Baltimore City Ranked Choice Voting Campaign

The Baltimore City Green Party supports a push for legislation that would allow the Baltimore City Council to implement Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) for local elections (i.e. the city council and mayor’s race). We believe it is a better election system than the current "plurality" system we have in place. 

There is already a lot of support in Baltimore for Ranked Choice Voting, but the problem is that the General Assembly in Annapolis must first approve a bill "enabling" Baltimore to use RCV. To help encourage our elected leaders, we are running 2 campaigns to promote RCV in Baltimore:

• A letter to Mayor Scott requesting a Ranked Choice Voting bill from our City Delegation this session.
  
  
• A letter to the City Delegation (including senators) for a Ranked Choice Voting bill this session.

We invite you to send both messages. We believe applying a bit of pressure to both the mayor and the City Delegation to the Maryland General Assembly will encourage them to work together to create and submit legislation allowing Baltimore to enact Ranked Choice Voting for local elections. 

Why Ranked Choice Voting?

We believe that plurality voting isn’t working for our modern society and that we can #VoteBetterBaltimore. Ranked Choice Voting is a better option because it:

• Promotes Majority Winners
• Discourages Negative Campaigning
• Encourages More Choices for Voters

Here is a quick video on the basics of RCV. 

Why Baltimore Needs Permission from the General Assembly

For Baltimore City to implement Ranked Choice Voting, we first need the Maryland General Assembly to approve legislation that amends Md. Election Law Code Ann. § 8-101 so that the City Council is granted permission to decide how to run our elections.

Right now, the law basically says that all counties (and Baltimore City) have to run elections the same way.

Share Some Tweets About Ranked Choice Voting

We've prepared a few sample tweets you can use to help promote the Ranked Choice Voting for Baltimore City campaign. Please be sure to include the #VoteBetterBaltimore hashtag on Twitter and Facebook so that we can see all the great posts you make.

• @MayorBMScott, I'm a Baltimore City resident requesting that you ask @citydelegation for enabling legislation this session so that we can implement #RankedChoiceVoting. We can #VoteBetterBaltimore https://bit.ly/3qhEDxt
• @BaltCouncil, we need a better way to elect our leaders. Our mayoral nominees shouldn’t be chosen by anything less than 50% of the vote! As a Baltimore resident, I encourage you and @MayorBMScott to ask for #RankedChoiceVoting enabling legislation from our @citydelegation. #VoteBetterBaltimore https://bit.ly/3qhEDxt
• @MayorBMScott, we need a better way to choose candidates in our primary elections. In 2016, the 13-way Democratic mayoral contest ended with a nominee that had only 37% of the vote. I urge you to ask for #RankedChoiceVoting enabling legislation from our @citydelegation. #VoteBetterBaltimore https://bit.ly/3qhEDxt
• @MayorBMScott, I'm a Baltimore City resident and I want you to ask the @citydelegation for enabling legislation this session so that we can implement #RankedChoiceVoting and #VoteBetterBaltimore. https://bit.ly/3qhEDxt
• Plurality voting is antiquated and we can #VoteBetterBaltimore! @MayorBMScott let’s implement #RankedChoiceVoting. https://bit.ly/3qhEDxt