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A group seeking to bring ranked choice voting to Michigan is ending its effort to place a constitutional amendment on the ballot for the 2026 election, but organizers say they may try again for 2028.
In a Monday evening email to volunteers, Rank MI Vote’s statewide field co-directors Kate De Jong and Kate Grabowsky said the group is “pausing signature gathering efforts, but we aren’t pausing the campaign to bring ranked choice voting to Michigan.”
Organizers needed to collect 446,198 valid voter signatures in a 180-day window to make the 2026 general election ballot, but it appears they were falling short. Earlier this month, WLNS News reported the group was more than 200,000 signatures short of their goal.
“We can’t depend on a triggering event that would super-charge our petition drive,” De Jong and Grabowsky wrote in the email to campaign volunteers.
Instead, they said they would prepare for “a second launch in April 2027” to make the 2028 ballot.
In a statement to Bridge Michigan, Rank MI Vote executive director Pat Zabawa acknowledged the group is “pausing” signature collection but didn’t elaborate on the organization’s future plans.
“We are leaving all options on the table for the future of our movement,” Zabawa said in the statement. “Our over 2,500 volunteers are fully committed to lowering the temperature of our politics while increasing voter turnout through ranked choice voting.”
Rank MI Vote had begun planning and organizing years before beginning a ballot drive, but the group faced significant political headwinds from the onset of their campaign.
The Michigan Association of County Clerks, which represents many local election officials, came out in opposition to the proposal earlier this year, as did a number of conservative election-related organizations.
Voters had rejected similar proposals in several other states in 2024 and conservative groups opposed to the reform appeared poised to spend heavily against its passage in Michigan.
Ranked choice voting, sometimes called instant-runoff voting, allows voters to rank candidates in order of preference.
Initially only voters’ top choice is counted, but if no candidate has an immediate majority, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated.
All the voters who chose the eliminated candidate then have their second-place votes distributed to the remaining contestants. The process repeats until one candidate has more than 50% of the vote.
Rank MI Vote’s proposal summary language had been approved by the Michigan Board of State Canvassers in June and they spent months collecting signatures statewide. Unlike some other ballot proposals in recent years, they were a volunteer-driven effort and didn’t utilize paid petition circulators.
Zabawa pledged that the group’s “work is just getting started.”
