Honest Elections Project Executive Director Jason Snead | Honestelections.org
Honest Elections Project Executive Director Jason Snead | Honestelections.org
Much to the delight of voter integrity advocates, a ranked-choice voting initiative in Missouri in which voters rank candidates by preference on their ballots failed to garner the signatures necessary to appear on the November ballot.
Ken Cuccinelli, former Virginia attorney general and national chairman of the Election Transparency Initiative, called ranked-choice voting “an establishment tool to keep control against those of us out to help the little guy.”
“Ranked-choice voting is designed (i.e., its purpose is) to screen out conservative candidates,” he wrote to the Show-Me Times in an email. “Interestingly, that will also screen out liberal candidates.”
Under the ranked-choice system, a candidate is declared the winner only if he or she wins a majority of first-preference votes. Absent that, the candidate with the fewest first-preference votes is eliminated, and a new election is held. The winner of the majority in the next round wins the election.
Jason Snead, executive director of the Honest Elections Project, was likewise critical of ranked-choice voting.
“The truth is, no amount of money can hide what ranked choice voting is: an unwise policy that complicates voting and risks disenfranchising voters,” he told the Show-Me State Times in an email.
On Aug. 9, Missouri Secretary of State John Ashcroft announced that the initiative failed to submit the 171,592 signatures it needed to get on the fall ballot. Ballotpedia reported that “to receive a Certificate of Sufficiency, a minimum number of valid signatures must be obtained in six of the eight congressional districts in Missouri.”
“The initiative did not meet the valid signature requirement in any of Missouri’s eight congressional districts,” the report said.
The effort in Missouri was being led by Better Elections, a group founded in 2021 by David Roland, whom the Center for Capital Research (CRC) described as a “libertarian-leaning attorney.”
CRC also noted that the initiative was supported by the St. Louis City chapter of the NAACP.
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