Connecticut Push for Ranked-Choice Voting in Cities

State lawmakers are weighing a bill that would let Connecticut cities and towns adopt ranked-choice voting for municipal elections, and advocates are pushing hard to keep the momentum alive before the legislative session runs out.

Senate Bill 386, which passed the General Administration and Elections Committee earlier this month, would allow municipalities to use ranked-choice voting in local races and permit political parties to use it for primaries and conventions. The bill now needs the full Senate to take it up, and that is exactly where supporters say the real work begins.

“I think we’ve got more work to build support, getting more folks to sign on to the bill, to show that it’s got momentum, to try to get it called for a vote in the Senate,” said New Haven State Rep. Steve Winter, who has spent years leading the ranked-choice push in Connecticut.

The Senate is where the bill has stalled before.

Under ranked-choice voting, voters can rank as many candidates as they want in order of preference. If no candidate clears 50 percent of first-choice votes, the last-place finisher is eliminated and that candidate’s voters have their second-choice selections redistributed to the remaining field. The process repeats until one candidate reaches a majority. Supporters argue the system produces winners with broader public support and discourages the kind of negative campaigning that turns voters off.

Winter and Alden Okoh-Aduako, chair of Yale Students for Ranked Choice Voting, made the case on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” program Thursday. Both argued that ranked-choice voting pushes candidates to run on issues rather than personal attacks, because alienating another candidate’s supporters could cost them crucial second- and third-choice votes.

“When you give voters the ability to not have to pick between the lesser of two evils, when you give voters the ability to express their honest preferences and when candidates are running more positive issue-based campaigns, you see more people engaged in the civic process,” Okoh-Aduako said.

Winter pointed to Zohran Mamdani’s surprise victory in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary as evidence the system can shake up a crowded field in ways that energize rather than exhaust voters. More than 50 cities, counties and states now use some form of ranked-choice elections, including Alaska, Maine and New York City.

The political backing for SB 386 is growing. Gov. Ned Lamont has signaled support for the bill. The mayors of Stamford, New Britain, Norwalk, Norwich, Bridgeport and Hartford have added their names to the effort. New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker told the Independent Thursday that he supports it as well. That list of mayors covers Connecticut’s largest cities, crossing political and geographic lines in a way that gives the bill a stronger public case heading into Senate deliberations.

The core argument advocates are pressing is simple enough: ranked-choice voting lets voters support a candidate they actually believe in without worrying that doing so hands the election to someone they oppose. The fear of wasting a vote, they argue, is one of the main reasons people default to choosing against someone rather than for someone, and why third-party or independent candidates rarely break through.

“More choice, more voices,” Winter summed it up.

For Connecticut’s cities, the stakes are concrete. Bridgeport, New Haven and Hartford regularly see low municipal turnout and crowded primaries where winners claim office with a fraction of registered voters behind them. A system that requires a majority, even a redistributed one, would change how those races are contested and won.

What advocates need now is Senate leadership willing to schedule a vote. The committee passage is meaningful, but bills die in the Senate every session without ever reaching the floor. Winter acknowledged the coalition still has work to do. With the session moving through spring, the window to build that pressure is narrowing.