Approve every candidate you support. Not just one.
More Choice
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Add your name now, and we'll follow up once the official petition is ready to sign.
When primary elections force voters to choose only one candidate, voters often settle — or risk “wasting” their vote — and the candidates who advance to the general election are not always the ones who best represent the electorate.
Approval Voting simply eliminates the choose-one rule, giving voters the freedom to choose all the candidates they like and forcing candidates to earn broad support to advance. Whoever reaches the general has earned it, not benefitted from a divided field.
Same ballot. One sentence changes everything.
Try marking both ballots below with candidates you'd support in a five-way primary. Notice how the first ballot forces a single choice and how the second one leaves you free to choose one or several.
Vote for one
Selecting a second candidate is not allowed.
Vote for AS MANY as you approve of
No limit. Support as many as you genuinely want.
In our current system, needing to guess who's “electable" can pressure any voter to abandon their favorite candidates, even when they have no competition for their party's support. Approval Voting removes that pressure everywhere.
Choose-one voting can't tell the difference between “unpopular" and “divided."
When several appealing candidates run, choose-one voting splits their support instead of adding it up. Voters abandon candidates they actually prefer for whoever seems most “electable," and the general election ends up reflecting who voters feared losing to, not who they wanted.
This isn't hypothetical. St. Louis, Missouri lived this exact problem before switching to Approval Voting, and the numbers show it plainly.
was enough to win St. Louis's 2017 choose-one mayoral primary outright, with support fractured across three other candidates.
St. Louis primary voters approved more than one candidate in 2025, proof that “just pick one" was never the whole picture of what voters wanted.
of voters who supported lesser-known 2025 St. Louis candidates also approved of at least one other candidate — preferences choose-one voting would have erased entirely.
An election should measure how much support a candidate actually has.
Approval Voting does exactly that. By measuring overlapping support, it provides more choice, creates fair competition for broad support, and delivers better representation.
Mark every candidate you approve of
No limit, and no obligation. Just vote your conscience — mark one candidate or several, whoever you genuinely want to support.
Approvals add up, they don't divide
Overlapping support among candidates gets counted instead of split apart. A candidate with real, broad appeal is no longer penalized just because that support overlaps with others.
The most-approved candidates advance
Because voters have unrestricted choice in the primary, the candidates with the widest genuine voter support actually advance, and the winner arrives with a real mandate to represent more than just their base.
St. Louis already made this switch.
Approval Voting has already been used for municipal and legislative offices in Fargo, St. Louis, and Utah's Senate District 11. St. Louis in particular also pairs Approval Voting with an open primary that feeds into a top-two general, the same structure this reform would bring to California. St. Louis voters adopted this structure for municipal elections in 2020. Every election since has shown the same pattern: candidates who once looked narrowly supported turned out to have much broader appeal once the ballot let voters show it.
Winning share of the vote in St. Louis's fractured, seven-candidate mayoral primary.
St. Louis voters approved switching their municipal primary elections to Approval Voting.
The leading mayoral candidate advanced with broad approval, up from just 30% in the fractured 2017 primary race she didn't win.
St. Louis voters appreciated Approval Voting’s simplicity — clear and easy to use, no learning curve.
This finishes the job California's open primary already started.
Every candidate for state and congressional office still appears on one familiar ballot. Every registered voter, regardless of party affiliation, can still vote for any of them. This reform simply gives voters the freedom to support all the candidates they like in the primary. Nothing else about how California elects its leaders changes.
What this act does not do
- Does not bring back closed, party primaries
- Does not restrict who can run or who can vote
- Does not touch the ballot layout or how the general election works
- Does not require new voting machines or software
What this act does
- Gives primary voters the freedom to choose all candidates they like
- Reveals overlapping support that choose-one voting hides
- Advances the most widely approved candidates
- Gives winners a stronger mandate to represent more voters
Ready to bring Approval Voting to California?
Pledge your support and we'll follow up with next steps. Still have questions? Answers to the ones we hear most are just below.
Good questions deserve straight answers.
No. If you only want to support one candidate, mark just that one. Your ballot works exactly like it does today. Approval Voting doesn’t ask anything different of you unless you want it to. The reform isn’t about changing how you personally vote; it’s about giving every voter the freedom to do more if they want to, so that primaries as a whole measure support more accurately. Whether you mark one candidate or five, your vote counts fully either way.
Help bring Approval Voting to California.
Every pledge moves this closer to the 2028 ballot. Add your name below, and we'll follow up once the official petition is ready to sign.