Friends --
The Speaker of the House gets around 1,200 bills that representatives have filed, and has assigned about 300 of them to committee so far. HB 1137 isn't yet one of them, and time is getting short. The bill doesn't get anywhere unless it's assigned to the elections committee.
The bill would bring Ranked Choice Voting to elections in St. Louis County as a pilot program. Are you wondering why we in the Kansas City area should care what happens on the other side of the state, or why we should get excited about doing it in one county rather than the whole state? The answer is that the election officials in that county are amendable. One of them even showed up to testify in favor of the RCV legislation in the last hearings on it, so he's a strong supporter. Rep. Dan Stacy has rounded up quite a bit of support from civic groups and other legislators there.
But the entire state's associate of election clerks has passed a resolution against RCV. At both hearings on the topic they've sent people to testify against it. We've been working with them face-to-face at their two conferences last year, but there's still more work to be done. Dan Stacy has gotten their leadership to agree to "call off the dogs" for a bill that only covers St. Louis County; without this opposition, the merits should allow the bill to go through. One of the clerks' major concerns is practical: would RCV work in the machines? Would the machines be able to communicate with each other? Just adding up votes isn't as complicated and can work with a calculator, but with RCV, the machines need to be coordinated.
Once a pilot project proves successful, their fears diminish, and we have a clearer path to getting RCV in all of Missouri without opposition from a group that's powerful in election policy.