With the March 17 primaries finished and a potential mayoral election ahead, the City of Evanston and advocate groups continue to push for allowing ranked choice voting in Illinois, but still face strong headwinds and an extended timeline to get there.

Unofficial results show Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss won the Ninth Congressional District’s crowded Democratic primary with only 29.4% of the vote. Final results will be certified by April 7.

Biss is one of several area Democrats to win their primary without a majority of votes: Juliana Stratton and Donna Miller respectively won the U.S. Senate and Second Congressional District races with about 40%, Melissa Bean won the Eighth District race with 31.8%, and La Shawn Ford won in the Seventh District with 24.1%.

Nonprofit advocacy group FairVote argues these results are evidence that ranked choice voting is needed in races across the ballot. Senior Policy Analyst Rachel Hutchinson wrote in a recent analysis that since “most races are settled long before November” in Illinois thanks to seats being safely Democratic or Republican, using ranked choice in primaries would help improve representation.

“Since primary winners are effectively the ones who will hold office, it’s important that they have broad support,” Hutchinson wrote. “Ranked choice voting is a clear, proven way to achieve that.”

Ranked choice voting, also called instant runoff voting, lets voters rank multiple candidates in order of preference. If a candidate receives more than 50% of first-choice votes, they win the election outright; if not, the person with the fewest first-choice votes is eliminated, and their voters are shifted to their second choices. This process repeats until someone receives a true majority of all first-choice votes.

Alaska and Maine use ranked choice voting in federal and state elections, and numerous cities like New York, San Francisco and Minneapolis use it in local elections. Evanston led the charge in Illinois by approving a November 2022 referendum to use the system in city elections, and voters in Oak Park and Skokie have since passed similar ballot measures.

But implementation was stymied when the Cook County Clerk’s Office rejected Evanston’s referendum, arguing that ranked choice isn’t allowed by state law, leading nonprofit Reform for Illinois to sue the county clerk in July 2024. A circuit court judge initially struck down the referendum in November 2024, but an appellate judge later overturned this ruling and sent the case back for further review, advising the circuit court to specifically consider Evanston’s powers as a home rule city.

The lawsuit was officially refiled on Feb. 20, with the City of Evanston now attached as a co-plaintiff. How the case is or isn’t resolved over the next year could be critical for all three cities that passed referendums: Oak Park and Skokie intend to use ranked choice for the first time in April 2027, and Evanston could too if there’s a special mayoral election to replace Biss after he resigns to take office in Congress.

David Melton, an Evanston resident and Reform for Illinois’ board president, said that because of those incoming elections, the plaintiffs will pursue a quick briefing schedule. He said they hope to get a circuit court ruling in “the next two to three months” and any appellate ruling “well before the end of the year,” giving the three cities clarity on which voting system to use with enough time before their April 2027 elections.

He added that ranked choice would especially help with “large, multi-candidate races” like the federal primaries that ended last month. “That’s true not only for the Cook County suburbs that have passed it,” Melton said, “but would be true in Chicago and for other places as well.”

City of Evanston officials did not respond to a request for comment on the possibility of using ranked choice in a special mayoral election given the ongoing lawsuit.

FairVote’s Illinois chapter is not waiting on the lawsuit however, and instead wants to tackle the issue directly by passing a state law clarifying that ranked choice voting is legal. The organization is hosting a virtual statewide strategy meeting on April 12, and Executive Director Dan Ashurst said in a recent video that the group is “working with elected officials at all levels of government” on the issue.

A FairVote Illinois representative told the RoundTable that it’s too late for an existing ranked choice voting bill to move forward during the current legislative session, but they hope to make “a big push for it next year.” The representative said the group’s biggest goal is for the City of Chicago to use ranked choice in the 2031 election cycle, which will be “significantly easier” if the state legislature weighs in on the voting system’s legality.