OPINION: Voting Reform: the first step to women's representation

Mark Harris is a first-year student at Ohio University and an opinion writer at The New Political.

Please note that these views and opinions do not reflect those of The New Political.

All over the world women are underrepresented in government. This past Friday, I had the chance to speak to a woman who is working to change that, Katie Usalis. Usalis is partnership director for RepresentWomen, an international organization working to achieve equal representation for women in the United States.  Usalis and some of her colleagues at RepresentWomen took time out of their busy schedules to speak to me Friday morning about how Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) can help close the gender gap in voter representation.

“RepresentWomen is a leading research and advocacy group driven by the foundational need for a democracy with gender balance in elected and appointed positions. We work to identify and remove the systemic barriers women face in politics by equipping elected officials and changemakers with the research needed to build lasting political power for women,” Usalis said about the goals and priorities of RepresentWomen. “Our goal is to go beyond identifying women’s representation rates in positions across the political spectrum and pinpoint the barriers that keep inequality so high, while illuminating the best practices and data-backed strategies that will elect and appoint more women up and down the ballot.”

A commendable initiative and one worthy of attention. I was interested in how RCV could be an effective tool in achieving its goals.

For anyone who might not be familiar with ranked-choice voting, it is a system that allows voters to rank the candidates in the order they prefer. If no candidate wins a majority of first choices, the last place candidate is eliminated and those votes transfer to your next choice until a candidate receives more than 50% of the votes. To learn more about RCV, check out the article I wrote on behalf of The Forward Party featuring Rank the Voter Ohio Executive Director Kyle Herman. 

“(RepresentWomen’s) research indicates that ranked-choice voting has a positive impact on women’s representation in politics by enabling more women to run without being told to wait their turn and without fear of splitting the vote,” Usalis said about the positive impact of RCV on representation. “In regions that use a ranked choice voting system, women make up 51% of seats on elected city councils. Recently, New York City became the largest U.S. city to use ranked choice voting in the modern era. Record-breaking numbers of women ran and won in the city’s ranked primaries in June 2021, making the New York City Council majority-led by women for the first time in history.”

It is clear to me from what I already know about RCV and from speaking with Usalis that ranked-choice voting can really be a game changer when it comes to representation in government, not just for women.

Representation is just the first step, it is what that representation can mean for policy that really matters. Katie spoke further about New York City Council saying, “this gender-balanced council has improved policy outcomes and introduced groundbreaking legislation on wage equity and other bills that advance women’s rights.” 

To take nothing away from the work of the members of the council, this kind of advancement would not have been possible without the adoption of RCV allowing for better representation of women on the council. This exemplifies the need for changes in the mechanics of our governmental systems to be able to achieve the changes we want to see in legislation.

RCV isn’t the only form of voting reform that improves women’s representation. According to RepresentWomen's research, gender quotas and proportional representation systems also have proven effective methods of achieving better representation for women. However none of this is possible without a committed group of people working hard to see these goals met. It takes people like Usalis and her colleagues working all over the country and all over the world. 

If you have any interest in getting involved with RepresentWoman, please visit their website. To view its research and keep up to date on what it's doing, join their mailing list or view their research library. 

I want to thank Katie Usalis, Alissa Bombardier Shaw and Laura Carns for speaking with me, in addition to all the work that they do. Their efforts are making a difference for women around the world today and they are working to build a future by women and for women.