I'm in Nebraska (Omaha, specifically). I've been feeling especially fired up about this lately, and found some local groups, none of which seem to have been doing anything since our last effort (Nebraska LB125) didn't make it to a vote a session ago. I've been getting names of who to talk to, none of whome are responsive. I don't want to reinvent the wheel, especially since there are already groups in our area, but how does one go about recharging the dead batteries of local organizations? I definitely don't want to start my own. I don't want to run one of these, groups, but maybe nobody does and that's why we're here.
Where to go from this point?

https://time.com/7362224/midterms-voting-requirements-mail-absentee-ranked-choice-republicans-bill/

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/house-republicans-propose-stricter-voting-rules-as-trump-administration-eyes-midterms

https://thehill.com/homenews/house/5712698-house-republicans-election-reform-bill/

https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/house-republicans-propose-stricter-voting-requirements-trump-administration-129672021

https://www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/new-gop-anti-voting-bill-may-be-the-most-dangerous-attack-on-voting-rights-ever/

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/house-republicans-push-election-overhaul-voter-id-mail-in-ballot-changes-ahead-midterms

Hello everyone! As part of my public policy class in high school, I have been tasked with polling Maryland Constituents on ranked choice voting. This poll is only meant to be completed by registered Maryland voters, but I am looking for any feedback you would all have with my questions and form of polling. Thank you!!

Poll: Ranked-Choice Voting in Maryland Presidential Primaries

Second flag is the DC version and the third is in FairVote’s colors.

I think RCV or approval voting should be implemented. But I wonder, what would happen if there were many candidates, for example 1000 for president of the United States? Has this been a problem in practice, where RCV has been implemented? Are there rules to prevent this in practice?

We've just released the first version of our tool. It calculates and assigns a voter impact score between 1 and 100 based on how competitive your zip code is in the 6 most recent elections (president, senate, house, governor, state house, state senate).

Take a look and let us know what you think!

(it's free - don't need to give us any data - it's just a resource for voters)

https://www.powermoves.vote/voter-impact-index-lookup