Now, some legislators in Olympia want to open the door to ranked-choice voting in cities and counties across Washington state.

Yet some Washington residents still view the method as an experiment they’d like to forget.

In 2006, voters in Pierce County, the state's second most populous county, embraced ranked-choice voting. Three years later, those same voters decided to repeal it.

Today, Pierce County’s experience still haunts many local politicians as a cautionary tale. Two-thirds of local voters who responded to county surveys in 2008 said they didn’t like the new system. And some people still blame it for helping elect an assessor-treasurer, Dale Washam, who many saw as unqualified.

“From my point of view it was a disaster when Pierce County tried ranked-choice voting, and it was not well designed,” said state Sen. Hans Zeiger, R-Puyallup.

Advocates of ranked-choice voting, however, say it is time to try again. They see the voting method as a potential solution to overly partisan politics, as well as a tool to reduce the negativity of campaigns.

With national surveys showing that Americans have become more politically polarized in recent years, proponents hope ranked-choice voting can help bridge some of those divides.

A bill receiving a public hearing Wednesday in Olympia aims to rekindle the experiment Pierce County abandoned a decade ago, but on a larger scale. House Bill 1722 would alter Washington state’s election rules to allow cities, counties and other jurisdictions to adopt ranked-choice voting at the local level.

The bill would work like this: For certain local races, voters would have as many as five candidates to choose from on their general election ballot, rather than the two that show up under the current system.

If no candidate wins more than 50 percent of the vote on the first count, the candidate with the lowest number of first-place votes would be knocked out. Voters who preferred the losing candidate would then have their votes redirected to their next-choice candidates — a process that would continue until a winner is determined.

"Ultimately, people are kind of pigeonholed in the general election to the most extreme candidates that got past the primary election from both parties," said state Sen. Guy Palumbo, D-Maltby, who is sponsoring the Senate version of the ranked-choice legislation.

Unlike the system in Maine, the Washington bill wouldn't institute ranked-choice voting statewide or for federal races — it instead would allow local governments to introduce the method if they so choose. But its backers say many of the goals are similar.

“It’s all about giving voters real choices, eliminating divisive campaigns, and letting people vote for their true choice — without fear of wasting their vote," Palumbo said.

More choices, fewer attacks

Proponents of ranked-choice voting say it can also help cut down on negative campaigning. Candidates theoretically have less incentive to attack their political rivals, because they may need to appeal to a wide range of voters to win.

“Candidates in ranked choice races quickly learn it is not effective to trash their opponent, because they actually want their opponent’s supporters to put them in second place,” said Lisa Ayrault, chair of FairVote Washington, which supports ranked-choice voting.

Research bears out that theory. Todd Donovan, a professor of political science at Western Washington University, said that in cities with ranked-choice voting, voters were happier with how their local campaigns were conducted and less likely to view them as negative. According to Donovan’s research, voters in cities with ranked-choice systems were less likely to report that candidates frequently criticized each other.

Ranked-choice voting can also reduce the possibility of a widely unpopular candidate winning an election, said Jack Santucci, an assistant teaching professor of political science at Drexel University. Even in races where many like-minded candidates may split the vote, the candidate that the most people can live with is the one who tends to prevail, once voters’ second and third-place preferences are factored in, he said.

“It elects the least disliked candidate,” Santucci said.