In the News
April 3, 2023
In this article, Mark Harris an opinion writer at The New Political interviewed RepresentWomen's partnership director Katie Usalis on how ranked choice voting helps women's political representation. Read an excerpt below:
All over the world women are underrepresented in government. This past Friday, I had the chance to speak to a woman who is working to change that, Katie Usalis. Usalis is partnership director for RepresentWomen, an international organization working to achieve equal representation for women in the United States. Usalis and some of her colleagues at RepresentWomen took time out of their busy schedules to speak to me Friday morning about how Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) can help close the gender gap in voter representation.
“RepresentWomen is a leading research and advocacy group driven by the foundational need for a democracy with gender balance in elected and appointed positions. We work to identify and remove the systemic barriers women face in politics by equipping elected officials and changemakers with the research needed to build lasting political power for women,” Usalis said about the goals and priorities of RepresentWomen. “Our goal is to go beyond identifying women’s representation rates in positions across the political spectrum and pinpoint the barriers that keep inequality so high, while illuminating the best practices and data-backed strategies that will elect and appoint more women up and down the ballot.”
A commendable initiative and one worthy of attention. I was interested in how RCV could be an effective tool in achieving its goals.
For anyone who might not be familiar with ranked-choice voting, it is a system that allows voters to rank the candidates in the order they prefer. If no candidate wins a majority of first choices, the last place candidate is eliminated and those votes transfer to your next choice until a candidate receives more than 50% of the votes. To learn more about RCV, check out the article I wrote on behalf of The Forward Party featuring Rank the Voter Ohio Executive Director Kyle Herman.
Read the full article here.
