Op-Eds
February 22, 2024
Making the New Zealand Case for Ranked-Choice Voting in the U.S by Cynthia Richie Terrell and Rob Richie was published in Ms. magazine on February 22, 2024. Read an excerpt below:
This year is the 30th anniversary of a remarkable electoral reform triumph in New Zealand. In 1993, a citizen-led reform coalition pulled off a heroic upset in a referendum that replaced American-style winner-take-all elections with a “mixed member proportional” (MMP) system. We had a front-row seat, as our leadership in America’s nascent proportional representation movement earned us an invitation to support the campaign with events, strategy sessions and media interviews across the nation.
We wanted to mark this milestone with our reflections about what it takes to win such a transformative national change – and how best to translate those lessons into the very different world of politics of the United States.
New Zealand was seemingly an impossible place to win reform. It was the world’s most quintessentially winner-take-all democracy – one with just a single national chamber of 99 legislators, elected by plurality, “first past the post” voting in single-member districts. Minor parties couldn’t get traction, and the people lacked a citizen initiative. The major party winning the most seats earned absolute power and typically would have little incentive to change the electoral rules. Even so, New Zealand changed to a fully proportional system in 1993. In 2011, voters comfortably retained MMP, and it is now essentially settled law.
Read the complete article here.
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