In November of 2022, a resounding 83 percent of Evanston voters said yes to a referendum to adopt ranked-choice voting for their mayor, clerk, and city council members. Ranked-choice voting, or RCV, is a voting method that lets voters rank multiple candidates on their ballot instead of choosing just one. If your first choice doesn’t do well, your vote goes to your second choice and so on until a candidate receives over 50 percent of the vote and wins.
Ranked-choice voting has a lot of benefits. It gives individual voters more of a voice in the outcome of elections. It produces more civil campaigning and more diverse elected officials. And it avoids undemocratic results, like someone winning an election with only a small plurality of the vote in a field with multiple candidates. In Evanston, it would also eliminate primaries, which can be decided by very few voters.
The Cook County Clerk’s office argues that state law prohibits Evanston from adopting ranked-choice voting. Advocates of the referendum disagree. The good government group Reform for Illinois, which supported the referendum and is led by Evanston LWV Board member Alisa Kaplan, maintains that the Illinois state constitution allows home rule jurisdictions like Evanston to change “the manner of selection” of their representatives. That position is supported by a 2006 memo by then-Attorney General Lisa Madigan, which clearly stated that RCV could be adopted by referendum in home rule municipalities. The Evanston City Council accepted that view when it voted to put the RCV referendum on the ballot.
This issue goes beyond Evanston and beyond this particular referendum. Skokie and Oak Park, both of which have elections run by Cook County, will likely have RCV referendums on their ballots within the next year. And if the court decides home rule municipalities can’t adopt RCV, it could affect other types of election reforms, undermining Illinoisans’ ability to shape our own elections and our own local democracies.
The lawsuit against the clerk is being brought by Reform for Illinois and its Board president, Evanston voter David Melton. For more information, you can contact Reform for Illinois’ Executive Director,
Alisa Kaplan.