Proponents of Final-Four or Final-Five Voting, which puts all candidates on one “jungle primary” ballot and enacts ranked-choice voting in the general, argue it promotes compromise, action and civility in politics.

By Peter Cameron, THE BADGER PROJECT

By the tightest of margins, the only state in the U.S. that uses a Final-Four Voting system decided to keep it.

By fewer than 800 votes, or about .25% of all voters in the state, Alaska elected to continue using the innovative voting system, which proponents say promotes compromise, action, and civility in politics. Opponents say the system is too complicated and confusing for voters to understand.

An attempt to enact a similar system in Wisconsin is being planned again, though it faces a steep climb in the state legislature in the next couple years.

Final-Four or Final-Five Voting eliminates partisan primary elections — no more ballots for only Democratic or Republican candidates. Instead, it requires all candidates from all parties to run on the same “jungle primary” ballot. All voters then select their one favorite candidate from the ballot.

The top four or five vote winners from that jungle primary move on to the general election, where voters rank the candidates first up through last. It’s a process known as ranked-choice voting.

If one candidate earns a majority after the first-choice votes are counted, then that candidate wins, just as it works now.

If no candidate gets a majority after the first count, the last-place candidate is removed from the race. Voters who made that candidate their original top choice then have their votes distributed to their second choice.

The process continues in a series of instant run-offs until one candidate has a majority of the vote.

Proponents generally include centrists, moderates and independents. Opponents often include the political parties themselves, which stand to lose influence in the system.

Alaska State Senate Majority Leader Cathy Giessel, a Republican from Anchorage, traveled to Wisconsin earlier this year to promote Final-Five Voting at a public hearing at the state capitol.

“It has very much changed how governing is occurring in the (Alaska State) Senate,” Giessel said of Final-Four Voting at the hearing in Wisconsin. “We’re getting a lot done.”

Most elections across the country are decided before the majority of voters get a chance to have their say, said Sara Eskrich, executive director of Democracy Found, a Wisconsin-based organization that advocates for Final-Five Voting. Because only one political party is dominant in many states and districts, most elections are decided in the partisan primary. That system allows the most extreme voters — the few who show up to vote in partisan primaries — to choose many of our elected officials. And those elected officials fear offending that group of extreme voters, who usually just want to see their side win or make the other side lose, rather than compromise and take action, Eskrich noted.

Final-Five Voting aims to fix that.

LOOKING FORWARD IN WISCONSIN

Last year, a bipartisan group of five state legislators — three Republicans and two Democrats — co-authored a bill that would have launched Final-Five Voting in Wisconsin for congressional elections only.

It didn’t move far in the Republican-controlled legislature.

State Sen. Jeff Smith (D-Eau Claire), one of the five, said “I can’t speak for the others, but I absolutely plan to reintroduce Final-Five.”

His Republican co-authors are less enthusiastic. Aides for state Reps. Tony Kurtz from Wonewoc in Juneau County and Ron Tusler of Menasha in the Fox Valley said neither has plans to introduce the bill again.

Tusler “thought it could be a good idea to try something different so that voters would have more than two viable options to choose from,” his staffer, Joe Romenesko, wrote in an email.

“It’s an idea to try to decrease partisanship (and) party politics,” he continued. “Fear of losing support from voters often prevents legislators from being able to come to an agreement. Ron thought Final-Five could help with that significantly.”

“That being said, the appetite for it does not seem to be there at the moment,” he concluded.

Other insiders agree.

“I don’t know if there’s going to be much appetite for electoral reform in the 2025-2026 legislative session,” Eskrich said.

Democrats might be more open to the reforms than Republicans, but won’t be able to reclaim majorities in the Wisconsin State Legislature until after the 2026 elections, at the very earliest.

Across the country, and despite a lot of financial backing that paid for a promotional advertising blitz, results for voting reformers were mixed to bad in the 2024 election. Measures to enact ranked choice voting and/or jungle primaries lost on almost every statewide ballot.

Nevada voters, who had passed the enactment of Final-Five Vote once in 2022, failed to pass it a second time in the 2024 election, as required by the state to change its constitution.

“It seems like people were just skeptical. It wasn’t that they didn’t like it, it’s that they weren’t sure. And when you’re not sure, you vote no,” Eskrich said. “But people are committed to the long-term. I don’t think the movement goes away.”

Voting reformers did score some major victories in 2024.

Along with Alaska, Washington, D.C. and Oak Park, Illinois approved ranked-choice voting. D.C. also enacted semi-open primaries, meaning voters no longer need to be registered with a political party to vote in its primary election.

Versions of ranked-choice voting exist in Maine’s federal elections and in about 50 counties and cities, including New York City, San Francisco and Minneapolis.

Unlike in some states, in which advocates can get voting changes put on ballots and thus brought directly to voters, cities in Wisconsin cannot pass voting reforms without an exemption from the state legislature, Eskrich noted.

The Badger Project is an independent, reader-supported news nonprofit in Wisconsin.