Ranked choice voting, from ballots to back rooms.
RCV Clips is a practical, interview-driven show centered on ranked choice voting. Its conversations move from risk-limiting audits to student government elections, local organizing, legislative strategy, and even RuPaul's Drag Race ranking mechanics.
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RCV Clips is a focused public-affairs show about ranked choice voting as it is used, explained, audited, organized around, and argued for. Its center of gravity is practical. Conversations keep returning to what happens after the idea leaves the white paper and enters student elections, city primaries, legislative sessions, voter guides, and audit procedures. Chris Hughes appears in several recent episodes as a member of the Resource Center staff, guiding conversations with people working inside or near the ranked choice voting field. Kelly appears in earlier excerpts in the same staff role. The show can be precise without becoming sealed off from ordinary examples. In one episode, LeVar Henderson talks about LSU student government elections and the realities of campaigning while balancing school. In another, Chris Donnay connects ranked ballots, RuPaul's Drag Race, Borda count, and small-group decision problems. That range matters. RCV Clips is not only about elections with official machinery behind them; it is also interested in how ranking choices behaves when the voter pool is small, the options are personal, or the stakes are cultural rather than governmental. The policy side is substantial. Michelle Whitaker discusses ranked choice voting legislation, relationship-building, prime sponsors, and the short window of a legislative session. Sally Hudson brings proportional RCV into a conversation about Charlottesville, Virginia, power sharing, city history, and multi-seat outcomes. Grace Ramsey's episode turns toward voter education, candidate information, community organizing, and the difficulty of reaching people with reliable local election material. Stephanie Ginoza's appearance gives the show a technical lane, defining risk-limiting audits and explaining how election outcomes can be checked. The EAC conversation with Tom Hicks adds federal election administration context while keeping room for a lighter opening question. The result is a show for listeners who want the machinery as much as the message. It explains ranked choice voting through implementation details, not just advocacy language.
Made for: Suits a listener who wants election reform explained through administration, organizing, legislation, audits, and concrete local examples. It is especially useful for someone who cares how ranked ballots actually work once real people have to run the election.
What sets it apart: RCV Clips stands apart by treating ranked choice voting as an implementation problem as much as a political idea. The show moves comfortably between technical election processes, advocacy strategy, voter education, and unexpected ranking examples from pop culture and small-group decisions.
Join the Ranked Choice Voting Resource Center for our monthly podcast, where we cover ranked choice voting election administration topics ranging from drafting legislation to election certification. We'll have brief interviews with team members of the Ranked Choice Voting Resource Center, election administrators who have run RCV elections, and more, to tell us about the resources available through the RCVRC and best practices learned from running RCV elections.
Drag Race meets Charlottesville's city council ballot when you want voting theory put to work.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A campus election system becomes legible through the people and procedures that keep it running.
RCV Clips uses LSU's student government elections to make ranked choice voting feel less abstract. The episode follows how the system moved from a student-backed ballot initiative into ordinary campus election work, with LeVar Henderson, LSU's student government president and a…
A drag competition makes ranked ballots feel concrete, practical, and a little messier than theory.
This February 2026 episode of RCV Clips gives ranked ballots a tidy pop-culture pressure test, using RuPaul's Drag Race's Rate a Queen twist to ask what changes when competitors rank one another and those rankings set the top and bottom.
A Maryland election-reform conversation about the relationships and timing that help legislation move.
RCV Clips frames legislation as relationship work, following Michelle Whitaker as Greenbelt's advance of Proportional RCV feeds into Maryland's 90-day legislative sprint.
A Charlottesville primary turns proportional RCV into a concrete test of how two city council seats are distributed.
RCV Clips uses Charlottesville's first proportional ranked-choice vote this year to show how election rules can shape representation. Chris Hughes talks with Sally Hudson, Executive Director of Ranked Choice Virginia, former Virginia General Assembly member, and newest RCVRC…
A clear, practical conversation about voter education, candidate information, and ranked choice voting.
Ranked choice voting comes through here as a voter-education problem as much as a ballot-design problem. Chris Hughes talks with Grace Ramsey, co-director of Democracy Rising, about teaching voters around election reform, her route from Wisconsin and the University of Minnesota…
LeVar Henderson says LSU's ranked choice voting races can turn on three rounds of counting, including one 2022 ticket that lost the third round by 34 votes after leading the first two.
["Chris Hughes of the Ranked Choice Voting Resource Center talks with mathematician and data scientist Chris Dene about how RuPaul's Drag Race's 'Raid a Queen' twist turns queens' rankings into an election problem.", "Dene shows that the show's published season 17 and season 18 rankings line up with Borda count after he tests the ballots in Vote Kit.", "He walks through night-one results for Juicy Love Dion, Mia Starr, and Sierra Mist, then explains why Sierra Mist's night-two strategy centers on keeping Jane Dont out of the bottom.", "The episode also compares the show's strategic voting to Portland, Maine's 2021 at-large council tie, Portland, Oregon's tie-breaking procedures, and Nauru's Dowdall system."]
["Maryland's 90-day legislative session forces advocates to track January 14, crossover day, and the April sine die deadline at the same time.", "Michelle Whitaker says Greenbelt's proportional RCV win makes it the first city in Prince George's County and the first city in Maryland to advance PRCV, after Tacoma Park spent 20 years as the only RCV jurisdiction.", "She describes RCV Maryland's planning as a living plan built from debriefs, summer legislator meetings, coalition coordination with Common Cause and the League of Women Voters, and spreadsheets of committee assignments and support levels.", "The biggest lesson is that progress comes from small wins like hearings, unanimous votes, and new supporters, plus the trust built by showing up every day."]
Chris Hughes talks with Sally Hudson, the Executive Director of Ranked Choice Virginia and a former Virginia General Assembly member, about Charlottesville's first proportional ranked choice voting primary in June 2025.
Grace Ramsey says voter education works best when election reform is translated into ordinary life, not technical language, from apartment hunting analogies to neighborhood forums.
Kelly Goss and Chris Hughes open RCV Clips’ September 2025 season premiere by announcing a return to ranked choice voting fundamentals.
Charlottesville will use proportional ranked choice voting in its June 17 Democratic primary, where three candidates are competing for two city council seats.
In March 2025, Redondo Beach held its first ranked choice voting election after 77% of voters approved the change in 2023.
Chris Hughes interviews Stephanie Ginoza about Boulder County's first ranked choice voting risk-limiting audit.
Commissioner Tom Hicks discusses the Election Assistance Commission's work and answers questions about ranked choice voting.
Kelly interviews David Green from Rank the Vote about grassroots organizing for Ranked Choice Voting and collaboration with the RCV Resource Center.
Kelly interviews new RCTab project director Matthew Rueberg and developer Armin Samy about recent updates and future plans for the RCTab software.
Kelly interviews Tad Milhorn about his Ranked Choice Voting platform RankedVote.co and his journey into election reform.