Note: my personal feelings about voting are complicated as someone who’s strongly anti-authoritarian. However, I also recognize that we have a system and sometimes it’s more possible to make a system better than to change it completely. I respect folks who vote as well as folks who don’t. I firmly believe that each person must follow their own conscience in their efforts towards making the world a better place.
On July 11, 2026 I had the pleasure of attending a meeting of the WNC chapter of Better Ballot NC, a “non-partisan, non-profit, grassroots, 501(c)(3) organization in North Carolina working to bring more representative elections to our state by advocating for Ranked Choice Voting.”
“What is Ranked Choice Voting or RCV?” you may be asking. Well, this website has a great introduction to the concept generally if you’d like some info-graphics and they also have this short (2:30) video explaining how it works. The Better Ballot NC website, linked above, is very informative as well.
Historically, in North Carolina, Henderson County piloted an RCV program in the 2007 elections along with Wake County. According to exit polls, local voters overwhelmingly found Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) easy to navigate and liked having more options! The technology at the time kept the trial very limited; but with modern voting technology, proponents believe RCV should be easier to implement now or in the future on a more permanent basis.
Here’s a longer-form explanation from a more neutral source because everything is more complex than it seems on the surface. At FairVoteAction.org you can find some responses to criticisms if you’d like to see rebuttals and go deeper down the rabbit hole!
Below I’m going to focus more on the “why” of RCV and my experience attending the local meeting than on how RCV works, so please go read through the websites above and/or watch the short video for the “how.”
The biggest benefit of RCV, for me personally, is the elimination of the “lesser of two evils” voting issue. This is an issue that has bothered me since I was old enough to vote (not long after 9/11, for folks who don’t know me). Even in the primaries, voters often feel pressured to vote for the “more electable” candidate even if their values align more with a different candidate.
For example: I voted for Zelda Briarwood in the Democratic primary for my NC-11 House of Representatives district, because I didn’t want to compromise on my values and she was absolutely the candidate who best represented me and my beliefs.
However, I know many other people who voted for one of the several white men who were running. This happens sometimes because even though someone may like Zelda’s positions more than the other candidates’, those other candidates do seem more “electable” to quite a lot of people for reasons I’m not going to get into today.
Part of my reason for voting Zelda, even though I knew it was a long shot for her to win, was because if enough people vote for her then whoever does win the primary will see that many folks who support her policies are part of their base. Therefore, those are people who need to be represented by the winner as well.
Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) allows people to officially put their best-match candidate on their ballot!
Even if voters end up putting first the candidate they see as most electable, they can still vote for a less mainstream candidate as their second choice, which increases the odds that the winner will take into account that second place candidate’s policies.
Even better, voters can safely put their longer-shot preferred candidate as their first choice and still know their vote will ultimately go to the “more electable” candidate in the end if their preferred “long shot” candidate doesn’t get enough votes to win.
Best of all, the “long shot” candidate may not be a long shot in reality once people feel free to actually vote for “less electable” candidates without fear of splitting the vote and hurting their chances of having any representation.
Ranked Choice Voting can allow for political parties, candidates, and residents to see a more full picture of what their constituents and neighbors actually want and/or need from their federal and state representatives.
RCV can also allow for marginalized perspectives to be more easily heard and included on ballots. Therefore, it can result in a more collaborative and deliberate process.
During the meeting I attended for Better Ballot (W)NC, we talked about different aspects of Ranked Choice Voting and how the local organization is seeking more volunteers who believe in the expansive potential of RCV.
We discussed how municipalities have to request RCV in their communities. In NC, I believe the parties run the local primaries, so they would need to be on-board with RCV before it could be implemented throughout the state.
In an effort to make such a request simpler and easier for local governments, Better Ballot NC is planning to write and prepare a “trigger ordinance.” This could be used as either a template or in its entirety by local governments who are interested in RCV, but who don’t want to write their own ordinance from scratch.
The group leader emphasized that Better Ballot NC is nonpartisan and works with candidates on all sides of the aisle. This makes sense to me, because I believe that third parties and third-party voters really stand to benefit the most from policies that include Ranked Choice Voting.
Having more candidate options for voters can bring excitement and a “buzz” to local elections. It gives less conventionally popular candidates and candidates from parties other than the Democrat and Republican parties an opportunity to actually have a chance to win if RCV is used in a general election.
Ranked Choice Voting is a change that would require a lot of work to bring about. So, if you’re in NC and you’d like to volunteer, you know where to go to sign up. There are chapters all over NC and there are chapters in other states too. You don’t have to be local to me in order to find someone near you who’s working on this issue if it’s one that you’d like to get involved with.
Thank you for reading, thank you for caring!
~Betsy
No generative ai was knowingly used in the writing of this piece or any of my others. All Human, All the Time!
Below are a couple videos suggested to me by a volunteer with BetterBallotNC.
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