There was a unicorn sighting in the papers recently — a piece of election news equally welcome to left and right. Voters in Maine, fed up with a governor repeatedly chosen by a minority of the electorate, decided that state elections will be decided by majority rule. How? They enacted ranked-choice voting for state offices. Colorado should, too.

One of the axioms of U.S. politics is you can’t vote for a third-party candidate without betraying “your side” of the great electoral divide. Our history is littered with shipwrecks of third-party voyages that lasted only a cycle or two — Progressives and Bull Moose, John Anderson and Ross Perot, Ralph Nader and Gary Johnson. First hailed as heroes, they were soon branded as spoilers, accused of siphoning votes from friends and handing victory to enemies. Perot “elected” Clinton. Nader “elected” Bush. Champions become pariahs, and “conscience” voters become turncoats or dupes. In the ensuing melee, the new party is bludgeoned to death by its own natural allies, without mainstream Democrats or Republicans ever having to lift a finger or bloody a glove.

Ranked-choice voting — or RCV, also known as “instant runoff voting” — eliminates this problem. Here’s how it works: Voters rank their candidates in order of preference, marking ballots with choices 1, 2, 3, 4. If any candidate wins a majority — over 50 percent of the total votes cast — that person is declared the winner. If not, the last-place finisher is eliminated, and his votes are redistributed to the other candidates according to the next top preference marked on each ballot. Then the votes are recounted. If there is still no majority winner, the process is repeated, by eliminating the next lowest candidate and redistributing her votes, until one candidate gets an outright majority.

Let’s take Michigan for example. In Round 1, Donald Trump was the highest vote-getter by 11,012 votes, but there was no outright majority. The lowest vote-getter was Conservative Darrell Castle, with 16,926. So in Round 2, we distribute all of Castle’s votes to Trump, whom we’ll assume Castle’s voters ranked No. 2. Now Trump is up by nearly 28,000, but there’s still no outright majority. Next lowest is Green Jill Stein, with 50,700. Let’s assume Stein’s voters ranked Hillary Clinton No. 2, so she gets all those. Now Clinton’s ahead by 21,300. Notice that all of these third-party voters got to choose where their votes went after their candidate’s elimination, and nobody has helped “the other side.”

But there’s still no outright majority, because third-place Libertarian Gary Johnson polled 173,057 votes. Pundits argue Johnson voters split evenly between Clinton and Trump. If that’s true, in this example each would get 86,528 and Clinton would end up winning by 22,162. But those “pundits” are the same smart folks who predicted a Clinton landslide, and without RCV we have no idea whom Johnson voters actually loathed least. So who did the true majority of Michigan voters actually prefer? Nobody will ever know.

And nobody will ever know who “won” the majority vote in America either. Hillary got 2.2 million more votes than Trump, but third-party candidates collectively polled nearly 8 million, and we have no accurate way of apportioning their choices. Johnson alone polled 4.4 million votes. This is a problem for both ends of the political spectrum, which RCV might address. As such, it is not a partisan reform. In 2016, depending on the distribution of Libertarian votes, RCV could have boosted Hillary’s total to an Electoral College victory, or it could have given Trump an outright popular vote majority. Either way, it would have allowed Americans to know which candidate a true majority of voters actually preferred — something, after years of campaigning and billions of dollars spent, we still don’t know today.

Complicated? A little, at first. But not too hard for Australia and Ireland, which use RCV in national elections, or Berkeley, Oakland, or San Francisco, which use it for mayors, and now Maine, which will use it statewide. Colorado law already allows home-rule jurisdictions to experiment with RCV, so our city or county governments could adopt it right now — though RCV doesn’t mix with a multi-candidate slate such as our City Council’s. For statewide use, we’d need new law. A few folks just started a Facebook page, RCVforColorado, to explore the options.

There are obvious reasons for renewed interest in RCV, just as there are for abolishing the Electoral College. We are at a tipping point in our nation’s history. Our elections are repeatedly being decided on the edge of a razor. The traditional parties have begun to fracture and transform. The next generation is likely to see changes in climate, geography, food production, and population. There is no guarantee that democracy will survive these tectonic shifts. For it to do so, democracy must remain responsive to human needs, through voting mechanisms that allow parties to reflect changes in the popular will. People are sensing that it’s time to unlock the potential of third parties, and to unblock the momentum of majority rule. RCV might do both.

John Tweedy is a member of the Daily Camera’s editorial advisory board. Email: john@landlockedfilms.com