Keith Maben

Perhaps the next stop in the journey to election reform is not a sweeping national victory, but a small-town success, just like Ashtabula a century ago.

As they look to regroup and identify new reform targets, Hoag’s success shows that a bottom-up approach, focusing relentlessly on local reform, may be a successful formula.

Election reformers suffered disheartening defeats at the ballot box in 2024 as they tried and failed to bring ranked-choice voting and top-four/five primaries to many new states. But maybe they were looking in the wrong place.

As America faces a crossroads, with polarization and partisanship ripping the country apart at its seams, Hoag’s election reform model, and his affinity for local activism and reform, might have the answers we need to solve our impending crises.

National parties and large movements drive political action, and the local/personal elements of politics have faded. Hoag showed that an eight-person meeting can turn into a national movement. He showed that convincing policymakers of your ideas, even just a small-town charter board, truly matters.

Over a century later, Hoag ‘s ideas have returned in full force. From Alaska to New York, some of the highest-profile contests in the country have used ranked-choice-voting systems. Despite the eventual success of his policies, Hoag’s model of reform still seems bizarre in today’s political world.

Hoag’s success was short-lived. The politicians who were most harmed by these systems worked to abolish them, and the coalition in favor of these reforms was weak, disorganized, and unable to stop them. By 1962, 23/24 cities with single transferable voting had repealed or abolished it.

One person, one day, two meetings, and a movement was launched. Word of Ashtabula’s successful new system spread around the country, and Boulder, Kalamazoo, Cleveland, and Cincinnati followed suit, proving to the nation that Hoag's and the Proportional Representation League's ideas truly worked.

He was so persuasive that they brought him to the Ashtabula Charter Commission, which was in the middle of revising its charter. Hoag then convinced the commissioners to adopt his proposal. Notably, it included a single transferable voting, a precursor to what we now call ranked-choice voting.

Within hours of his arrival, he seized hold of a man and insisted that he bring his friends to an impromptu public meeting. This grew to an eight-person hearing where Hoag enthusiastically preached the benefits and importance of proportional representation election systems.

"Town" would be a more appropriate description of this small municipality with a population of just under 20,000. Yet Hoag, who knew nothing about the city, had never been there before, and had likely never planned to ever be there, used Ashtabula’s size to his advantage.

In 1912, Hoag was stuck on a one-day train layover between New York City and Cleveland. He decided on a whim to turn this delay into a national political movement. He asked the conductor for a ticket to the next major city and was handed a ticket to Ashtabula, Ohio.

Hoag was a proponent of bringing down reform to the most fundamental units of government. Of course, he reflected the broader Progressive-era trend of city-level reform. But he took it a step further by introducing reform on the most personal level possible: directly to voters.

As secretary of the Proportional Representation League, Hoag was a progressive-era equivalent of a modern “think-tank policy wonk”. Despite authoring many important texts, most notably the aptly named Proportional Representation (1924) his most important contribution was his method of reform.

In 2024, millions were spent on ballot propositions on ranked-choice voting and top-four/five primaries in states across the country. They were pitched as solutions to partisanship and polarization. Yet these supposedly novel reforms are rooted in the century-old work of one man: CG Hoag.

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