• by Kaila Colbin , Featured Contributor, April 19, 2024

It seems pretty clear there are a few cracks in America’s democracy. Polarization, mis- and dis-information, tribalism, othering… Things are tense.

So what’s the number-one solution we get offered? Vote.

I get it. I’ve offered this solution myself, including in a 2016 article for this very publication. And I stand by it -- you absolutely should vote.

But will voting fix our political challenges? Or does it just make it more likely that my person will be the one overseeing the degradation of the American experiment?

If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say the latter. The U.S. government faces challenges that are structural and systemic.

So what are those structural and systemic challenges? As Andrew Yang (yep, that guy) argued at TED this week, the problem is misaligned incentives.

Here’s what he means. In the 2022 midterms, according to FairVote, 84% of House seats were decided by >10 points, or were uncontested.

Basically, the vast majority of districts are drawn so strongly red or blue that all you have to do to win that district is to become the candidate for the dominant party.

Typically, party candidates are selected through the primary system, but here’s the thing: Only about 20% of eligible voters turn out for primaries.

Split that by party, and only 10% of voters decide each primary -- and therefore, in 84% of cases, the outcome.

In addition, the voters who turn out for primaries tend to be the most politically engaged, and typically the most extreme.

This is a far cry from how most of us imagine things should work. In a democracy, Yang observed, we think you have to win over 51% of the population in order to get in, including a chunky swath of moderate voters.

But, in this system, you must win over the most extreme 10% of voters. Not only that, but if you try to court more moderate voters, the extreme ones will kick you out in favor of someone more aggressively in their camp.

Here’s the great news: There is a solution. It’s wildly popular among those who’ve adopted it. It’s inexpensive. And it fixes things at the structural, systematic level -- where it counts.

The solution? Ranked-choice voting (RCV), also known as instant-runoff voting or single transferable vote.

In RCV, there’s no party primary; all candidates run in the same open primary.

Instead of voting for the one person you want, you choose as many candidates as you like, in order of preference.

If no candidate gets more than 50% of the vote, the last-place candidate is eliminated, and those votes go to those voters’ second choice.

RCV means voters no longer have to worry about how other people are likely to vote or whether they’re “splitting” the vote. They can vote for the candidate they want, knowing that, if their preferred candidate doesn’t end up with a shot, their vote will still count.

If a candidate is a long shot, most of us don’t want to waste our vote -- or worse, by pulling our vote away, let in our undesired candidate. But ranked choice allows us to vote for moderates, confident that, if our first choice doesn’t get in, our vote will still count.

This isn’t a new or radical idea. In the US, 48 local jurisdictions and two states use RCV in elections, as do numerous national, state and local governments around the world. In 2023, RCV won in all seven cities where it was on the ballot, including in Burlington, Vermont, where an initiative to expand its use from city council elections to all municipal elections passed by 64%. This year, Oregon and Nevada will vote on adopting it statewide.

We should all vote, regardless of whether our district or state offers RCV. But implementing RCV makes our vote count, and rewards politicians who listen to the majority rather than to a small group of extremists.

RCV is possible, achievable, cheap and popular. Let’s stop messing around and get this done.