For Juneau, There’s a Better Way than Cascade Voting

There’s a reason most experience the thrill of whitewater rafting with a seasoned guide. Rivers have forks, twists, and turns, and it helps to have someone along who can navigate them. In a tumultuous time for politics in the United States, leading election reform in a place like Juneau, Alaska, can feel much the same: it’s exhilarating to be out front leading a movement, but there are certain routes you must know not to take—lest you find yourself stuck in a hole or plunging off a cliff. 

The Juneau Assembly recently shoved off on a quest to bring ranked choice voting to local elections. For one-winner races like picking a mayor or single assembly member, Juneau is sailing smoothly toward a tried-and-tested model that gives voters real choices and encourages candidates to work together. For multi-winner contests, though, which include those for school board and the occasional two-person assembly race, the Assembly has steered toward a little-known variation: cascade voting, which can be as precipitous as its name implies. 

The cascade method might look from a distance to be a shortcut to the ultimate destination: fairer, more representative elections. But Australians, Mainers, and Utahns have explored the same passage and capsized or hastily reversed course, a sign of treacherous waters ahead. Luckily for Juneau, a better route is just a few paddle strokes away: single transferable vote, also known as proportional ranked choice voting, offers a safe and charted path forward.  

Wait, what is cascade voting and what’s wrong with it? 

Cascade voting (also known as “block preferential” or “multi-pass” voting) looks like ranked choice voting. It sounds like ranked choice voting. But instead of driving better governance and incentivizing more positive campaigns like ranked choice voting, the cascade method can distort election outcomes. Voters outside the mainstream can find their voices locked out of governing entirely. And in some cases, even candidates with majority support can lose their seats.  

On the surface, cascade voting appears to be little more than a version of ranked choice voting that elects multiple candidates (like three people to fill open seats on a local school board) rather than just one (like a legislator or mayor). Just as in a regular ranked contest, voters select candidates in order of preference. Once votes are in, officials eliminate the worst performers and transfer their votes to voters’ next choices until someone wins a majority.  

But it’s after the first winner that the cascade model veers off course. To determine the winner of the second seat, election administrators count all the ballots again, ignoring rankings for the winner. Simply put, so long as they ranked their ballots, voters who elected the first-round winner get just as much weight in choosing the runner-up. The process repeats until there are enough winners to fill all of the seats up for election on the body in question. 

While it may seem like a simple procedural tweak to accommodate multi-winner contests, cascade voting can have disastrous consequences for representation. Since the same voters get to elect multiple candidates, votes tend to “trickle up” to candidates who are most like the initial winner. Take Australia, for example, which once used the cascade model for its senate. It almost always produced single-party delegation sweeps, overrepresenting the most popular party with no representation for anyone else.  

At the local level, things got even worse. In Australian cities, minority parties figured out how to manipulate the process and prevent those in the majority from winning at all. It’s no wonder, then, that one contemporary reformer called it a “blockhead system.” In 1948, the country phased out cascade voting. 

Closer to home, few, if any, would recommend following the Cascade route. For example, in Utah, the city councils of both Payson and Vineyard opted out of cascade voting in 2025 after adopting it on a trial basis six years earlier. And while Portland, Maine, used the cascade model as a one-time stopgap to elect a charter commission, residents overwhelmingly approved a fairer replacement the following year.   

Better elections await Juneau, Alaska—with a dilemma in the details 

In 2024, residents of Juneau, Alaska, poured out in droves to save the state’s model ranked choice voting law. Voters at the capital’s doorstep saw firsthand how ranked choice voting encouraged broader governing coalitions to work together. So perhaps it was only natural that the Juneau Assembly kicked off its own venture to bring ranked choice voting home in March of 2025.  

The Alaska constitution, state statutes, and Juneau’s own charter give the assembly the power to determine procedures for local elections via ordinance. And to be clear, for mayoral contests and most assembly races, the familiar Alaska model of ranked choice voting is a natural and positive fit, just as it has been in statewide general elections for governor or state legislature.  

But, as the city’s legal department wrote in its initial review, a key detail needs ironing out. Ranked choice voting is designed to pick a single winner with majority support. The Assembly would have to find another option for elections with more than one winner, which occur every October when two or three school board seats are on the ballot. And on rare occasions, contests for the Assembly itself also have multiple winners.¹

Juneau’s current method for addressing multi-winner elections is bloc voting, a less-than-ideal model that can overrepresent majority opinions on government bodies while denying others a seat at the table. In partisan elections, this often means one party wins all the seats. 

But cascade voting, which is among the options from which assembly members could choose for multi-winner contests, isn’t any better. In fact, if history’s any indication, it could be even worse. So where might the Assembly aim its sights instead? 

Navigating around the cascades with single transferable vote 

A charter commission in Portland, Maine, once found itself facing a quandary similar to Juneau’s. The city had already adopted ranked choice voting, but didn’t have a permanent solution for what to do when multiple seats from one body came up for a vote at the same time.  

Ultimately, the commission recommended single transferable vote, also known as proportional ranked choice voting, which retains the benefits of single-winner ranked choice voting—majority support, reduced negativity, spoiler-proof elections—while ensuring fairer representation in multi-winner contests. The measure was successful, winning over 64 percent of voters in the 2022 election, and became city law. (If the Portland, Maine, story conjures up a sense of déjà vu, it’s probably because Portland, Oregon, recently started using the same model. It’s been going very well.) 

Instead of picking the top finishers one by one (as with cascade voting), winners in single transferable vote elections must cross a threshold of support. In simple terms, it means that in a three-seat contest, if about a third of aligned voters support a particular individual, that candidate is likely to win one of the seats—not zero, as can happen under cascade or bloc voting. 

While it’s slightly more complex on the back end, administrators have implemented single transferable vote without issue, and cities have created resources to help voters understand the process. Voters in cities that use this proportional model get a wide variety of choices and win more accurate representation.  

For Juneau voters specifically, who are already acquainted with Alaska’s ranked elections, single transferable vote would require little additional explanation. Voters would simply rank their candidates just as they would in any single-winner ranked election. Juneau already has the necessary infrastructure in place to implement single transferable vote for its school board and the rare two-person assembly race, and the city could uplift educational materials to ensure the experience is smooth sailing.  

Across Cascadia, where it’s an option, adopting single-winner ranked choice voting is undeniably a safe and charted path forward. But in the cases of multi-winner elections, like some school board, council, or assembly contests, history indicates that cascade voting could drop representation into troubled waters. Advocates in Juneau and elsewhere could instead build on the positives of ranked choice voting and navigate toward single transferable vote, which aligns with the north star of election reform—giving all voters a fair shot at a voice in local government.