A referendum will likely be on the upcoming election ballot for voters in Oak Park to decide whether the west suburban villages switches to ranked choice voting to pick its local leaders.
As part of a grassroots push, the binding referendum may be on the Nov. 5 ballot.
If the referendum is approved, Oak Park would become the second municipality in Illinois to adopt ranked choice voting – following Evanston which approved the switch in 2022. The first election using ranked choice voting in Evanston will take place next year.
If Oak Park voters approve changing to ranked choice voting the new system will be used as of the April 2027 Oak Park municipal election.
“With ranked choice voting it’s a better way for people to at least think that if their first choice [isn’t voted in] at least their second choice would get in,” said Peggy Kell, the voter services chair of League of Women Voters of Oak Park and River Forest, which supports ranked choice voting.
With ranked choice voting, voters select candidates in order of preference instead of just voting for one. But in the case of the Village Board there would be three candidates. If a candidate receives a majority of voters’ first choice ballots that candidate is elected.
But if no candidate receives that majority, then the candidate with the fewest first choice votes is eliminated. Votes for the eliminated candidate are reallocated to that voters’ second choice candidate. That process repeats itself until a candidate receives a majority of the vote.
Advocates of ranked choice voting say that the system assures that winning candidates have wide support, discourages negative campaigning, provides more choice for voters, encourages more candidates to run, and allows voters to vote for their favorite candidate without the fear of wasting their vote in multiple candidate fields.
Initially advocates of ranked choice voting asked the Oak Park Village Board to place a referendum about ranked choice voting on the ballot this year. But at an October 10, 2023 meeting the Village Board declined to do so, citing a desire to wait for a report from a state taskforce created to study ranked choice voting.
But advocates of ranked choice voting, aided by the organization FairVote Illinois, took matters into their own hands. Volunteers went to places like the Oak Park farmers market and Thursday Night Out to gather signatures on petitions calling for a binding referendum to be placed on the ballot. They needed 1,900 valid petition signatures to get the referendum on the ballot and on Aug. 5 they turned in 3,254 signatures to the Oak Park Village Clerk, organizers confirmed.
“We got most of them (signatures) at events that draw large numbers of Oak Park voters,” said longtime Oak Park resident Bruce Lehman, who was one of approximately 20 volunteers who gathered the signatures.
Lehman says that ranked choice voting is a fairer system and will produce winning candidates more in line with wishes of the majority of voters in Oak Park.
In a phone interview with Pioneer Press, Lehman pointed to the 2019 Village Board race that had 11 candidates running for only three seats. He says ranked choice voting would have probably produced winners more aligned with the views of the majority of Oak Park voters.
Ranked choice voting is currently used in more than 50 municipalities, including New York City, Minneapolis and Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 14 states, according to the website of the Campaign Legal Center.
The voting process is also used in Maine for primary and general elections to the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate. Ranked choice voting is also used in statewide elections in Alaska.
Bob Skolnik is a freelancer.
