RCV trends: Four states ban RCV in 2025, bringing the number of states with bans to 15.
(Okay idk why it says 15 up here then later says 16, somebody on that site probably didn’t update the title text)
As of April 30, five states had banned RCV in 2025, which brought the total number of states that prohibit RCV to 16.
- Gov. Mark Gordon (Republican) signed HB 165 on March 18.
- West Virginia Gov. Patrick Morrisey (Republican) signed SB 490 the March 19.
- Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly (Democrat) signed SB 6 into law on April 1.
- North Dakota Gov. Kelly Armstrong (Republican) signed HB 1297 on April 15.
- Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders (Republican) signed HB 1706 which became law on April 17.
Six states banned RCV in 2024.
Why YSK: If you’re a US-American, its time to pay attention to State and Local politics instead of solely on the Federal. There is a trend in conservative jurisdictions to stop progress in making elecoral systems more fair. Use this opportunity as a rallying-cry to pass Ranked-Choice Voting in progressive jurisdictions, and hopefully everyone else takes notes. Sometimes, all you need is a few states adopting a law to become the catalyst for it to become the model for the entire country, for better or for worse. Don’t allow anti-RCV legislations to dominate, counter the propaganda with pro-RCV arguments. Time to turn the tide.
Edit: fixed formatting
Edit 2: Added in the map so you don’t have to click the link:
See the pattern? 🤔
At what point is a democracy not a democracy any more?
A better question would be “when was there ever been a true democracy?”
For me, there hasn’t been. That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try. It means that we need to truly internalise that wealth and power will, if left unchecked, succeed in perverting it entirely. We need to be ever augmenting it, with that in mind, with a view to playing whack a mole with the interests of the 1% and keeping it working for the 99%.
I mean that won’t work either. The rich and powerful will never allow us to simply vote away their ill beggoten wealth and power. However, at least people could say that they tried.
I don’t think we’ll ever have a “true” democracy.
Its like the concept of “utopia”, you can get closer and closer, but never actually reach it
Like an asymptote in mathematics.
For the U.S., the decisive blow came with the Citizens United ruling, although it’s not unreasonable to suggest the refusal to punish Nixon during watergate signaled that the rule of law was merely a suggestion. That kicked off a whole cascade of political and legal maneuvering to get both the legislative and societal landscape into such a contortion that it would willingly hand away the entire nation to vulture-capitalists.
The US has never been a democracy, they’re just being more straightforward about it recently
People keep commenting this without context and it’s driving me mad. It’s factually wrong, so at least tell us what you mean in the figurative sense.
It is not factually wrong, even if you argue that a representative republic can be democratic it’s an easily verifiable historical fact that ours never was. At every point in US history there have been groups of people who were deliberately and methodically disenfranchised from any representation while still being subject to US rule. If being told that hurts your feelings it just means the propaganda worked, try being less gullible.
No, this is just the first time anyone actually invested more than the one sentence into an explanation. Can you give me a little more to look into? I genuinely have no idea what you’re referring to.
African Americans were supposed to be given the right to vote after abolition.
There was a brief period of time during Reconstruction where that happened. However, many states came up with complicated contrivances to make it impossible to vote - poll taxes, “literacy tests,” etc. Effectively, it was a right solely on paper until LBJ in the 60s. Conservatives throwing a massive fit about this is why we have the insane fascistic Right we do right now - they were pro public education until Black kids got to go to the same kids as white kids.
Women weren’t guaranteed the right to vote until 1920. Conservatives today are trying to revoke the 19th amendment and undo that.
Yes, there’s tons of things that make the process unfair, but does that make the system not be a democracy? It’s a flawed one, one that basically only allows white dudes to vote, but the system is still a democracy.
Yeah, democracy.
What if only people who make over $500k annually can vote? Is that still a democracy?
I get you’re referring to a plutocracy. The question is if the US is so far gone that it’s out of flawed democracy territory - the lines are definitely blurred and I’d argue it depends on the state.
If I had to guess I’d say that nobody has bothered responding to you with more than a single sentence because you clearly have internet access and could easily read about the history of US voting rights and the current state of US voting suppression, and that you therefore have no excuse for weighing in on a topic about which you clearly don’t know much, but that’s just an educated guess.
Originally voting rights in the US were only extended to white male christian land-owners. Over the course of the next two centuries they gradually relaxed the property ownership requirements, then eventually got around to granting voting rights to non-white men and then women. In theory this would make the US currently a democracy, but in practice they suppress voting access in predominantly non-white districts through gerrymandering, and elected officials routinely act against the wishes of their constituents in favor of pleasing their billionaire donors. We transitioned from a fundamentally racist and classist republic to an oligarchy.
All that to say it is a democracy after all, just even more condescendingly. Wonderful.
When you refuse to listen to reason, yes you deserve it.
No, that’s not what I said at all you fucking moron. The US is not and has never been a democracy, go read a book.
Okay, then, is Nazi Germany a democracy? It has votes, after all. How about fascist Italy? Is that a democracy?
A democracy requires free elections, so no to both.
I don’t think the US is that far gone, though. Some states do care about the democratic process, as the graphic indicates. I don’t think the US has left flawed democracy territory yet, at least not everywhere.
The US’ democracy index is falling, but it’s still comparably high, between France and Italy.
But I did say factually wrong. I do admit it’s not that cut and dry, and the republic organisation isn’t everything.
Sadly, some states, people voted against ranked-choice-voting in referendum. Seems lile people just hear a complex idea and want to shut it down because it challenged their simplistic worldview.
Not sure. Ancient societies also used FPTP and they are still considered by some Scholars/Historians as “democracy” 🤷♂️
Personally, I think government systems are actually a type of technology. Unfortunately, they aren’t the kind of research where you can easily experiment and iterate upon, since people tend to die in massive numbers if the experiment fails.
The USA is too big to be a democracy. It would need to be several smaller regions/countries that had equal rights when dealing with each other. But its much easier to just force people to do what you want rather than make a mutually beneficial deal.