Democracy Renovators Are All on the Same Side
All-Party Primaries and Ranked Choice Voting Are Allies, Not Rivals
If I could wave a magic wand and change a few things about the movement to fix American democracy, my first wish would be to retire the habit of treating every reform as a rival to every other — the assumption that if you are for one fix, you must be against all the rest. Case in point: the supposed rivalry between all-party primaries and ranked choice voting.
I have a stake in both sides of that rivalry, if that’s what it is. I chair the board of FairVote, the nation’s largest ranked choice voting advocacy organization, and I am the convening chair of the Coalition for Healthy Democracy, the ballot initiative campaign seeking to bring all-party primaries to Massachusetts. If these two reforms were truly at odds, I would be at war with myself.
They are not at odds. They are compatible reforms with distinct and complementary benefits. All-party primaries shift the decisive election in state and federal races to November, when most people vote and the electorate is more diverse. Ranked choice voting (RCV) changes how voters express their preferences in any election and frees them to support the candidates they actually prefer without fear of spoilers. Both systems reward candidates who reach beyond a narrow base. The reforms can also be combined, and they work well where they have been. Alaska pairs an all-party primary (top four) with a ranked choice general election. Seattle has adopted ranked choice voting within its all-party primary and will use that combination for the first time in 2027. The advocates pursuing a top-four system for the city of Boston are following Alaska’s path.
My second wish would be for reformers to pay closer attention to state law. The particulars of each state’s legal system shape the order in which reforms can be pursued. Sometimes that context affects where things move in parallel and where they cascade through sequential steps.
The all-party primaries ballot initiative now before Massachusetts voters applies to state elections only. This initiative changes nothing about how cities and towns run their elections. Every home-rule petition, every local RCV campaign, every study committee proceeds exactly as before. VoterChoiceMA continues its terrific work advancing municipal ranked choice voting across the state, including the push for a top-four system in Boston. The two efforts solve different problems: Municipal RCV reformers are improving nonpartisan local elections, while all-party primaries ensure that the broader, more diverse general election electorate makes the decisive choice in state and federal elections.
Massachusetts law is a case in point. In 2023, a combined petition — a top-five all-party primary plus a ranked choice voting general election — was submitted to the state attorney general for approval. The attorney general’s office declined to certify it under Article 48 of the Massachusetts Constitution, which requires that a ballot initiative contain only “related or mutually dependent” subjects. The attorney general ruled that the two reforms could not be tied together in a single ballot question — even though Alaska, applying its own single-subject rule, let voters adopt both in one 2020 measure. That they cannot be done at the same time, though, does not make the two reforms incompatible. For those of us who like the Alaska system, it makes them a question of sequence.
The Massachusetts initiative does not foreclose a ranked choice future for the Bay State. It opens the door to the Alaska model. The Coalition for Healthy Democracy designed the all-party primary initiative with exactly that possibility in mind. With all-party primaries in place, it would become legally feasible for the first time to run and win a top-four ranked choice ballot measure. That choice remains, as it should, with the voters; the coalition takes no position on it, but our ranks include many RCV supporters.
The status quo does not need coordination to defend itself. But a renovation movement that treats every reform as a competitor to every other will lose to the status quo every time. In contrast, reforms undertaken both in parallel and in sequence can compound. Each victory makes the next more achievable. Supporting all-party primaries is not choosing between reforms. It is putting one piece in a complex puzzle into place.
Join us for the next Renovator Assembly, a conversation for paid subscribers on Thursday, August 6, at 7 p.m. ET, with Lisa Rice. After being told she could no longer receive a ballot in Washington, D.C.’s only consequential elections, Lisa founded Make All Votes Count DC and led the campaign that passed semi-open primaries and ranked-choice voting with nearly 73 percent of the vote in November 2024. Then she kept going — building Grow Democracy DC to fight the litigation and the recalcitrant City Council through implementation, winning the Council’s reversal on semi-open primaries just last month. She’ll talk with us about how her organization pulled off major change against entrenched opposition, where she found the resilience to sustain it, and what comes next.
Paid subscribers can find the Zoom registration link below.