The voting method is extremely important and affects all parts of the election from who wins, how seriously candidates’ ideas are taken, and who you see on your ballot. Specifically, the choose-one plurality voting method that we use now is really bad.

Fortunately, there are alternatives. One that works really well and is also very easy is called approval voting. This method lets you choose as many candidates as you want. Most votes wins. Approval voting works with our current setup, prefers more consensus winners, and encourages political competition between more than two candidates.

That’s nice and all, but how does a better voting method like approval voting get implemented?

Here’s the obvious hitch. A politician gets elected under a certain terrible voting method (plurality voting). Now there’s a proposal for a new voting method that could provide a different result. What are the chances that this politician will be on board with a new voting method and risk not getting elected?

Not so great.

Fortunately, a path for voting method reform has already been carved. And it doesn’t involve getting permission from anyone elected.

In the first half of the 20th century, some two dozen US cities from Cincinnati to New York used a proportional voting method to elect their city council[1]. That’s drastically different from how we currently do it[2]. And more recently, towards the end of the 20th century, a single-winner ranking method has been implemented in cities like San Francisco and Minneapolis.

While those particular voting methods that were implemented wouldn’t perhaps be at the top of our must-have list, they’re also not the status quo methods—which are awful. Experimentation is a good thing, particularly when what we use now is so bad and it’s hard to do any worse. I’ve said as much before regarding efforts in Maine where the push went to the state level after getting a number of cities on board.

The challenge is that approval voting hasn’t been used to elect anyone for government office before. There have been uses for government decisions, religious leaders, quasi-government positions like the UN, and a number of organizations. But that’s just not the same. Approval voting needs a solid example. It already has decades of academic research behind it and has shown its practical feasibility at the organizational level. It’s time.

Enter Fargo, North Dakota.