In Ms. Magazine’s new podcast Looking Back, Moving Forward, Cynthia Richie Terrell joins Carmen Rios to discuss gender balance and democracy reform.
What would a truly representative democracy look like — and what’s standing in the way?
In the premiere episode of Looking Back, Moving Forward, host Carmen Rios traces fifty years of feminist political power with leading voices shaping the future of U.S. democracy. RepresentWomen founder and executive director Cynthia Richie Terrell joins fellow guests Celinda Lake, Aimee Allison, Angel Charley, Julie Suk, and Jennifer Piscopo to explore how structural reforms, such as ranked choice voting and gender-balanced leadership, can finally deliver on the promise of equality in government. Cynthia underscores why systems change is essential to elect more women, strengthen democracy, and shift who holds power in America.
As Cynthia states in the interview:
"In the United States context we elect about 520,000 offices, 75 percent of them are nonpartisan and about 75 percent of them are single-winner, and there are not that many reforms that can work in a nonpartisan, single-winner kind of environment. Ranked-choice voting happens to be the reform that works well in both of those contexts. Ranked choice voting is the system where you get to rank your candidates in order of preference and the last place finisher is eliminated. Those votes are redistributed until you get a majority winner.
And we are excited about the data because the more and more cities and jurisdictions, which pass ranked-choice voting, the data is still really strong that women hold 52 percent of seats in jurisdictions with ranked-choice voting and that’s about twice the norm, roughly.
I mean, we’re talking about states, cities, counties, but that’s pretty impressive when you think of a single reform where women are winning about twice as many seats as the norm."
Listen now to hear how feminists are reimagining politics and why representation in power remains democracy’s greatest unfinished project.