With 25 major candidates running for the Democratic Party's 2020 presidential nomination, the field is diverse and highly competitive with each candidate having unique strengths.

While states voting early in the primaries will have a choice between the entire range of candidates, other Democrats around the country will not get the opportunity to choose, as many people will see their favorite candidates concede for lack of delegates in the early days.

Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) is a voting system that allows voters to rank many candidates on a ballot in order of preference rather than choosing one candidate, so voters can vote for all of the candidates they support, rather than vote against all but one candidate.

In the 2016 Republican Primary, the consequences of having an overcrowded field were put on display, as the most radical candidate with the biggest "cult following" won states early-on and forced a number of perfectly qualified candidates to concede. Although Donald Trump only won 44.9% of delegates, with 1,612,131 more Republicans voting against Trump than for him, he was nominated the Republican Presidential candidate due to the dilution caused by the large primary field. Moreover, late in the primary, voters who may have preferred, for example, Marco Rubio to Trump, were instead forced to choose between Ted Cruz and Trump in their state primaries. And although John Kasich was still on the ballot late in the race, voters who preferred him had to decide whether to vote strategically against a candidate they disliked rather than voting their conscience. A ranked choice ballot may not have changed the result of the Republican primary, but it would have given voters the chance to express their views without a strategic worry.

Voters face a similar problem for the 2020 Democratic primary. Under a ranked choice voting system, if a voter's number one doesn’t win, they can at least support their number two. And more importantly, voting for their number one would not weaken the chances of their number two winning. In 2016, Maine voters approved the Maine Ranked Choice Voting Initiative, which provided for the use of RCV in elections for United States Senators, United States Representatives, the governor, state senators, and state representatives. Ranked-choice voting was successfully implemented in Maine's 2018 federal general elections, and as of 2019, seven states contained cities that had implemented RCV in municipal elections. There are also many countries throughout the world who exercise their democracy via RCV rather than the conventional, binary system.

While RCV is unprecedented at the level of Presidential primaries, so too is the anomalously large number of candidates running for the Democratic nomination. As the party that prides itself on being adaptive, progressive, and problem-solving, the Democratic National Committee needs to take the initiative to make sure that all voters are given a voice, and the candidate nominated is representative of the entire Democratic Party. They can do so by implementing ranked choice voting for the 2020 primaries.

You can learn more about RCV at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked_voting