About the FairVote Awards
The FairVote Awards is our biennial event, started in 2022 as a celebration of 30 years for FairVote. Our founding CEO, Rob Richie, had a desire to bring folks together from the democracy reform space to honor thought leaders, and to propel FairVote forward as we make RCV the norm for all elections!
Now in its second iteration, the FairVote Awards took place during a pivotal moment in FairVote’s history. Meredith Sumpter, appointed CEO on April 1, unveiled FairVote’s 2025-2028 strategic plan under the vision of “Build, Win, Sustain.” The event celebrated our coalition partners, as well as the leaders inspiring us in the democracy reform movement, including Rashad Robinson and Eric Liu. It brought together political leaders from all major parties with the common purpose of advancing ranked choice voting and making government work for all Americans.
Unique to the 2024 event, Cynthia Richie Terrell and Rob Richie received an award to honor their lifetimes of service to FairVote and the democracy reform movement.
The Honorees
Eric Liu — American Democracy Leader Award
Eric Liu is the co-founder and CEO of Citizen University, which works to build a culture of powerful and responsible citizenship in the United States. He is also the founding director of the Aspen Institute’s Citizenship & American Identity Program. Liu is the author of numerous acclaimed books, including most recently You’re More Powerful Than You Think: A Citizen’s Guide to Making Change Happen and Become America: Civic Sermons on Love, Responsibility, and Democracy — a New York Times New & Notable Book. He is featured in the PBS documentary American Creed and is a contributing writer at The Atlantic.
Rashad Robinson — Voter Champion Award
Rashad Robinson is President of Color Of Change, a racial justice organization with more than 7 million members who demonstrate the power of Black communities every single day.
Under Rashad’s leadership, Color Of Change has developed winning strategies for holding local prosecutors accountable to enact major criminal justice reform; holding Big Tech corporations accountable to address the racial injustice they cause; leading the $7 billion advertiser boycott of Facebook; exposing rampant racial discrimination by Wall Street in the federal Paycheck Protection Program; and much more.
Cynthia Richie Terrell — Generational Impact Award
Cynthia Richie Terrell is the founder and executive director of RepresentWomen and an outspoken advocate for institutional reforms to advance women’s representation and leadership in the United States. Terrell and her husband Rob Richie helped to found FairVote where she became the longest-serving board member from 1992 until 2020. Terrell has worked on projects related to women’s representation, democracy, and voting system reform in the United States and has worked extensively to help parliamentarians around the globe meet UN goals for women’s representation and leadership.
Rob Richie — Generational Impact Award
Rob Richie co-founded FairVote in 1992, and served as its leader before transitioning into a new full time senior advisor role in November 2023. He has been involved in helping to develop, win, and implement: ranked choice voting in states and more than 20 cities, fair representation voting systems in numerous Voting Rights Act cases, the National Popular Vote plan in 16 states, and voter access proposals like voter preregistration and automatic voter registration. Richie is a frequent media source and has been a guest on CNBC, CNN, C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, NPR’s All Things Considered, MSNBC, On the Media, and Freakonomics.
Special thanks to our sponsors: IBIS Group, Unite America, Democracy Fund, the Forward Party, Temerity Capital Partners, Tusk Philanthropies, Hogan Lovells, and RepresentUs.
For information on the 2022 FairVote Awards, visit this page.