The original article was published December 18, 2023 in Crain’s Chicago Business Forum.

Commentary: Approval voting forces politicians outside their bubbles
by Chris Raleigh

What makes the holidays so special? And awkward?

Once a year, your Fox News-obsessed uncle and your campus-protest-leading cousin are forced to be in the same room with those outside their partisan bubbles.

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Are there fights? Some years. But for most of us, most of the time, even our most partisan relatives tone it down when forced to be in person for the holidays. These face-to-face interactions can even rebuild lost empathy and lead to new mutual understandings. We want these values in our democracy. To do that, we need to find a similar bubble-bursting force that works year-round.

My organization fights for a system called approval voting because we’ve seen it do just that.

Approval voting works like this: Imagine a ballot with 10 candidates (a party’s primary, for example). You really believe in three candidates. With approval voting, you check all three of their boxes. Or if you hate six candidates, you simply vote for the four you like.

You may have heard of ranked choice voting (RCV), but approval voting is different. With RCV, you rank candidates in order of preference. Approval voting is just pick-all-you-like. You can support both systems. After all, liking multiple things is our thing.

To the voter, the power of approval voting may not be obvious. Yet this ability to pick multiple candidates forces politicians into a new situation. They have to travel outside their bubbles if they want to win.

Currently, campaigns look at the electorate and say, “Who do I need to talk to . . . and not a single person more.” They know voters can vote for only one candidate and they bank on that. Using powerful voter analytics, campaigns essentially put each voter into buckets — those worth speaking to, or not.

Do you already support the candidate? You’re not worth it. Are you likely to disagree with the candidate? Also unworthy. Politicians are creating their own bubbles in which they live, deciding who matters and ignoring everyone else.

This is approval voting’s power. Every connection with a voter can become a vote for a campaign, even if they like someone else, too. But what the voters expect also changes: “You want my vote, you come speak to me.”

We’ve seen this shift since approval voting was adopted in St. Louis in 2020. In the past, candidates could win with support from a small faction, especially if many candidates ran. The last pre-approval voting mayor won with just 32% of the vote in 2017, mostly representing only her corner of the city.

In 2020, activists won a ballot measure to adopt approval voting. Only four months later in St. Louis’ first approval voting election, Tishaura Jones came out on top with 57% approval. Prior to the change, in 2017, Tishaura Jones received only 30% of the vote.

What happened? Jones connected with voters outside of her neighborhood, meeting people on both sides of the city’s divides. Voters finally could say that they supported Jones along with other candidates they agreed with.

What could your uncle and cousin agree on this holiday season? That their vote matters, and politicians should care what they think. Your family could agree on approval voting.

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