The Center for Election Science
The Center for Election Science is an American 501 electoral reform advocacy organization. It advocates for cardinal voting methods such as approval voting and score voting. Its goal is to implement approval voting in at least 5 cities with 50,000 people by 2022.
CES argues that approval voting is superior to other proposed electoral reforms, such as ranked choice voting; it says approval voting will elect more consensus winners, which it contends traditional runoffs and instant-runoff ranked methods don't allow, because they eliminate candidates with broad support but low first-preference support.History
CES was founded in 2011 by Aaron Hamlin and Clay Shentrup. It helped pass approval voting in the city of Fargo, North Dakota during the 2018 elections. It received a $1.8 million grant from the Open Philanthropy Project in February 2019, and is considered to be a form of effective altruism. It is currently seeking to implement approval voting + runoff in St. Louis, Missouri with the help of St. Louis Approves, and has donated $75,000 so far to that campaign.
