America is as divided as it has ever been.
According to Gallup, “80% of US adults believe that the country is divided on important issues.” This division is pushed by politicians who continue to trend more to the poles of their parties.
In the modern election system, winning the party primary is key to winning the general election because being your party’s nominee means you have their financial backing, and often the votes of party line voters.
Winning the primary means appealing to the base of votes who are typically to the poles of the party’s beliefs. This means that candidates have to appeal to the base before they appeal to the broader American people.
The base will be more partisan, and the candidates will be more partisan as a result. But we can make changes to this system in the form of ranked choice voting, or RCV. It is just what it sounds like; voters will rank the candidates in order of preference, one being first choice.
RCV runs on a round system, where if no candidate scores 50% or more of the vote, the candidate with the least percentage of votes is eliminated, and rounds are run until a candidate gets more than 50% of the vote. RCV is already being used in Alaska and Maine, as well as in some places across 23 states and the District of Columbia, according to FairVote.
RCV allows for a greater consensus to be reached by voters. This will allow voters’ opinions to be more accurately tallied so that the majority of the people support the candidate who wins. RCV will moderate American politics due to the fact that more people are willing to support a moderate candidate than a radical one on either side.
In a 2018 Maine congressional election, Republican Bruce Poliquin won the popular vote, but lost the election to Democrat Jared Golden, according to Quartz. This is because more people selected Golden higher on their ranked ballots than Poliquin overall. Of the two, Golden was much more moderate, reinforcing that RCV elects more moderates.
RCV is not without criticism, with one of the biggest opponents being StopRCV. I find that most of their points are already problems with the current system, and others are just flat out false or misleading. The most blatant of these misleading statements was saying that RCV favors the “elites” of our society because people would have to research and form opinions on multiple candidates.
This statement is very confusing, as calling people who have the time to research candidates “elites” is not always true. With our current system, people have to research multiple candidates in order to pick one. None of the so-called issues with RCV are things that are not currently occurring.
Overall, RCV makes it so that the true will of the people is what is the result of our elections. Even though its use is not yet widespread, RCV has shown promise to moderate American politics, create a more respectful political environment and thus a better America.
Jonas Couzin-Frankel • Dec 10, 2025 at 11:41 am
I agree with this article. I think a ranked choice voting system would help to decrease the division that the US is experiencing right now. I think at the very least we should test it out for one or two elections and if it performs well, it could be permanently implemented. In 2021, New York used RCV for their mayoral race and a moderate won. This was because he was the second choice candidate for a lot of people. This proves that RCV is a good way to limit division on a smaller scale and is likely to work the exact same way if implemented on a much larger scale for the whole country. While the extreme groups wouldn’t like this system as much, they are a much smaller group of people when compared to moderates on both sides, so this system would appeal to more people than our current system does.
Liam H • Dec 9, 2025 at 1:43 pm
I’ve long maintained that America’s two-party system is indicative of a failure to properly foster democracy, and RCV would fix that in spades. We are, currently, stuck between a rock and a hard place with many elections because elections are so often Side One versus Side Two. RCV, for the flaws it may have, would encourage people to vote for third-party candidates, because if you can put another candidate on your list as well then it won’t feel like a vote third-party is throwing it away, or worse, a vote for the other party. And, by the way, StopRCV saying that “people have to research multiple candidates in order to pick one” genuinely lost me, because thinking it’s a good tactic to not do an iota of research before voting is a one-way trip to an uneducated populace. I agree; there’s no reason not to go ranked-choice.