Better Ballot Glendale is a citizen’s initiative seeking to place a charter amendment on Glendale’s September city election ballot which would prevent the kind of runoff election quagmire presently paralyzing the city governments of Mesa and Tempe, and influencing the city governments of Litchfield Park, and Buckeye among others. (For example, on March 11, no candidate in Mesa’s District 5 received more than 50 percent of that district’s votes, triggering a runoff requirement; similarly, four candidates are in a virtual tie ... Read More

Farai Chideya leads a discussion on America's modern democratic process and whether the current electoral system is fair. She's joined by William Poundstone, author of Gaming the Vote: Why Elections Aren't Fair, and What We Can Do About It; and Robert Traynham, D.C. bureau chief for the Comcast cable network, CN8. Here at on NPR now: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=87952106 Read More

Telling the US Elections Assistance Commission (EAC) what we see wrong in their current guidelines regarding Ranked Choice Voting As FairVoteAZ and other groups proceed in our efforts for greater democracy by better representation using Ranked Choice Voting (RCV), implementation has always been a concern to me. Not implementation by ‘We the Voters’ (that’s as simple as 1-2-3) but how we get machines to help in the count. Now some folks don’t want machines part of the system at all and ... Read More

An opinion piece by Vermont State Rep. Michael Fisher in the Burlington Free Press advocates for instant runoff voting for Congressional elections, and notes the success of the system in Burlington. The 2006 Mayoral election in Burlington served as an important test for IRV. That election was a resounding success. Voters had no difficulty with the new ranked-choice ballot and exit polls showed that the overwhelming majority of voters preferred IRV to the old way of voting. Read the full story here. Read More

Three US cities have implemented Instant Runoff Voting in the last five years – San Francisco (CA) in 2004, Burlington (VT) in 2006 and Takoma Park (MD) in 2007. Exit polls were conducted for each of these elections and show that voters overwhelmingly understood how to use Instant Runoff Voting and prefer it over the traditional runoff system. This table compares the results in each city. Read More