Skip to content

A short history of STAR Voting

STAR is a genuinely new method — younger than the smartphone. It was proposed in 2014, named in its current form a few years later, and has spread mostly through party and organizational elections while its municipal ballot measures have so far fallen short. Here's the timeline, with the honest caveat that the fullest origin story comes from STAR's own advocates.

Where it came from

STAR grew out of Oregon's electoral-reform scene. In 2014, after an Oregon campaign for a "Unified Primary" (an approval ballot with a top-two runoff), Mark Frohnmayer conceived the Equal Vote Coalition and proposed a new method he first called Score Runoff Voting (SRV). The core idea was to bolt an automatic runoff onto ordinary score voting — using the runoff to blunt the strategic incentive to exaggerate scores. (Frohnmayer is credited as STAR's primary progenitor, with Clay Shentrup of the Center for Election Science; see who's who in voting reform.)

Around 2017, modeling work from the Center for Election Science — the kind of Voter Satisfaction Efficiency simulation that scores methods on how happy they leave the electorate — reportedly showed the score-plus-runoff design outperforming both RCV-IRV and Approval, and found a 0–5 ballot worked about as well as the original wider scale. The coalition adopted the simpler 0–5 star ballot and the name we use today: STAR — Score Then Automatic Runoff. By its first public ballot appearance in 2018 it was campaigning under that name.

Timeline

Year What happened
Oct 2014 Mark Frohnmayer proposes Score Runoff Voting (SRV); the Equal Vote Coalition forms out of the Unified Primary campaign.
~2017 Modeling favors the score-plus-runoff design; the coalition adopts the 0–5 ballot and the name STAR.
Nov 2018 Lane County, Oregon — Measure 20-290, STAR's first ballot measure. It failed, 47.6% yes to 52.4% no.
2019 Equal Vote Coalition incorporates as a 501(c)(3) (founders Sara Wolk & Brian Skinner). The Multnomah County Democratic Party adopts STAR for internal elections.
2020 STAR Voting Action (a 501(c)(4) advocacy arm) is formed. The Independent Party of Oregon uses STAR in its primary — its first statewide binding use; per Frohnmayer, ~90% of voters used the full 0–5 range and the star (approval) ratings tracked public approval polling. The Democratic Party of Oregon uses it for national-convention delegate elections. A Eugene referral dies on a 4–4 city-council deadlock.
2022–23 The Libertarian Party of Oregon authorizes STAR for internal elections.
Nov 2024 Oakridge, Oregon measure fails (~46% yes).

Where it stands

The pattern so far: STAR has been adopted widely for party and organizational elections — where a board or membership can just choose it — while government ballot measures have not yet passed, losing in Lane County (2018) and Oakridge (2024) and stalling in Eugene (2020). Its home base remains Oregon, though interest and pilot use have spread beyond it, and the free BetterVoting platform now lets anyone run a STAR election online.

That "not yet at the government level" is worth stating plainly rather than glossing — it's the honest counterweight to STAR's strong showing in simulations and its enthusiastic organizational uptake.

A note on sources

The richest origin narrative is the coalition's own Equal Vote — Origins page; because Equal Vote is STAR's advocacy organization, this library leans on it for the story and dates but cross-checks the neutral facts (measure results, adoptions) against Wikipedia. The two agree on the arc; they differ a little on exactly when the "STAR" name was settled (2017 vs. 2018), which is why the timeline above hedges that one date.

Sources