There’s a common saying around election time, “the lesser of two evils.” Many voters feel they’re presented with two compromised candidates that make it difficult to cast a vote.
But there’s a movement that’s been gaining momentum in the U.S. that’s imagining a new way of holding elections. Instant runoff voting is a system where voters have a number of choices, usually more than two, and rank them based on preference. In Wisconsin, that campaign is called Final-Five voting.
Sara Eskrich is the executive director of Democracy Found, the campaign for Final-Five voting in Wisconsin.
"The big problem is that we are actually deciding far too many of our races in the primary election, where far fewer voters vote," Eskrich says. "Because our districts are either so red or so blue, whoever makes it out of the Republican Party Primary in red districts, and the Democratic Party Primary in blue districts is virtually guaranteed to win."
This systematic structure is actually where Eskrich believes a lot of voters' frustration comes from.
"Our current political moment demands really systemic change," says Eskrich. "Having something that would not advantage one party or the other, but solely focus on making sure that our elections are more accountable to voters, responds to that primary concern of voters that may feel like their vote doesn't matter, and they don't like their choices."
When Tracy Hunter, a Waukesha resident, first heard of the Final-Five system in 2021, he was tired of the bipartisan fighting and lack of governing. He says he had three immediate thoughts when looking deeper into the campaign.
"The first one was it just made sense," Hunter says. "They have a very specific problem [and] they define that they're trying to fix that problem with the primary elections. Number two, it was nonpartisan ... and the third thing was that it was hopeful."
Hunter has gone on to become a volunteer in the Final-Five campaign in state.
"It definitely could make a very substantial improvement in how we elect our congressional leaders in Wisconsin."
Nate Atkinson is an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School, and he offers another viewpoint.
"Under a Final-Five type system, the moderate candidate is going to be eliminated in the first round of the election and we're going back to our normal election here where we have one left-leaning candidate and one right leaning candidate," Atkinson says.
Atkinson isn't opposed to different forms of instant runoff voting, but he points to the 2022 special election in Alaska to determine their lone U.S. House representative where Final-Four voting was implemented and called it a problem. It was one of the nation's first experiments with the new voting system.
"There's other electoral methods that are going to allow voters to rank their candidates but instead is going to ask the question, 'Is there a candidate who's preferred to all the other candidates by the majority of voters? If so, let's elect that candidate,'" says Atkinson, who says this is where Alaska's Final-Four method failed. "If we're trying to contemplate changing to a different electoral system to combat extremism and polarization, there are other systems which can do that better."
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