The #NeverTrump and #NeverHillary movements have momentum. A grass-roots call for Bernie Sanders to run as an independent generated discussion before he endorsed Hillary Clinton last week.

Voter displeasure with establishment politics is at a historic high. Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson polled at 11 percent in a three-way matchup with Clinton and Trump in a recent Monmouth University poll. With this in mind, it seems like an apt time to revisit the issue of third-party politics.

The question, however, is: How do we move beyond the tired and fruitless script on this topic? We've heard that compromising is just choosing the lesser of two evils. We've heard that voting third party throws your vote away — or worse yet, helps to elect the candidate you disagree with most. So how do we move the conversation forward? How do we make it safe to vote for third-party candidates?

Few Americans have heard of ranked-choice voting, yet there are currently 11 American cities that use it to elect mayors, city councils and other local officials — including major cities such as Berkeley, California, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Minneapolis. A variation of ranked-choice voting is used nationwide in Ireland, a small yet relatively densely populated country, and in Australia, one of the largest yet least densely populated nations on Earth.

There are variations of the practice, some more complex than others, but the simplest form would have voters rank the candidates No. 1, No. 2, No. 3, and so forth when there are more than two candidates for a single position. For example, left-leaning voters might rank Green Party candidate Jill Stein as No. 1, Hillary Clinton No. 2, Gary Johnson as No. 3, and Donald Trump as No. 4. If Stein does not receive the greatest number of votes, ballots cast for her would automatically shift to Clinton, and then if Clinton doesn't get the greatest number of votes even with Stein's votes added in, those initial Stein votes would then shift to Johnson. In this way, Green Party voters do not have to fear helping Trump win the election, yet they also do not have to begrudgingly ignore their deep-seated convictions and outright vote for Clinton.

Renowned economists Partha Dasgupta, of the University of Cambridge, and Eric S. Maskin, of Harvard University, concluded in their 2004 Scientific American article that "when more than two choices present themselves, voters should submit a ranking of candidates and that majority rule … should determine the winner." They likewise conclude that ranked-choice voting offers "an accurate representation of the voters' wishes" more so than any other voting system.

Despite its successful implementation in U.S. cities and entire countries, there are obstacles to the method, foremost among them being an almost total silence on the subject in the national political conversation. Just as important, Democratic and Republican politicians have no incentive to push measures that would instate ranked-choice, since neither major party has anything to gain and it would almost exclusively help third-party candidates and voters. It is therefore largely by ballot referendum that ranked-choice becomes law and given that so few Americans have heard of it that it rarely ends up on the ballot. The aforementioned cities have already passed ranked-choice and the state of Maine will vote on using it for all statewide elections in November.

This is almost certainly the only way it will ever be implemented in the United States. Activists will have to gather the requisite number of signatures to make the issue a ballot referendum that voters can decide on directly, cutting out the major-party politicians who have no interest in seeing such legislation pass. But in order to achieve this, to say nothing of having the ballot referenda eventually pass, a major educational campaign explaining ranked-chioice voting would have to be undertaken to get activists involved and to convince the public that it would be a better system than our current one.

This presidential election cycle has been full of upsets and surprises, largely caused by voter dissatisfaction with politics as usual. Perhaps one of the lessons we should take from this is that it's time to implement this new system at all levels of government in order to offer voters a greater range of choices.