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Ranked Choice Voting Needs To Be Put Back On The Ballot
There is a good chance that our most recent election serves America best by letting us recognize that the system we have claimed as the best democracy on the planet is in need of some improvement. We were again given only two choices that most of us didn’t want to make, and that should make us question if our system is really promoting the will of the people. After 244 years of building ourselves up as we are the best version of democracy on the planet, it’s time we more fully address what it means to be a democracy and how we can implement the changes that will allow us to truly mean it.
For a number of years, Americans have toyed with the idea of Instant Runoff Voting (also called Ranked Choice Voting), which would give Americans the ability to vote for one of the many “third” parties without feeling as if they’ve thrown away their vote by not supporting the two parties in power. However, since the major choices made in America are made by representatives who are beholden to those two parties, there has been no passionate fervor for integrating this much better, wiser, more functional way running a democracy because those parties fear losing their power. While America has roughly 30 qualified, ballot-certified political parties and 214 state-level political parties, we are still largely confined to voting for two candidates in a winner-take-all…
