Board & Staff

Dan Ashurst

Executive Director

Dan Ashurst has led FairVote Illinois since the start of 2026. He joined the organization as a communications volunteer in early 2023 and became Social Media Coordinator in 2024, where he managed paid social campaigns that helped pass ranked choice voting referendums in Oak Park (79% Yes, November 2024) and Skokie (58% Yes, April 2025).

A three-term AmeriCorps alum and Carleton College graduate (B.A. cum laude), Dan brings years of communications and organizing experience to the role. His political organizing began in 2017 with Doug Jones's historic US Senate upset in Alabama, where Jones became the first Democrat elected to that seat in 25 years. Before joining FairVote Illinois full-time, Dan served as Social Media Corps Leader for Campus Compact's national environmental AmeriCorps program, training communicators across ten states.

Dan believes our ballot should reflect what voters actually want. Ranked choice voting offers exactly that. Today, FairVote Illinois is focused on building toward RCV adoption in the City of Chicago, with a 2027 push for local option legislation as its next milestone.

Ben Nagy

Director of Programs

Ben Nagy joined FairVote Illinois in November 2025 and leads the organization's volunteer programs, working with chapter leads to drive statewide voter education and organizing for ranked choice voting.

Since 2022, Ben has volunteered with Citizens' Climate Lobby as Liaison to Illinois's 3rd Congressional District and Healthy Forests Action Team Lead, coordinating volunteer events with the Chicago Park District, Forest Preserves of Cook County, and Openlands. He has lobbied the US Congress on climate legislation and presented on urban forestry at a national conference in Washington, DC. He also serves as an Initiative Lead with Strong Towns Chicago, co-leading phone banks with the Save Transit initiative.

Ben joined FairVote Illinois to help develop volunteers and leaders who feel they have agency to make positive change.

Patrick Barrett

Board President
Co-Founder, FVIL

Patrick Barrett is Board President of FairVote Illinois and one of the organization's co-founders. He has been part of FairVote Illinois since its earliest days as an informal MeetUp group in 2017, before the organization was formally incorporated. Patrick helped shape that early community into Illinois's leading advocacy organization dedicated solely to ranked choice voting, contributing project management and operational expertise alongside Andrew Szilva and Larry Garfield. He continues to serve as the volunteer Onboarding Lead, welcoming new volunteers into the organization.

A PMP-certified Project Manager and Electrical Engineer with over 25 years of experience, Patrick currently serves as Senior Project Engineer at MxD, where he manages public-private partnerships uniting industry, government, and academic stakeholders. He holds a degree from the University of Limerick and brings the same cross-sector collaboration experience to FairVote Illinois's governance.

Patrick views ranked choice voting as a foundational improvement to how we govern ourselves. For him, supporting RCV is about strengthening democracy at its roots.

Larry Garfield

Secretary
Co-founder, FVIL

Larry Garfield is Secretary of FairVote Illinois and one of the organization's co-founders, having served on the Board since FVIL's incorporation in 2020. From 2020-2024 he led FVIL's Speakers Bureau, training volunteer speakers and serving as lead presenter. In 2022, he led the ground team for FVIL's first major referendum win in Evanston (82% Yes).

A software architect and open-source community leader, Larry has spent two decades shaping the PHP ecosystem. He serves on the Core Committee of the PHP Framework Interoperability Group and has co-authored adopted features of the PHP language. A former core leader of the Drupal project, he led the Drupal 8 overhaul and served on the Drupal Association Board of Directors. Larry is a published author on PHP and Drupal and holds an M.S. in Computer Science from DePaul University.

A longtime free software advocate, Larry sees ranked choice voting as part of the same commitment to meaningful access and participation. He believes voters should be able to vote for candidates they support, not against candidates they've been told to hate.

Rebecca Williams

Former Executive Director
& Statewide Organizer

Rebecca Williams serves on the Board of Directors of FairVote Illinois, having previously served on staff from 2022 to 2025. As FVIL's first Statewide Organizer (2022-2024), Rebecca managed the winning municipal referendum campaigns in Evanston (82% Yes), Oak Park (79% Yes), and Peoria Township (67% advisory). She launched five local chapters across the state, coordinated statewide volunteer teams, and personally delivered 29 of FVIL's 57 statewide presentations during her tenure. As Executive Director from January through November 2025, she led the organization to its third major municipal win, the Skokie ranked choice voting referendum (58% Yes).

Before FVIL, Rebecca organized for the Clean Energy Jobs Act with the Sierra Club and the NRDC Action Team, generating constituent advocacy that helped pass landmark Illinois climate legislation. She also served as Chicago Northside Chapter Co-Leader of Citizens' Climate Lobby from 2017 to 2020.

Rebecca is inspired by the volunteers who have given their time to this work and hopes to one day see ranked choice voting used across the state.

Victoria Mitchell

Chief Operating Officer
at GoodParty.org

Victoria P. Mitchell serves on the Board of Directors of FairVote Illinois, where she has volunteered since 2023. She is the Chief Operating Officer of GoodParty.org, where she's helped build the organization from 0 to over 13,000 candidate wins from across the political spectrum in all 50 states. She is also the founding COO and strategic advisor for Gifted Savings, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit delivering financial literacy education for high school students in underserved communities. She served on the executive leadership team of Burning Man Project, a major arts 501(c)(3) nonprofit, where she oversaw city planning for a population of 80,000, the nonprofit's revenue, and pandemic financial contingency planning for the Board. Earlier, she was Director of Operations for the food-tech company Zesty, scaling from startup stage to serving more than 3 million meals.

Victoria is an expert leader of operations, mobilization, finance, culture, HR, and talent acquisition. Her work has reached millions, including being featured in Governing Magazine, Forbes, and The New York Times and speaking for the U.S. Conference of Mayors, Chief, and more. A Chicago resident, Victoria brings two decades of volunteer leadership experience and her endless passion for democracy reform to the FairVote Illinois Board.

Andrew Szilva, PhD, MBA

Treasurer
Former Executive Director
& Founder

Andrew Szilva is Treasurer of FairVote Illinois and one of the organization’s co-founders. He served as FVIL’s founding Executive Director from 2020 through 2024, growing the organization to more than 10,000 supporters and building a grassroots fundraising program generating over $100,000 annually. Under his leadership, FairVote Illinois helped make Evanston the first Illinois municipality to approve ranked choice voting, with 82% voter support in the November 2022 referendum. Oak Park followed in November 2024, approving ranked choice voting with 79% voter support.

Andrew is an innovation and operations leader with more than 20 years of experience leading complex technology, logistics, and organizational transformation initiatives. He currently serves as Principal of Szilva Consulting Group, advising organizations on strategy, operational transformation, and cross-sector partnerships. Earlier in his career, he designed operational and logistics systems for the North American freight rail industry and led large-scale enterprise initiatives as a PMP-certified project manager.

Andrew holds a PhD in Computational Chemistry from the University of California, Los Angeles, an MBA from the Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and executive training in AI and data science leadership from the University of Chicago. He helped found FairVote Illinois to advance more representative, voter-centered elections in Illinois.