City voters in East Lansing, Kalamazoo and Royal Oak approved proposals allowing ranked choice voting in local elections this month.

There’s just one problem — ranked choice voting (RCV) isn’t allowed by the state, said Cheri Hardmon, press secretary for the Michigan Department of State.

But there is a solution if people in Michigan communities want ranked choice voting, she said.

“The (state) Legislature needs to amend the Michigan Election Laws,” Hardmon said.

In Royal Oak, City Manager Paul Brake is the city’s point man to monitor any changes in state law that would allow ranked choice voting at the local level. He knows RCV will require a legislative change in the state law.

“This isn’t only a Royal Oak issue,” Brake said. “This will likely impact other Michigan communities in the future.”

Support among voters for RCV in Royal Oak was slim in the Nov. 17 election. It passed with 50.53 percent of voters out of 15,695 who cast ballots, according to unofficial county tallies. However, it garnered 71 percent of the votes in East Lansing, and about 52 percent in Kalamazoo.

The measure got on the ballots in Royal Oak, Kalamazoo and East Lansing following petition drives among residents organized by the nonprofit group RankMiVote, headquartered in East Lansing.

The state legislator in Michigan with the highest media profile nationwide is State Sen. Mallory McMorrow, a Royal Oak Democrat and the senate majority whip, who also serves on the Senate Elections and Ethics Committee.

McMorrow was approached by the RankMIVote organizers to endorse the proposal, but chose to remain neutral, she said.

“I serve on the Senate Elections and Ethics Committee,” she said. “I didn’t want to put my thumb on the scale.”

But there’s more.

McMorrow said she is concerned about the possibility of having a patchwork of different voting systems in different communities. Moreover, she would like to see whether RCV is something more communities want statewide.

“I think we need to see more communities (vote for RCV) before the Legislature will take this on,” McMorrow said.

She compared the political dynamics of the RCV voting issue to what happened with conversion therapy, a scientifically discredited practice that claims to “convert” LGBTQ+ people to heterosexuality or traditional gender expectations.

McMorrow said more than a dozen communities passed resolutions against conversion therapy before the Legislature took it on, passing bills to ban the practice, which Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signed into law in July.

It remains unclear at this point how many more communities in Michigan may decide they also want to have ranked choice voting.

Ranked choice voting allows each voter to vote for multiple candidates in order of preference, from his or her first choice, second choice, third choice, or more, that appear on a ballot for single elective office.

If one candidate gets a majority of first-preference votes of 50 percent plus one, that candidate wins. However, if there is no candidate with a majority, the candidate with the least amount of votes is eliminated and the losing candidate’s votes are added to the remaining candidates named as a second choice preference. The process continues until a single candidate has a majority.

Ferndale voters approved RCV in 2004 and Ann Arbor voters passed a similar proposal in 2021.

The ranked system is used in elections statewide in Maine and Alaska, and is allowed for local elections in California. More than 50 cities and counties nationwide use the system in their elections.

Ireland has used a form of RCV for many years. McMorrow said she recently spoke with the general counsel of Ireland and talked about that country’s voting system.

She cited the system’s benefits of transparency and decreased political polarization in Ireland.

“It tends to encourage people to work toward the middle,” she said, “because a fringe candidate of either party is less likely to win.”

The downside is that vote counting in Ireland can take weeks.

“In our country any delay in election results leads to doubt,” McMorrow said. “People start questioning the results, it gives time for mistrust to breed and we’ve seen that before in Michigan.”

State Rep. Regina Weiss, an Oak Park Democrat, co-sponsored a bill supporting RCV last year that failed to gain enough support to get a committee hearing.

Weiss said she and others in the House are working on some changes in the bill to introduce it in the future. Because two state House Democrats — Lori Stone of Warren and Kevin Coleman of Westland — left office to successfully run for mayoral positions in their cities, the House is now balanced at 54 to 54 between Democrats and Republicans. Weiss said she and other RCV supporters will wait until seats once held by Stone and Coleman are filled before bringing the issue up again next year.

“I don’t anticipate this bill would get Republican support,” Weiss said, adding she thinks there will be enough support to pass a RCV bill in the House in the current term

“I think (RCV) should be allowed at the local level,” Weiss said. “I think if they decide on it then there should be a (legal) mechanism for them to enact it.”

Royal Oak City Manager Paul Brake said he and many of his counterparts in other communities, will be waiting on any updates on RCV at the state level from the nonprofit Michigan Municipal League. The MML advocates for more than 500 member cities, villages and urban townships.

The MML has not taken a position on ranked choice voting, said Matt Hodgkins, an associate with the MML’s state and legislative affairs team.

“We support anything that will help our members’ (communities),” Hodgkins said. “No members have reached out to us to engage with us on ranked choice voting … we haven’t been approached by cities to push for this.”