What is the Final Five vote and what could it mean for Wisconsin? | WUWM 89.7 FM

There is a saying during election time: “The lesser of two evils.” Many voters feel like they are being presented with two compromised candidates, making it difficult for them to cast their vote.

But there is a movement in the US that is imagining a new way of conducting elections. In instant runoff voting, voters have a number of choices, usually more than two, and order them according to their preferences. In Wisconsin, this campaign is called final-five voting.

Sara Eskrich is executive director of Democracy Found, the campaign for the Final Five election in Wisconsin.

“The big problem is that we actually decide far too many of our races in the primaries, where far fewer voters cast their ballots,” Eskrich says. “Because our districts are either so red or so blue, whoever makes it in the Republican Party primaries in the red districts and the Democratic Party primaries in the blue districts is virtually guaranteed to win.”

Eskrich believes that this systematic structure is the real reason for voter frustration.

“Our current political situation really requires systemic change,” says Eskrich. “Having something that doesn't give advantages to one party or the other, but is focused solely on making sure our elections are more accountable to voters, is an answer to the main concern of voters who feel like their vote doesn't count and they're not happy with their choices.”

When Waukesha resident Tracy Hunter first heard about the Final Five system in 2021, he was fed up with bipartisan fighting and a lack of governance. He says he immediately had three thoughts upon closer inspection of the campaign.

“The first thing was that it just made sense,” says Hunter. “They have a very specific problem [and] They say they're trying to solve this problem with the primaries. Second, it was bipartisan… and third, it was hopeful.”

Hunter became a volunteer in the state's Final Five campaign.

“It could definitely make a very significant improvement in the way we elect our congressional leaders in Wisconsin.”

Nate Atkinson, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School, takes a different view.

“In a Final Five-style system, the moderate candidate would be eliminated in the first round of voting and we would return to our normal electoral system of having a left-leaning candidate and a right-leaning candidate,” Atkinson says.

Atkinson is not opposed to various forms of runoff voting, but he points to the 2022 special election in Alaska to determine the only U.S. House of Representatives seat, which introduced the Final Four voting system, as a problem. It was one of the country's first experiments with the new electoral system.

“There are other voting methods that allow voters to evaluate their candidates, but instead ask the question, 'Is there a candidate that is preferred by the majority of voters over all other candidates? If so, let's elect that candidate,'” says Atkinson, who says Alaska's Final Four method failed here. “If we're thinking about moving to a different voting system to combat extremism and polarization, there are other systems that can do that better.”