If you’re a city voter, you might be approached on Election Day (April 2, mark your calendars) by a group that's advocating for an alternative voting method in municipal primaries in St. Louis.
Tyler Schlichenmeyer, a Washington University graduate student studying biomedical engineering, is part of a movement to implement approval voting in St. Louis City elections. Originally, Schlichenmeyer and a group called St. Louisans for Ranked Choice Voting were pursuing ranked choice, or instant runoff, voting, which asks voters to rank up to three candidates on order of preference. They launched a Facebook group. They got to work gathering signatures. But when the group realized that the voting machines in the city can’t run the software necessary to tally ranked choice voting, they changed courses, joining with the organizations Clean Missouri and Center of Election Science, to approval voting. (The approval voting system can be tabulated by the machines here.)
So what is approval voting?
“It’s just another voting method to address the problem of spoiler candidates and plurality rule,” Schlichenmeyer says. “It’s a step toward getting a candidate that works for the majority of voters.”
The nitty-gritty of it works like this: On the ballot, voters are asked to mark one or more candidates they approve of. If voters like candidates A and B, but not C, they’re not forced to pick between A and B, but can select both. Under normal voting conditions, if candidates A and B have similar platforms, one of them can spoil the other—meaning he or she could divert enough votes away to give candidate C, who might have lower approval than either, the opportunity to win. Voters, sensing that if they vote for their true favorite it would cause the candidate they dislike most to win, then end up voting for the person they believe can take out the opponent, not necessarily the one they like the most. Fargo, North Dakota, population 122,359, is the largest city to use approval voting right now and were first to adopt it.
Schlichenmeyer cites two elections that caused him to become interested in alternative voting methods. One was the 2017 mayoral Democratic primary, when Lyda Krewson won with only 32 percent of the vote. The other was the recent Democratic primary for the board of aldermen president. Incumbent Lewis Reed won with only 35 percent of the vote. “We’re ready to pick up on that momentum that people are feeling, that the winner might not have been our first or our second choice,” he says.
As far as implementing, the city’s charter allows for an initiative petition, and if the group wants to change the charter through an amendment, it will need 20,000 signatures, and to hand them in at least 90 days before the election.
Schlichenmeyer, along with Show Me Integrity, is hosting an event at 7 p.m. on April 1 at Fortune Teller Bar to introduce people to approval voting. He’s hopeful people will want to pick up petitions and post up outside polling places on Election Day to gather signatures.
