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.
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, over-representing 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...

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