| Mawa Iqbal | WBEZ Chicago |
The 2024 elections are just seven months away, but a task force of state lawmakers, county officials and voters’ rights advocates are already thinking about the way Illinois residents will vote in the 2028 presidential primaries.
Positive campaigning
Anika Bowie is a city council member in St. Paul, Minn., which has used ranked choice voting to elect their mayor and city council members for more than a decade. In February, Bowie told the task force ranked choice allows candidates to gear their campaigns towards policy issues rather than political mudslinging since there often is no one “opponent” to rally against. FairVote Research and Policy Director Deb Otis calls this “positive campaigning.”
“A candidate might know, ‘I’m probably going to get 40% in the first round, but I’m going to need to be the second choice on 10% or more ballots,’ ” Otis said. “ ‘How do I get to be a second choice?’ It is not by attacking the voters’ first choice, it is by focusing on the issues that matter.”
