I want to discuss briefly why I am so focused on this esoteric-seeming issue. With families struggling with high costs, the deficit out of control, the job market a disaster, and the military again mired in an unwinnable war, why talk about weird-sounding changes to election rules?

The simple answer is that all of the dysfunction in our political system results to some degree from our outdated election process. Gerrymandering ensures that most people in Congress are elected from safe districts and have no need to worry about challengers, except in primaries. Even in primaries, it’s common for votes to be split among several challenger/outsider candidates, allowing a low-quality incumbent or establishment candidate to cruise to nomination with 40% of the vote. The spoiler problem and the need to vote strategically, and all the catch-22s which arise from that regarding media attention and donations, make it impossible for voters to reject the false dichotomy, leaving gerrymandered districts secure from general election challenges. The result is a Congress that everyone hates because it’s full of show-horse radical ideologues who are bought and paid for by corporations and special interests, but somehow 90% of incumbents get re-elected.

Proportional representation breaks us out of this by making some or all Representatives elected by their whole state, not just one specific corner of it. For proportionally elected members, there are no gerrymandered safe seats. For them to win re-election, their political parties would have to deliver on their promises and solve Americans’ problems. Corrupt Republicans would face real competition from Libertarians and Constitution Party vote shares; empty-suit Democrats could be replaced by Greens or socialists. However, proportionality would reflect that (almost by definition) most Americans are not extremists; ideas currently outside the Overton window could get a hearing in Congress, but not rule the roost unless larger parties or the public were persuaded of their value.

Ranked choice voting for Senators would have similar benefits. Principled, decent people like Bill Redpath, Ohio’s Libertarian Senate candidate, and Ted Brown in Texas (who I know from our work together on the national Platform Committee) can’t get a hearing under plurality because no one wants to “waste their vote”. In RCV, no votes are wasted: one is free to rank a third-party candidate first and a preferred major-party candidate second.

This issue is not about being a Libertarian. Political organizations and smaller political parties across the ideological spectrum support electoral reform because they recognize how plurality single-member districts perpetuate the dysfunctional duopoly and shut out ideas not already in the mainstream. Social Security insolvency, the budget deficit, and the dislocations impending from AI will require radical-sounding new ideas to solve. We will not get those from the kind of Congress the current election system produces.