This election, Oak Park voters have the opportunity to choose Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) as the method for selecting our village president and trustees in future elections, beginning in April 2027.
I urge you to vote “Yes” on this referendum because RCV, which allows voters to rank the candidates for an office in order of preference, is a better way to select elected officials than the traditional all or nothing approach to voting.
Why RCV? First, unlike under our current system, a candidate in an RCV election must achieve a threshold level of support from voters — in the case of village president, 50% plus 1, and in the case of village trustees, 25% plus 1. This fundamental change will be an upgrade for Oak Park, where currently trustees can be elected with single-digit vote shares (which can lead to single-digit accountability).
Second, RCV incentivizes candidates to get some level of support from all voters (i.e., to at least get ranked second by voters whose first choice is a different candidate), they are likely to advocate for broadly supported policies, and also run more civil campaigns that do not alienate voters.
Third, RCV gives voters more choices. When voters are freed to vote their heart without fear that their one vote will be wasted (or counterproductive), a wider variety of candidates will likely take a chance on running for office.
I know, because I have talked to many voters, that RCV has broad support in Oak Park. But I worry that some voters will be intimidated by the detail in the ballot measure. They shouldn’t be. RCV is as simple as I have described it. Satisfying the legal requirements imposed on ballot measures requires explaining in detail how RCV will eliminate candidates with low support and reallocate the votes they received to their supporters’ second choice, and so on until a candidate achieves a majority of the votes. The ballot description of this process is quite technical, but really it is no more complicated than other choice ranking we do every day, like choosing your second favorite ice cream flavor at Petersen’s after you find out that they no longer carry your favorite.
Over the course of our history, our country has evolved toward a system of majority rule, supplemented with guardrails to protect the rights of minorities. But we often fall short of this ideal. By requiring majority support to be elected, while opening up the ballot to greater choice, RCV can move us closer to this ideal, and serve the principles of our democratic republic better than the system we have been using. And if municipalities like Oak Park lead the way on adopting ranked choice voting, we might even get to use it statewide in the future.
For more information on RCV in Illinois, go to rcvforoakpark.org.
Edward Malone is an attorney who has lived in Oak Park for 26 years. He has worked on RCV issues as a volunteer for Fair Vote Illinois.