To distract myself from wondering if my chest is tightening, I sometimes think about other things that could go really wrong this year. The list is long, but somewhere near the very top is the thought that the President could somehow eke out a close election victory, despite—well, despite everything.

There’s no guarantee it won’t happen. The Democrats didn’t find a perfect candidate, and there’s going to be an endless blizzard of Facebook lies, and team Trump is topnotch at voter suppression. But there are ways to lessen the odds a little, and a good one would be to not have a third-party challenge from the left this year, at least in the six or seven battleground states that are going to make the difference. That means asking the Green Party to stand down in those places. People with impressive left credentials—Noam Chomsky, Barbara Ehrenreich, Ron Daniels—did this already, in January, in a well-argued open letter. But it didn’t seem to work: the Party’s most likely Presidential candidate, Howie Hawkins, declared that he would run even if the Democrats nominated Bernie Sanders, who, Hawkins told an interviewer, had been “a little slow” in his plans for reform. Hawkins has run many times for governor of New York, and also for the House and the Senate from that state, while never getting more than five per cent of the vote. (He did come in a respectable second in a Fourth District city-council race in his home town of Syracuse, in 2013.) “Recognizing the danger of Trump does not mean that electing any damned Democrat should trump all other considerations,” Hawkins said. So I probably won’t be able to persuade him, either, but let me at least offer the suggestion that there’s a particularly useful reform that Greens—and others interested in a more vibrant politics—could be working on, instead, this autumn.

To understand why this reform—ranked-choice voting—seems so important to me, let me say that, by ideology, I’m pretty much a Green. One of my favorite politicians anywhere is Bob Brown, a former member of the Australian Senate, who, in 1972, helped found what was arguably the first Green Party (and also saved a large portion of Tasmania’s classic wilderness). I’ve given speeches on behalf of German Greens and European Union Greens and local Green parties in many states and cities, and, whenever Canada holds an election, I stay up to watch the returns from the island district in the Pacific, off Vancouver, just to make sure that Elizabeth May, who for many years led the nation’s Green Party, has retained her seat. So I’m about as small-“g” green as green gets, having spent my adult life working on the greatest environmental crisis in the history of our civilization, the rapid heating of our planet.

But I haven’t supported the Green Party in national elections in this country, and that’s because of the way our electoral laws work. The obvious difference between the United States on the one hand and most of Europe on the other is that we have a de-facto plurality-winner-take-all two-party system that makes it all but impossible for a small party to make a non-perverse difference, while European countries have parliamentary systems with electoral mechanisms that encourage small parties to play constructively pivotal roles. Time and again, by winning five or ten or twenty per cent of the vote, and a like share of seats, the Greens who operate in parliamentary democracies have ended up with enough representatives to give them bargaining power when it came time to form coalition governments. And those bargains make big differences: having the Greens in a power-sharing government was a major reason that Germany pioneered renewable energy; currently, in British Columbia, a Green-Liberal coalition has bolstered opposition to giant pipelines.

In the United States, winning a few percentage points of the vote gets you nothing, except a chance to argue about whether you were the spoiler. Ralph Nader, in 2000, and Jill Stein, in 2016, have roundly insisted that they weren’t, arguing that the Democrats who were defeated in crucial states by margins smaller than their vote totals there did not run skillful enough campaigns. Relitigating that history seems less essential than looking ahead: the last poll I saw for Wisconsin showed that the race between a Democrat and Trump, for the state that many analysts predict will sway the election, was currently within three percentage points. So, if a Green Party candidate is on the ballot and attracts even a smidgen of support—well, it could end very badly indeed. And why would you take that chance this year?

That’s not to say that America wouldn’t be better off with more electoral alternatives. We clearly would. And to get them we needn’t wait for some unlikely constitutional change that might produce a parliamentary system. Instead, we can work to get more states to follow the lead of Maine, which last year introduced a ranked-choice voting system for most elections. Here’s how it works: if there are ten candidates on your ballot, you list your choices from one to ten. You can proudly vote for the Green candidate as your No. 1 choice for Congress, and, if she comes in last, you haven’t lost your vote or spoiled someone else’s chances. That’s because that vote would then be eliminated and your second-ranked vote would be counted instead, and so on, until someone has won a majority.

This is not some impossible dream of a reform—pundits used to say “as Maine goes so goes the nation,” and, indeed, last year, after Maine adopted the plan, so did New York City, with the support of seventy-three per cent of its voters. “Before the pandemic, R.C.V. was gaining momentum, with efforts teed up in several states to advance it via ballot initiative or legislative lobbying,” Josh Silver, the director of the electoral-reform campaign RepresentUs, said. “A ballot initiative for R.C.V. is likely in Alaska this year, and possibly in North Dakota and Massachusetts. There is a huge opportunity for legislative lobbying efforts in many other states, blue and red, as evidenced by the deep-red Utah legislature’s vote to allow their cities to enact R.C.V.” That is to say, Green enthusiasts in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania could skip Presidential campaigning and, instead, push their legislatures hard to put R.C.V. on the agenda. The pandemic has only increased the urgency, because the one drawback of a now necessary vote-by-mail system is that candidates sometimes drop out of elections after you’ve mailed in your ballot. Silver again: “This happened to millions of voters in this year’s primary, and R.C.V. fixes it. We must lean in hard to this opportunity.”

If we managed to enact this reform, the result would be a much better system in many ways. One is that you could really build small progressive parties without potential supporters worrying that they’d inadvertently elect Trumpish figures; if the Greens, or any third party, are ever going to have a real breakthrough on a national level, it will be because people can vote for them without fear, real or imagined, of being a spoiler. But there’s another reason, too, which I got to see close up while covering elections as a young city-hall reporter in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which for decades was the only major city in the country to use R.C.V. It’s that these elections not only allow for more ideological diversity but also tend to reduce the truly hateful divisiveness that’s become such a feature of our elections. If you’re a candidate in a ranked-choice election, you have a strong incentive not to be a sneering jerk to your competitors, because that kind of behavior reduces your chances of getting crucial No. 2 votes. You have to make your case, and you have to at least understand someone else’s.