Patti Vasquez is joined by Dan Ashurst, executive director of FairVote Illinois. He explained ranked choice voting and the current efforts to enable its use in Illinois, as well as opposition to it.

Here are a few highlights from the conversation:
- Ashurst said ranked choice voting lets voters rank candidates and can encourage more civil, issue-focused campaigns, though it does not eliminate incivility. He said multi-winner ranked choice voting can support proportional delegate allocation in presidential primaries.
- Evanston, Oak Park, and Skokie adopted ranked choice voting, but implementation faces legal and election-code hurdles. FairVote Illinois is pursuing legislation to clarify local authority and election-administration standards.
- He talked about how the Democratic National Committee almost banned ranked choice voting for the 2028 presidential primary, even in places like Maine and Washington, D.C., where voters have already made it law. Under the proposal, the party would have allowed only first-choice votes to be counted. "Luckily," Ashurst told WCPT, "there was huge backlash to this. We put out a video on social media, boosted it to a number of places in Illinois to make sure people know about this, and once it got to the floor of the DNC, it was a really beautiful moment because it became very, very clear that they did not want to ban pro-democracy reform at this event."  

Catch "Driving It Home with Patti Vasquez" weekdays from 5:00 to 7:00 p.m. Central on WCPT (heartlandsignal.com/programs/driving-it-home).

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