Morning Distribution for Monday, March 1, 2021

A [FiveThirtyEight]( email [Morning Distribution]( Monday, March 1, 2021 Your daily briefing from FiveThirtyEight --------------------------------------------------------------- The Morning Story [Missourians Vote In 2020 Primary Election]( [In St. Louis, Voters Will Get To Vote For As Many Candidates As They Want]( By [Nathaniel Rakich]( When voters head to the polls Tuesday to pick St. Louis’s next mayor, they’ll be faced with [four names on the ballot](. But unlike in most other elections, they won’t have to choose just one candidate to vote for. Instead, St. Louisans will experiment with a new form of voting that allows them to vote for as many candidates as they like. In November, St. Louis voters [passed Proposition D]( which switched the city’s municipal elections to a nonpartisan “approval voting” system. The way it works is that voters can vote for as many candidates as they think would make a good mayor (or whatever office is up for election) and the two candidates with the most votes advance to a head-to-head general election. (In other variants of approval voting, the person with the most votes is simply named the winner after one round of voting.) Like its better-known cousin, [ranked-choice voting]( approval voting is a popular proposal among election reformers looking to fix the flaws of our first-past-the-post electoral system (i.e., the election system you’re probably most used to: voters pick only one candidate, and the candidate with the most votes wins, regardless of whether they get a majority). By allowing people to vote for multiple candidates, approval voting aims to remove the often zero-sum game of our politics, no longer forcing people to choose between a candidate they love who has little chance of winning and a more viable candidate about whom they are less enthusiastic. For this reason, [proponents argue]( that approval voting gives a fairer shot to third parties. It also theoretically eliminates the problem of vote-splitting. For instance, St. Louis is a plurality-Black city, but it has had a white mayor for the last 20 years in part because Black candidates have [split the vote in the city’s predominantly Black north side](. But under approval voting, Black voters will be able to vote for as many Black (and non-Black) candidates as they want. [Read more]( --------------------------------------------------------------- Weekly Listen [Play]( [Politics Podcast: What The White House Thinks The Economy Needs]( [FiveThirtyEight] [View in browser]( [ABC News]( [Unsubscribe]( Our mailing address: FiveThirtyEight, 47 West 66th Street, New York, NY 10023.