Voters in Oak Park overwhelmingly approved a referendum last week that will change the way the village president and members of the Village Board are elected.
Initial results from the Nov. 5 election indicate 79.21% of voters voted in favor of switching to ranked choice voting for those offices. The switch goes into effect in 2027 so next April’s village election will be held under the current first past the post system.
Under ranked choice voting voters list all the candidates for an office in order of preference. A candidate who gets 50% of first preference votes plus one is elected. If no candidate reaches the 50% plus one benchmark, the last place finisher is eliminated and then the votes of those who voted for the eliminated candidate as their first choice are reallocated to those voters’ second choices. The process continues until a candidate has a majority of the votes.
Advocates of ranked choice voting say it results in fairer results with the winning candidates having broader support. They also say ranked choice voting reduces negative campaigning because candidates do not wish to antagonize another candidate’s supporters in the hope of being listed as second or third choice.
Local supporters have been working for two years to get the method adopted in Oak Park. They initially tried to get the Village Board to make the change but when the Village Board demurred they gathered enough signatures to put the binding referendum on ranked choice voting on the November ballot. One of the volunteers working toward that effort was longtime Oak Park resident Bruce Lehman.
“We worked long and hard on achieving ranked choice voting for Oak Park,” Lehman said. “I’m very happy about the result. We think that the people who voted for it were often very enthusiastic about it. They often asked us, is there a way to get this nationwide?”
Oak Park is the second Chicago suburb to switch to ranked choice voting in village elections. Evanston approved the switch to ranked choice voting in 2022 although the first Evanston ranked choice election also is next year.
Lehman said he started pushing for ranked choice voting in Oak Park after reading a Tribune story in 2022 about Evanston switching to ranked choice voting for local races.
“I just felt if Evanston can get it why not Oak Park,” Lehman said.
Ranked choice voting is currently used in more than 50 cities, including New York City, Minneapolis and Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in 14 states according to the website of the Campaign Legal Center. It is also used in Maine for primary elections and general elections to the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate.
However, the victory for ranked choice in Oak Park last week ran counter to most results elsewhere last week where ranked choice voting was on the ballot. The use of ranked choice voting in statewide elections Alaska was repealed in a close vote. Referenda to adopt ranked choice voting in statewide elections were defeated last week in Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Missouri, Nevada, and Oregon. However voters approved switching to ranked choice voting in Washington, D.C., and Bloomington, Minnesota.
In 2027 the Village Board elections in Oak Park will be conducted using ranked choice voting as will the village president race in 2029. But the referendum omitted the office of village clerk, which is an appointed office in many suburbs.
“Basically that was a mistake,” Lehman said. “It was an inadvertent omission.”
Lehman said the lawyer drafting the language of the Oak Park referendum was also drafting possible referendums for other communities which have an appointed village clerk and neglected to include the village clerk’s office in the Oak Park referendum.
Lehman said ranked choice voting advocates will ask the Village Board to pass an ordinance to switch to ranked choice voting for the village clerk’s office.
“We are planning to try to achieve that,” Lehman said.
Bob Skolnik is a freelance reporter for Pioneer Press.
