We need an electoral system that breaks the current stranglehold of the two-party monopoly, one that would allow voters to choose between a much more nuanced range of positions than “extreme” versus “moderate,” would allow third-party candidates to run without being spoilers and would encourage more civil campaigning and political discourse.


The solution is to adopt ranked-choice voting for all state and federal elections, which can be done state by state without a constitutional amendment or even federal legislation. Also known as “instant run-off voting,” the system is currently in place in Maine and 11 American cities. The system is not nearly as complicated as it may sound; it just means that voters get to rank their choices, putting their most favored candidate first and then their second, third, fourth, etc. choices. If no candidate wins a majority outright (an increasingly frequent result in American politics), the candidate with the lowest number of votes is knocked out, and his or her second-choice votes are redistributed among the remaining candidates, a process that continues until a candidate does reach a majority.

A century ago, during the Progressive Era, Americans transformed our political system by passing a constitutional amendment to replace the selection of senators by state legislatures with direct senatorial elections. Over 20 states also moved from selecting candidates through the backroom wheeling and dealing of party conventions to the relative transparency of the primary system. We need similarly big reforms today—reforms that will allow the American people to reassert our power over a party system that is badly broken and compel candidates to appeal to a far broader swathe of us than a narrow “base.”