The last time I felt good about a vote I cast for president, I was probably in college and the candidate was probably losing. Every election since has been damage control. I’m not voting for somebody, I’m voting against the other guy because my kids have to live in whatever country the next four years produces.
I’m guessing that lands for a lot of people. About two-thirds of Americans tell pollsters the country’s heading the wrong way, both parties blame each other, and most of us walk into the booth holding our nose. That’s not democracy working. That’s two private clubs running a protection racket on the ballot.
So I went down the rabbit hole on voting systems — what we use, what other countries use, what reformers are trying, and what’s actually possible inside the Constitution we have. Here’s what I found, with as little cheerleading as I can manage.
What we have now is engineered to produce two parties
Plurality voting — pick one, most votes wins, no majority required — has one famous bug: the spoiler effect. Gore vs. Bush 2000 is the textbook case. Nader got 2.7%, most of those voters preferred Gore to Bush, Bush won by a thread. So now everybody knows: vote for the third party you actually like and you help elect the candidate you hate most. Vote for the lesser evil instead. Lesser evil wins. Third party never grows. Repeat forever.
This isn’t a bug somebody forgot to patch. Duverger’s Law has been a poli-sci cliché for seventy years: single-winner plurality elections produce two-party systems. We built it this way.
The two big reform attempts and what’s happened to them
Ranked Choice Voting is the one most people have heard of. Rank your candidates 1, 2, 3. If nobody hits 50%, the last-place candidate gets dropped and their voters’ second choices kick in. Maine uses it, Alaska uses it, NYC uses it for primaries. It mostly fixes the spoiler problem.
But it has a real flaw called “center squeeze,” and the cleanest example is the 2009 Burlington, Vermont mayor’s race. Three candidates, all reasonably close in first-choice votes. The moderate Democrat got eliminated first because he was nobody’s passionate #1 — even though, on the full ballots, he’d have beaten both finalists head-to-head. The candidate most Burlington voters actually preferred lost because he wasn’t enough people’s first pick. Same dynamic in Alaska 2022, where Nick Begich would’ve beaten both Peltola and Palin head-to-head and got eliminated in round one.
And the practical problem: RCV is now banned in 19 states. Tennessee and Florida in 2022, then a steady drumbeat through 2024 and 2025, and Indiana and Ohio earlier this year. Mostly Republican legislatures, mostly states that weren’t using it. The pattern is clear — when one of the parties decides a reform threatens them, they outlaw it preemptively.
Fusion voting is the older reform and the more interesting story. It lets a third party cross-endorse a major-party candidate, with the votes tracked separately. So in New York, when the Working Families Party delivers 50,000 votes for a Democrat on the WFP line, the Democrat can see exactly how much the endorsement was worth — and the WFP can credibly say “lose us next time and you lose those votes.” That’s how minimum wage hikes, paid family leave, and tenant protections actually moved in New York.
In the late 1800s, fusion was legal in all fifty states and third parties — Populists, Progressives, Labor — were using it to wring real concessions out of the majors. Then during the Progressive Era, 40-plus states banned it. The justification was “election reform.” The actual effect was eliminating the mechanism that gave third parties leverage. Today nine states still allow some form of it, and only New York and Connecticut use it meaningfully. The Supreme Court blessed the bans in 1997 (Timmons v. Twin Cities), explicitly citing the state’s interest in protecting the two-party system. The Court literally said the quiet part out loud.
Why Germany’s system can’t happen here. A lot of “fix America” energy ends up at proportional representation — the German model, where if your party gets 15% of the vote it gets 15% of the seats and a half-dozen parties horse-trade their way to coalition government. It works for them. It can’t work for us without rewriting the Constitution, because our House is one-rep-per-district winner-take-all by design, our Senate is two-per-state by design, our presidency is a separate executive election by design, and our Electoral College is in there too. Germany rewrote their constitution because they lost a world war and were occupied. We didn’t, so we’re stuck with the structure we have. Anything that requires a constitutional amendment isn’t a plan, it’s a wish.
The system I kept coming back to
After working through ranked choice, fusion, the proportional dream, Borda count (gameable — a party that runs ten clones beats a party that runs two), and STAR voting (promising but untested in any actual government election), I kept landing on the dumbest, simplest option: approval voting.
The rule is: check every candidate you’d be okay with. Most checks wins. That’s it.
Couple things I like about it. First, you can’t game it. I tried. Only approving your favorite is worse for you, because voters who approve multiple candidates have more pull on the final outcome. Running clone candidates doesn’t help — they just split your own approvals at the same percentage. Approving everyone is the same as not voting. There’s no spoiler effect because approving the Green doesn’t take anything away from approving the Democrat — you do both.
Second, it actually rewards consensus instead of intensity. A moderate who 55% of people would tolerate beats a polarizer who 35% adore. That’s the opposite of what our current system selects for, which is probably the single biggest reason American politics feels insane.
Third, third parties finally get real numbers. If 25% of voters approve the Libertarian, that’s on the scoreboard. Not “spoiler.” Not “wasted vote.” Just 25%. Next cycle they have a real argument for media coverage, donors, and ballot access.
It’s not theoretical. Fargo, North Dakota voted it in by 63% in 2018 and used it successfully for three election cycles. St. Louis adopted it in 2020 and still uses it.
I have to be honest about the headwind, though. North Dakota’s legislature signed HB 1297 in April 2025 banning both ranked choice and approval voting statewide, which killed Fargo’s system over the city’s objection. So my earlier draft of this post said approval voting was “too simple to ban” — that turned out to be wishful thinking. Anything that works gets attacked. The honest version is: approval voting is the system I’d choose, not because it’s bulletproof, but because it’s the cleanest combination of simple, proven, and effective among the realistic options.
About the Electoral College. A fair question: even if states adopt approval voting, doesn’t the Electoral College still produce the same swing-state distortion? Yes. States can change how they allocate their electors without a constitutional amendment — that’s how Maine and Nebraska already do district-based allocation — but the Electoral College itself isn’t going anywhere without one, and small states are never going to vote to lose their disproportionate power.
The workaround that’s actually getting traction is the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. States agree to give their electors to whoever wins the national popular vote, and it kicks in once enough states have signed on to control 270 electoral votes. As of April this year, 18 states and DC are in, totaling 222 electoral votes. Virginia joined this spring. Need 48 more. Combine that with state-level approval voting and you’ve effectively built a national approval-voting popular vote for president — no amendment required.
It’s not happening tomorrow. But it’s actually possible, which is more than you can say for most of the reform menu.
I don’t love that the answer is “the boring one.” I wanted there to be a more elegant system that the founders just didn’t think of. But the systems that look elegant on paper either get gamed, get banned, or require us to throw out the Constitution.
What I want is to walk into a voting booth and check the names of every candidate I’d actually be okay with — including the third-party one I like but currently have to ignore. I want my actual preferences counted instead of strategic ones. I want the next round of candidates to know they have to be acceptable to more than just their angriest base.
That’s a small ask. It’s also apparently terrifying to both parties, which is how you know it’s the right one.
Even that's Odd 
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