Poll Shows Fargo Residents Support Approval Voting 2:1

By Aaron Hamlin

We’re all curious how approval voting stands in Fargo for the upcoming ballot measure. So over the last week, CES contracted a poll with Prime46, a local polling agency in North Dakota. Here’s what we have:

Yes: 43% No: 21% Not Sure: 36%

n=200 95% C.I. = +/- 7% Standard error = 3.5%

The most common comment other than that the respondent supported approval voting was that the respondent was unaware or didn’t know enough about approval voting. Though when the respondent had heard of approval voting, they tended to support it by a 2:1 ratio. That’s really awesome because it means people like what they hear about approval voting, but they just need to hear it. Given that we’re talking about approval voting compared to plurality voting, of course that’s the case!

Both CES and Reform Fargo have received quite a bit in earned media, which has helped with awareness. Now CES is doing more direct messaging outreach for its educational campaign. And Reform Fargo just started its direct advocacy messaging to support the measure all the way up until election day. While we’d prefer to have a smaller confidence interval than +/- 7% in our poll, we also want to make sure that we focus our spending more on getting people comfortable with approval voting.

If you’d like to see this measure pass, you can support our education efforts as well as volunteer with Reform Fargo to directly get the message out.

Thank you for helping to make history!

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Aaron Hamlin is a co-founder of CES, and served as its Executive Director until 2023.