On November 8 voters will consider a wide range of state and local ballot measures. Here are some that relate to voting and election reform.

Nevada voters in Question 3 will decide whether to join Alaska in adopting the innovation known as Final Five voting (Final Four in Alaska), in which a single all-party qualifying-round primary is followed up by a ranked choice voting (RCV) general election. As I’ve argued, while RCV tends to get more attention, it’s the first of these paired reforms that could pose the more systematic challenge to current practice by offering a way to sidestep “some of the manifest problems with today’s party primary system, in particular the dominant role of zealously motivated base voters.”

Ranked choice voting standing on its own, in what I call its plain-vanilla or “instant-runoff” version, will be considered by voters in ten jurisdictions, among them Seattle, Evanston, Ill., Portland, Me., and Fort Collins, Colo., as well as two populous counties spanning the Columbia River, Multnomah (Portland), Ore., and Clark County, Wash. In general, RCV has been popular with voters in the jurisdictions that have adopted it in recent years, including New York City and Maine.

Voters in Portland the Oregon city, as distinct from the surrounding county, will consider adopting a different RCV format, multi-winner single-transferable-vote (STV) for city council seats. Long employed in Cambridge, Mass., as well as Australia and Ireland, STV is somewhat more complicated to tabulate than the instant-runoff variety of RCV and tends (unlike instant-runoff) to yield results with an element of proportional representation, hence its nickname “proportional RCV.” Note that the Portland changes are being offered up as part of a sweeping overhaul of city government structure — described by John Ketcham in City Journal here – that would replace the city’s Progressive-era commission form of government. Because some of the other proposed changes are momentous, the vote won’t offer a clean up-or-down choice on the STV idea itself.

Voters in Baltimore will consider (Question K) whether to adopt term limits for the offices of mayor and city council, city council president, and comptroller. Several populous Maryland counties, including the suburban D.C. counties of Prince George’s and Montgomery, already have term limits. Dylan Diggs considers the pros and cons of term limits for Baltimore in a paper for the Maryland Public Policy Institute.

Alabama voters will consider whether to prohibit changes to election law made within six months of a general election, Louisiana voters in a December vote will consider whether to explicitly reserve the ballot to citizens only, Arizona voters will consider voter ID together with some other security-related election proposals, and Connecticut voters will decide whether to join all but five other states in allowing early in-person voting. Finally, Arizona and Arkansas voters will consider proposals that would curb use of the direct democracy process itself by requiring supermajorities for many ballot measures and, in Arizona’s case, imposing some other new constraints. Earlier this year South Dakota voters rejected a proposed 60 percent supermajority requirement for ballot measures that would raise taxes or require significant new state spending.