College students are leading the way in election reform with ranked choice voting
Ranked choice voting (RCV) is the fastest-growing nonpartisan voting reform in the United States. Students across the country are leading the way by implementing RCV at their own colleges and universities, just as they’ve led on democracy reform for generations. While state legislatures around the country are contemplating RCV, many universities have beaten them to the punch and are proving its worth in real time.
School’s out for summer, so it’s a great time to take a step back and take account of the growth of RCV in campus elections, from Maine to California. Approximately 95 American colleges and universities use RCV in some or all student government elections. They include schools from every corner of our nation – like Yale University in the Northeast, Georgia Tech in the South, Purdue University in the Midwest and Brigham Young University in the West.
The University of Southern California, University of Montana, and Colorado State are among the schools that adopted RCV this past academic year.
Some universities are taking voting reform a step further and implementing the “gold standard” of proportional RCV. Under proportional RCV, nearly all voters will help elect a candidate they support, and different groups of voters will elect winners in proportion to their share of the votes cast. Leading universities like Carnegie Mellon and Boston University use proportional RCV to elect student government positions.
The RCV movement is another chapter in a long saga of students leading on the key issues of the day. Students have been at the forefront of social and civic movements throughout U.S. history, including the voting rights movement in the 1960s and the successful effort to lower the voting age – which resulted in the ratification of the 26th Amendment in 1971.
As students go, so goes the nation. Poll after poll shows that RCV is extremely popular with young Americans – their desire for (and hands-on experience with) better choices and better elections will be critical to RCV’s growth in the coming years.
