Five Ways Ranked Choice Voting Could Help Climate Action

This article by Shannon Grimes was published by the Sightline Institute. It cites RepresentWomen's ranked choice voting information.

Read an excerpt below.

Pew Research Center found in 2020 that two-thirds of Americans think the federal government should do more on climate and similar statistics for more specific policy ideas. Yale Program on Climate Change Communication in 2024 also found strong support for various forms of climate policy action.

And yes, there’s been progress, especially here in Cascadia. Yet laws in the United States are still not aligned with public sentiment on climate and many other issues.

That’s because our democracy isn’t functioning as it should.

One could blame individual elected leaders for their foibles. But perceiving everyone to be at fault—“fire everyone and start fresh,” as one recent US survey respondent summarized—is more productively interpreted as a nudge to explore the structures that incentivize politicians to act the way they do.

With that framing, it’s clear that candidates that get elected into office aren’t always the most responsive to the will of the people. Limited voter participation means that politicians tend to primarily attend to the desires of people who actually vote, who aren’t representative of the overall public (especially in lower-turnout elections like those in odd-numbered years and primaries). Some primary elections intentionally exclude voters, creating candidates who are accountable only to a narrow partisan base. When more than two people run, there’s a good chance that one of them will be elected without majority support, and candidates find easy ways to game the system to gain political power. (Sightline has a whole book covering these systemic flaws—and solutions to fix them.)

Stymied climate policy action is what got Sightline into democracy and elections issues in the first place. Since then, Sightline has extensively researched election topics from money in politics to voter registration to proportional representation.

Read the complete article here.