STL Approves


 * see also: Advocacy/United States/Central, Missouri,



STL Approves  is an advocacy organization which promoted the use of approval voting for primary elections in St. Louis, Missouri. They facilitated a successful ballot initiative which passed with 68% of the vote in November 2020.

The primary rules are defined in a short paragraph on the 2020 ballot petition: "Notwithstanding any other provision of law to the contrary, in the primary election for the [offices in question], voters shall select as many candidates as they approve of for each office. The two candidates receiving the most votes for each office shall advance to the general election. The candidate for each office receiving the most votes in the general election shall be declared the winner."Because of the success of this initiative, St. Louis voters used approval voting for their March 2021 primary election.

2021 St. Louis mayoral election
St. Louis held its first-ever approval voting primary on March 2, 2021. Though the new approval-based primary was a non-partisan election, candidates were allowed to state their party preference on the ballot. The top three candidates (Tishaura Jones, Cara Spencer, and Lewis Reed) declared their party preference "Democratic Party" and Andrew Jones declared his party preference "Republican Party". Lewis E. Ree and Andrew Jones (a Republican Party candidate). Because they received the largest number of votes of approval, Tishuara Jones and Cara Spencer advanced to the general election. Lewis Reed and Andrew Jones (as well as all other candidates) were eliminated from consideration for the general election.

Jones went on to defeat Spencer in the general election in April 2021 by nearly four percentage points (51.38% to 47.46%). Since the elections in 2021, Reed has supported an effort to repeal approval voting for the primary.