David Caruso, writing for the AP, details New York’s adoption of a ranked choice voting system—a system that if embraced in enough areas of the country could break us out of our two-party rule and lead to a greater diversity of thought, opinion, and ideas within our government and consequently our culture as a whole.
The system is based on a simple premise: Democracy works better if people aren’t forced to make an all-or-nothing choice with their vote.
Rather than pick just one candidate, voters get to rank several in order of preference. Even if a voter’s top choice doesn’t have enough support to win, their rankings of other candidates still play a role in determining the victor.
San Francisco has been using a ranked choice voting system since 2004, and Maine adopted it for state and federal primary elections and federal general elections in 2016. If more city and state governments transition to such a system, we could see a shift toward the election of candidates who simply embrace good ideas, rather than those deemed the lesser of two “electable” evils.