Democrats complain about Green Party "spoilers," but few back a solution: ranked choice voting

In our current system, the person who wins the most votes wins the election. As a result, if a third-party candidate who is ideologically similar to one of the main two parties enters a race, they can split the vote, causing the less popular platform to cary the day. However, in a ranked-choice voting system, voters “rank” the candidates in order of preference. If none of the parties get to 50 percent of the vote, the least popular candidate is stricken, and their votes are allocated according to the second choice of the voter. Meaning that if Stein voters had ranked Clinton second on their ballots, the votes cast by Stein voters would have gone to Clinton once it became clear that Stein finished last.

In 2017, a group of House Democrats, led by Virginia Rep. Don Beyer, introduced H.R. 3057, the Fair Representation Act, which would require every congressional district in America to use ranked-choice voting. It would also require districts to be redrawn by independent redistricting committees, which would diminish the effects of partisan gerrymandering, and it would require the installation of multimember districts — a reform that would allow voters in each district to elect multiple lawmakers instead of just one, so that more people would be represented.

The law would make congressional elections much more competitive and also make it so that voters who feel unrepresented by the major parties, or disenfranchised because they live in a district that is staunchly in favor of one party or another, would have a greater incentive to vote.

When it was introduced, the bill had a total of three sponsors: Beyer; Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif.; and Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md.

A year later, it has only gained two additional sponsors: Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., and Rep. Jim Cooper, D-Tenn.

It seems to me that Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) would alleviate many of the ills that plague the US political system. It's not a perfect method, but it's much better than First Past the Post. It encourages civility in politics because a candidate should want to win over opposition voters. It makes gerrymandering much more difficult, if not impossible. Finally, the reason I think it will always be an uphill fight in the US - it would smash the duopoly. Republicans would become a small regional/junior member party almost over night, and that's if they didn't split into corporatist, religious, and fascist wings. Democrats would likely fracture into a corporatist party and a left wing party. Neither side is going to want to deal with that level of change, so what can we as citizens and voters do?