Despite the turmoil surrounding the legitimacy of the Trump presidency, there are still many stalwart Trump supporters. However, there are also many Republicans who wonder how he won the primary in the first place, and would have preferred another candidate to vote for in the general election. Likewise, there are many voters who weren’t happy with either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton as a presidential candidate. In fact, these two candidates were individually the most disliked candidates in history, and we had the bum luck of having to decide between the two of them. Many voters would have preferred to have another option, but worried that by not voting for either the Democrat or the Republican would have wasted their vote.

This bizarre election was an illustration of two side effects of our outdated election system: vote splitting and the spoiler effect. To understand vote splitting, think of the clown car of candidates in the Republican Primary, and how moderates were split between several candidates — opening the way for a more extreme candidate like Trump. To understand the spoiler effect, think of Ross Perot and the derision with which Democratic Party loyalists treat Green Party members — believing that they are in effect voting for the opposing candidate by not backing a major party. There is a solution to both of these problems, and it's called Ranked Choice Voting (also known as Instant-Runoff Voting).

In a Ranked Choice Voting system, the voter ranks the candidates by order of preference. If no one wins a majority of first choice picks, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated. If the eliminated candidate was your first choice, then your second-choice vote will be applied in the next round of counting. This process continues until one candidate has more than 50 percent of the vote.

Vote splitting was also a major problem in Maine gubernatorial elections. In 2014, independents made up the largest percent of the Maine electorate, with 37 percent not registering with the major parties. Correspondingly, independent candidates are very popular. The rules of traditional voting systems led to two consecutive three-way races in which vote splitting allowed a highly contentious candidate, Paul LePage, to win with less than 50 percent of the vote. So how did the majority of Maine voters react to being twice smitten? They voted to be become the first state in the nation to use Ranked Choice Voting in their elections, guaranteeing that never again would some one win without a majority. There is an increasing number of people who would like to build on this initial step and bring this voting system to their state.

If you are intrigued by the idea of Ranked Choice Voting and want to learn more, you should head over to the First Unitarian Church in New Bedford this Sunday at 11 a.m. In the summer, the First Unitarian adopts a summer lyceum format, inviting speakers to talk on a variety of topics instead of offering the usual religious service. This week’s speaker is Ben Schattenburg, a representative of Voter Choice Massachusetts, which advocates for electoral reforms that increase the range of choice on the ballot and produce outcomes that better reflect the will of the voters. In this talk, he will discuss how Ranked Choice Voting can improve our current election system by solving the problems of vote-splitting and spoiler candidates, and allowing people to naturally select candidates in the order of their true preferences.

Ben worked as a field organizer for the Yes on 5 campaign in Maine, helping Maine become the first state in U.S. history to enact Ranked Choice Voting statewide. Ben, a native of Wayland, Mass., has also organized ballot access drives for candidates and referendums across New England, and specialized in messaging and logistics for the signature-gathering phase.

Elise Korejwa is senior research associate at the Public Policy Center at UMass Dartmouth.