Nick Troiano was in his early 20s when he began jousting with a very large windmill — the federal debt. First, he helped launch an advocacy group to reduce the budget deficit. Next came an unsuccessful bid for Congress as an independent. Then he led an organization backing moderate candidates.
Blocked at every turn, Troiano concluded that the only way to keep the country from going broke was to fix its broken political system. Politics and political candidates answered only to extreme views, it seemed, leaving average Americans outside looking in.
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Nick Troiano was in his early 20s when he began jousting with a very large windmill — the federal debt. First, he helped launch an advocacy group to reduce the budget deficit. Next came an unsuccessful bid for Congress as an independent. Then he led an organization backing centrist candidates.
Blocked at every turn, Troiano concluded that the only way to keep the country from going broke was to fix its broken political system. Politics and political candidates answered only to extreme views, it seemed, leaving average Americans outside looking in.
Coming soon from the Chronicle: the nonprofit leaders who want to build trust in elections
“It’s theincentive structure of our political system that’s fueling political division and political dysfunction,” he says.
Today, Troiano leads Unite America, one of dozens of nonprofits that aim to upend how Americans vote. Funders and advocacy groups have long backed efforts to protect voting rights, educate and register voters, and limit money’s influence in campaigns. But now comes a host of groups — many established since 2016 — that believe the election system itself is a cancer fueling polarization through gerrymandered districts, legislative gridlock, and contests in which the outcome is a foregone conclusion.
Advocates say their favored replacements — ranked-choice voting, open primaries, fusion voting, and others — reduce partisanship and increase choices for voters. Measures to revamp election structures (and defend change already passed into law) are on the ballot in more than a dozen states and cities in 2024, including Arizona, Colorado, and Missouri. Advocates hope to capitalize on major victories in New York City, which introduced ranked-choice voting in 2021, and Alaska, which adopted open primaries and ranked-choice general elections in 2020.
Clockwise from top: Nick Troiano, Unite America; George Cheung, More Equitable Democracy; Danielle Allen, Harvard; Meredith Sumpter, FairVote; Lee Drutman, New America.
These ideas aren’t new. They have kicked around in think tanks and with a small number of organizations for decades, says Stephen Heintz, president of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Recently, however, money and energy have been flowing more freely to advocacy and grassroots groups. “People have recognized that those spaces are essential to making progress, and they have invested more in them.”
The budget for Unite America, a funder intermediary, could reach $70 million this year, 10 times its size five years ago, Troiano says. The budget for RepresentUs, which backs state campaigns for open primaries and ranked choice, has more than tripled since 2018, according to its tax filings.
Much of the money and energy comes from progressive and center-left funders, with the center-right showing up in small numbers. Several organizations have affiliated 501(c)(4) organizations through which they support individual candidates and political activity.
Explore ideas, conversations, and solutions for a fractured country.
Critics of alternative voting systems — particularly ranked-choice voting — say they lead to confusion for voters and faulty outcomes. Democratic and Republican party leaders have aligned against the proposed change, although conservatives have taken the lead. Six GOP-leaning states — Florida, Idaho, Kentucky, Montana, South Dakota, and Tennessee — have banned ranked-choice voting in the past two years, and Alaskans will vote in November on whether to repeal its new voting system.
Many see structural election change as a stalking horse to give Democrats more power. Ken Cuccinelli — a former Trump official at the Department of Homeland Security and now head of theElection Transparency Initiative —describes ranked-choice voting as “disastrous” and a scheme “by the Left to destroy election integrity and preserve the status quo.”
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Funders include major grant makers like Arnold Ventures, Pierre Omidyar’s Democracy Fund, and Rockefeller Brothers. Smaller backers include the Klarman Family Foundation and the Stupski Foundation.
The Chronicle asked more than a dozen experts and advocates to identify top 501(c)(3) nonprofit leaders who champion structural change in elections. This list is not comprehensive and was assembled with an eye to capturing a range of people and approaches.
Note: The Chronicle will soon compile a similar list of nonprofit leaders who are working to build trust in elections.
Fusion voting. Multiple parties can nominate the same candidate. Advocates argue this will force candidates to broaden their outreach and platforms to build multiparty coalitions.
Independent redistricting. A body other than the state legislature draws the lines for congressional and state legislative districts. Proponents say this will eliminate gerrymandering, in which politicians create districts to favor their party.
Open primaries. Voters can pick candidates from any political party, regardless of their registered political affiliation or whether they even have an affiliation.
Proportional representation. Parties gain seats in proportion to the number of votes cast for them. Under such an electoral system — popular in several European countries — congressional districts might send multiple members to the House of Representatives.
Ranked-choice voting. Voters identify their top candidate then rank secondary picks — second, third, fourth, and so on. If no candidate receives a majority of first-choice votes, the one with the fewest is eliminated from the race and the votes are re-tabulated with his or her votes redistributed to others.
George Cheung,More Equitable Democracy. Launched in 2018, Cheung’s organization promotes ranked-choice voting and proportional representation as a means to increase representation and political power for people of color and underrepresented communities. Cheung is a former Joyce Foundation program director and founder of Equal Rights Washington, a statewide LGBTQ advocacy organization.
Todd Connor,Veterans for All Voters. The former U.S. Navy lieutenant, worried by polarization, started the organization three years ago to recruit military veteran volunteers to work for open primaries and other structural change. Half of vets are political independents, according to the group, a set of voters shut out of closed primary systems. Former presidential candidate Andrew Yang pointed to a commercial by Marine veteran Mike Escobar as a key to a successful 2022 open-primary ballot initiative in Nevada.
Katherine Gehl,Institute for Political Innovation. Gehl, a philanthropist and former CEO of her family’s food business, founded the Chicago organization to promote change to what she considers a broken political system. She’s a proponent of “final four voting,” in which candidates compete in an all-comers primary, with the top four vote-getters advancing to a ranked-choice general election.
Matt Germer, R Street Institute. R Street, a think tank promoting free-market solutions and limited government, is the rare conservative organization promoting structural election change. It counters the argument that ranked-choice voting and open primaries are bad for Republicans. Germer, director of the institute’s governance program, says voters feel shut out and frustrated by the current system.
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Nathan Lockwood,Rank the Vote. The software engineer and industry exec co-founded the group in 2020 after leading a volunteer Massachusetts organization that put ranked-choice voting on a statewide ballot in just three years. Now with revenue of more than $1 million, It’s working in dozens of states helping activists build grassroots support for legislation.
Joshua Graham Lynn, RepresentUs
Joshua Graham Lynn, RepresentUs. Lynn is CEO and co-founder of the 12-year-old organization, which broadly defines “corruption” in elections as anything that limits the influence of average Americans. The group is active in ranked-choice, open primary, and anti-gerrymandering ballot-measure campaigns in more than a dozen states and cities. Lynn is a marketing and communications pro, and the group calls on a slate of Hollywood heavy-hitters (Michael Douglas, Jennifer Lawrence, Mark Ruffalo) for funds and cultural influence. Revenue in 2022 was $10 million.
John Opdycke,Open Primaries. Before founding the organization in 2009, Opdycke spent a couple decades in politics backing independent parties and candidates — including Mike Bloomberg when the media mogul won his first New York mayor’s race in 2001. Open Primaries is working with groups in more than a dozen cities and states, including the presidential battlegrounds of Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
Maria Perez and Grace Ramsey, Democracy Rising. The organization — which Perez and Ramsey founded in 2020 — works where ranked-choice voting has been adopted to help jurisdictions make needed changes and educate voters and candidates. Perez, an immigrant from Ecuador, has worked with Common Cause and FairVote; Ramsey is a former FairVote organizer. The two believe ranked-choice voting can increase the representation and power of women of color.
Miles Rapaport, 100% Democracy. Lots of nonprofits work to boost voter turnout; Rapaport — a former president of Common Cause and Demos — would require every American to vote, in part to bring less partisan voters to the ballot box. Mandatory voting — often called universal voting — is practiced in more than two dozen countries, including Australia and Belgium.
Rob Richie and Meredith Sumpter,FairVote. Richie co-founded the organization in 1992, and Sumpter took over as CEO this spring. The group was integral to the movement before there was a movement. It helped lead the 2016 fight to make Maine the first state in the nation to adopt ranked-choice voting in state and federal elections.
Cynthia Richie Terrell,RepresentWomen. Richie Terrell’s organization argues that ranked-choice voting helps weaken the electoral advantage enjoyed by incumbents — an advantage that makes it tough to achieve gender equality in representation. After New York adopted ranked-choice voting in 2021, women became a majority on the city council for the first time. Richie Terrell, a co-founder of FairVote with Rob Richie, started RepresentWomen in 2018.
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