America has repeatedly expanded democracy by changing the rules. Ranked-choice ballots may be the next reform capable of bringing more women and more voters into the process.
This is part of a new miniseries FEMINIST 250: Democracy’s Feminist Future, a special Ms. series examining the next chapter of American democracy through a feminist lens. As the nation approaches its 250th anniversary, the series explores how women and marginalized communities have shaped democratic progress, what lessons history offers for the challenges ahead, and how a more inclusive, representative and equitable democracy can be built for the next 250 years.
For 250 years, the story of American democracy has been a story of expanding who holds power and who gets to decide who yields it. The 15th Amendment, the 17th, the Voting Rights Act, the 19th Amendment and the 26th—each was a structural intervention, a deliberate redesign of the rules to bring more people into the democratic process. And at each iteration, a bet was made on the same proposition: Democracy works better when more people have real power within it.
We are overdue for the next chapter.
Women make up 51 percent of the American population and hold fewer than 29 percent of seats in Congress.
That gap is not a product of insufficient ambition, inadequate candidates or a thin pipeline of viable women. It is the product of an electoral system that was designed before women could vote, and has never been fundamentally redesigned since.
The ranked ballot changes that. It is the single most powerful, best-documented structural reform available for advancing women’s political participation, and it serves every voter, at every level of government, on every ballot.
Voters rank candidates in order of preference—first choice, second and third—and if no candidate wins a majority outright, the candidates with the fewest votes are eliminated and their votes are redistributed until someone reaches a winning threshold
The dominant electoral system in the United States creates conditions that consistently work against women candidates, particularly women of color, younger women, Independent and unaffiliated women, and Republican women. In a plurality race, voters fear wasting their vote on a candidate who can’t win, negative campaigning is rewarded and candidates who attack their opponent most aggressively tend to win. Women are disproportionately disadvantaged by all these dynamics.
This cycle, fewer than 40 of 435 House seats are considered competitive—meaning that in roughly 400 districts, the outcome is effectively decided before the voters cast a ballot.
The recent Supreme Court ruling weakening Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act has made this worse, threatening the majority-minority districts that have been among the most reliable pathways for women of color to reach elected office.
When incumbents rarely lose and competitive races are vanishingly rare, representation calcifies.
A ranked ballot works differently. Voters rank candidates in order of preference—first choice, second and third—and if no candidate wins a majority outright, the candidates with the fewest votes are eliminated and their votes are redistributed until someone reaches a winning threshold. Under this system, voters can express a genuine preference without fear of wasting their vote on a candidate who can’t win, and qualified women candidates can run without fearing splitting the vote.
Ranked ballots also work everywhere. The vast majority of elected offices in the United States—city councils, school boards, county and city executives—are nonpartisan, while most races are also single-winner, such as legislative district seats and executive offices. Ranked ballots also work in the 15 states with three or fewer House members and they are already used in Maine, Alaska, dozens of cities and by military and overseas voters in a number of Southern states.
In the jurisdictions that use ranked ballots, the results for women are unambiguous.
- Data from cities that have adopted ranked choice voting shows that women now hold 55 percent of city council seats, more than twice the national average, and 36 percent of mayoral seats.
- In 2018, London Breed became the first Black woman elected mayor in San Francisco, under a ranked ballot.
- That same year, 16 of San Francisco’s 18 ranked ballot-elected offices were held by people of color.
- New York City Council went from 13 women before implementing a ranked ballot to a supermajority of 31 of out 51 within just one election cycle using a ranked system.
- Portland, Ore.’s adoption of voter-centered representation—resulting in a gender balanced city council in 2024—illustrates how maximizing voter power through multimember districts and ranked ballots produces representative results.
- This pattern holds across ideological backgrounds and party lines: Ranked ballots elect more women.
These wins are structural by design, and that structure has financial consequences too. Under a plurality system, outspending your opponent is a reliable path to victory, and negative advertising drives a significant share of those costs. Ranked ballots disrupt that strategy. When alienating a rival’s supporters costs you their second-choice votes, pursuing a negative campaign strategy becomes a liability. In ranked ballot elections campaigns naturally grow more civil, and civil campaigns inherently cost less. Kate Snyder defeated an incumbent Portland, Maine mayor despite being significantly outspent. When the highest spending candidate is no longer guaranteed to win, voters gain power.
While ranked ballots are undeniably the way of the future, with 77 percent of voters under 50 supporting this policy, the window for structural reform does not stay open indefinitely—time is of the essence. Women’s representation in Congress has not grown; it has contracted from 152 members to 150 members since 2024 with more Republican women departing than arriving. And as a result, the United States ranks well below international allies—that use different voting systems—in women’s representation. We are not going to close the representation gap by working harder within a system that was not designed to produce it. The rules determine the results, and always have.
… Voters can express a genuine preference without fear of wasting their vote on a candidate who can’t win, and qualified women candidates can run without fearing splitting the vote.
For 250 years, the expansion of American democracy has come from changing those rules, not from asking underrepresented people to be more persistent within them. A feminist vision for the next 250 years requires the same courage.
At the federal level, ranked ballots are gaining traction via the Ranked Choice Voting Act and the Fair Representation Act in Congress, while ranked ballot legislation is moving at the state and local level as well. Ranked ballots are used and endorsed by the American Bar Association, Robert’s Rules of Order, the Academy of Motion Pictures and many colleges and universities. Expanding our support for ranked ballots is where our collective energy belongs.
Any policy that diminishes voter power is moving in the wrong direction. The ranked ballot moves us in the right one, for all voters, and especially women. The ballot is the most powerful tool in a democracy, and it is past time we designed it that way.
Continue Exploring FEMINIST 250
This essay is part of FEMINIST 250: Democracy’s Feminist Future, Ms. magazine’s sweeping series marking America’s 250th anniversary through a feminist lens. Much of the project is already live, including Founding Feminists, which reexamines the nation’s history through the women who shaped it; Feminist Lessons, which explores the defining victories, setbacks and organizing strategies of each decade since the 1970s; and the ongoing Democracy’s Feminist Future section, which looks ahead to the challenges and possibilities facing the next generation. We invite you to explore the full series and catch up on earlier essays, interviews and reported features examining how feminist movements have transformed the nation—and where the fight for a more inclusive democracy goes next.
