Election Reform

A key feature of a democracy is that citizens vote for their representatives. However, there are a great many different ways that this can be done. What voting system should we be using?

Over the past 250 years, there have been numerous innovations in the design of voting systems. These can be summarized with two primary observations:

1. Every voting system has its unique strengths and limitations.

2. Almost everyone agrees that there are more modern voting systems that are vastly preferable to the system that is still the norm in the United States.

The key idea is that we generally get more representative election outcomes when voters are allowed to provide slightly more input about their preferences. This makes it very difficult to argue, although certain people still do, that our voting systems in the United States should remain mired in the distant past.

Ranked Choice Voting

The fundamental innovation of Ranked Choice Voting is that, rather than being compelled to vote only for a single candidate, voters are allowed to rank the candidates in their order of personal preference. In many cases, this is actually easier for voters than choosing only a single candidate. This is because voters in our current voting system often worry that their vote will be “wasted” if they use it to support a candidate who is unlikely to win. In Ranked Choice Voting, when a voter’s first-choice candidate finishes in last place, that voter’s vote is immediately reallocated to their second-choice candidate. This process can continue for multiple rounds of counting until one candidate amasses a majority of the votes. As a result, the winning candidate ends up being the one that the majority of voters prefer over the remaining alternatives.

STAR Voting

Coming soon

Popular Voting for President

Coming soon