American democracy is certainly beginning to show its age and we could learn a thing or two from some of the newer democracies elsewhere in the world that have made improvements.
Here, I would like to offer what I believe are the two most important changes we can make to governance in the United States that will make government work better for all citizens and that will help reduce the polarization that is currently paralyzing our country.
#1 Publicly Financed Political Campaigns
Each accepted candidate for an elected political office should receive a designated amount of taxpayer-funded money for their campaign and not be allowed to accept donations from individuals, corporations, lobbyists, special interest groups, or any other entity. Key aspects of these publicly financed political campaigns would be
- At each level of government (local, county, state, national) each candidate would need to receive an agreed-upon minimum number of nomination petition signatures in order to qualify for a run.
- The amount of money each candidate receives depends on the office and the level of government, with national candidates receiving the most financial support.
- There will be agreed-upon rules on how this money can be used and transparency into how it is used.
- All candidates for a given political office receive the same amount of money to fund their campaigns.
- Though each candidate is barred from accepting donations from other sources, they are free to take part in as many interviews and debates sponsored by other organizations as they wish.
#2 Ranked Choice Voting
Ranked Choice Voting (also known as instant runoff) allows each voter to vote for more than one candidate by selecting their first choice, second choice, and so on, if they wish. Ranked Choice Voting should be allowed at all levels of government (local, county, state, and national).
Here’s a simple example of how one method of ranked choice voting works.
Let’s say you have three candidates running for a particular political office: Candidate A, Candidate B, and Candidate C.
There are nine different ways a voter could vote in this election:
A only
B only
C only
First choice: A; Second choice: B
First choice: A; Second choice: C
First choice: B; Second choice: C
First choice: C; Second choice: B
First choice: C; Second choice: A
First choice: B; Second choice: A
Now, let’s say we have 8,764 voters who voted as follows:
A only: 182
B only: 361
C only: 880
A, then B: 718
A, then C: 1,366
B, then C: 1,336
C, then B: 1,815
C, then A: 489
B, then A: 1,617
Tallying up everyone’s first choice gives us:
Candidate A: 182 + 718 + 1,366 = 2,266 votes
Candidate B: 361 + 1,336 + 1,617 = 3,314 votes
Candidate C: 880 + 1,815 + 489 = 3,184 votes
We see that Candidate A received the fewest votes, so they are removed from further consideration. We now look at the second choice (if any) of all those who voted for Candidate A as their first choice, in addition to those who voted for Candidates B & C as their first choice.
Candidate B: 361 + 718 + 1,336 + 1,617 = 4,032 votes
Candidate C: 880 + 1,366 + 1,815 + 489 = 4,550 votes
You’ll notice the 4,032 + 4,550 = 8,582 votes, which is 182 less than the total number of voters (8,764). That’s because 182 voters voted only for Candidate A, and since they didn’t specify a second choice, when Candidate A was removed their contribution to the election is over at this point.
You’ll also notice that Candidate C wins the election with the majority of the votes (4,550 vs. 4,032).
Generalizing, if there are n candidates running then the number of ranked choices available is n-1. For example, for four candidates, there would be two rounds of elimination instead of only one as shown in the three-candidate example above.
Two candidates qualifying
Each voter chooses one and only one candidate
Three candidates qualifying
Each voter can choose a first choice and second choice candidate
Four candidates qualifying
Each voter can choose a first choice, second choice, and third choice candidate
And so on…
Ranked choice voting would encourage more than two viable political parties (and that would be a good thing, seeing as our current two-party system maximizes polarization), plus voters could vote for any candidate they truly support without fear of the spoiler effect, since they can specify a second choice should their first-choice candidate be eliminated because they received fewer votes than the other candidates.
It is unlikely that initiatives to adopt publicly financed political campaigns and ranked choice voting will come from either the Republican or Democratic parties (or their corporate and billionaire donors and lobbyists!) so it is up to us, the rank-and-file voters, to force these issues at a grassroots level. I would be interested in hearing from readers who have ideas on how best to accomplish this.
David, I continue to enjoy your newsletter. Thanks for the Democracy Crisis: Solutions post. If you haven’t, I hope you can consider getting it published as widely as possible.
I took a math course in college called Mathematical Models in the Social Sciences, in the early ’70’s, and that’s when I first learned about Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem, and it blew my mind! It really shatters your faith in the democratic process to learn that fair elections that involve more than two candidates cannot mathematically be fair. I’d love to see other alternatives to what we have — the flaw of our present system is that it too often encourages extremism and hyper-partisanship.
Thanks again for your newsletter.
Thanks, Peter, and you’re very welcome. I’m glad you brought up Arrow’s impossibility theorem. Ismar Volić in his excellent 2024 book “Making Democracy Count: How Mathematics Improves Voting, Electoral Maps, and Representation” goes into detail about this in Chapter 4: The Impossible Democracy. As a mathematician, Volić admits that Arrow is right and there is no ranked voting method that is perfect and thus will always give an indisputable result. However, he goes on to say (and I am paraphrasing) if a ranked voting method works almost all of the time, isn’t it good enough and an improvement over what we currently have? He makes a strong case in the book that instant runoff (the method I illustrated in the article) is the best form of ranked voting, and is very unlikely (though not impossible) in practice to give a disputable result.
Volić writes on p. 111:
“Some theoretical research suggests that up to 50% of ‘close’ instant runoff elections show monotonicity failure. The problem is that the 50% incidence rate is an artifact of precisely aligning the definition of ‘close’ with elections that flunk monotonicity. If you assume that the top three candidates receive about 1/3 of the votes, then yes, there’s a strong chance of witnessing paradoxes. As Graham-Squire put it to me: ‘This is akin to saying “40%-50% of people going to bars get into fights” when you’ve restricted your research to the situation where both people are drunk, have been arguing for the last 15 minutes, and are now both standing up with their fists raised. It is both true and kind of useless. The landscape of U.S. elections is very different from this.’ Luckily, close elections aren’t common, and that explains why violations of monotonicity are rare.”
I would add that we do know that close elections between two candidates are not rare, but with three or more candidates all candidates are unlikely to receive close to the same number of votes.
Some definitions from the glossary in the book:
Arrow impossibility theorem: The only ranked voting method for three or more candidates that satisfies monotonicity and independence of irrelevant alternatives is dictatorship.
monotonicity: It is impossible for a winning candidate to become a losing candidate by gaining additional votes or by being moved up in one or more rankings.
independence of irrelevant alternatives (IIA): If candidate A is the winner, then modifying the ballots in a way that does not change A’s position relative to another candidate B should not make B the winner.
instant runoff voting: A type of ranked voting method whereby the tallying is completed by performing a series of runoff elections that eliminates the candidate with the least number of first-place votes at each stage until a candidate has a majority of the vote. Also known as Hare’s method.
Here’s a great online activity you can do that illustrates ranked choice voting using ice cream flavors. Thank you, CNN!
https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2025/06/politics/ranked-choice-voting-explained-dg/
Here in Southern Arizona, we’re having a special election to fill the U.S. House District 7 seat vacated by Congressman Raúl Grijalva who died on March 13. That set in place two elections, first the Democratic and Republican primaries (which only registered Democrat and Republican voters and candidates could participate in), followed by the general election where the winners from the two primaries run against each other along with other qualifying candidates from other parties.
We could have had just one RCV instant runoff election with all qualifying candidates, which would have saved a lot of money and voters wouldn’t have had to vote in two different elections for the same House seat.
Having a single election and ranked choice voting, the ballot would have looked something like this:
https://cosmicreflections.skythisweek.info/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/RCV-Example-Ballot-US-House-District-7-Special-Election-Example-2025.jpg
Each state sets their own rules about what determines the order of candidates on the ballot, but the simplest and best method would be alphabetical order by candidate’s last name, as I have shown here.
Keep in mind with ranked choice voting, you select your first choice candidate as you usually would but you also have the opportunity, optionally, to choose a 2nd choice candidate, 3rd choice candidate, etc. In this example, you vote for as few as one and as many as ten candidates, ranking them in order of preference. Most voters will probably stop after picking their top three candidates.