A new methodology for electing government representatives is emerging. Eighteen states already have some form of ‘ranked choice voting’ in place. Instead of using ballots that pit party against party, the ballot will elect the most popular candidate, party notwithstanding. It works exactly like the TV show ‘America’s Got Talent’. Perhaps for elections it should be renamed as ‘American Politicians Got Talent’. Politico.com has the most succinct description:

“Ranked-choice voting allows citizens to rank their candidate preferences on an election ballot instead of voting for a single candidate. If one candidate does not initially win a majority, competitors with the fewest votes are eliminated from the race and their voters’ second choices are applied to the tallies of the remaining candidates until one candidate achieves a majority.”

The process asks the voter to rank all the candidates rather than selecting just one. Then, exactly like voting on ‘America’s Got Talent’, less popular candidates are eliminated to identify the candidate with the highest ranked votes.

So what does the reader think about this?

Dominated by political party machinery, the election environment has become both complex and expensive. For the 2020 primary, mariner’s own state, Iowa, collapsed under burdensome procedures of trying to determine who would be on the Democratic Party’s ticket. Bean counting became an art form involving many qualifiers that confused voters at the precinct level; it grew worse as tallies were transferred up the chain to State headquarters.

Hand in hand with complexity was the amount of cash required to sustain elaborate party machinations and local campaigning. For years at the national level, all political parties continuously have been increasing fund raising to the point that one had to be a billionaire (Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg) to run independent of party machinery. It is conceivable, one hopes, that funding will become a local sport rather than a national one.

Besides the overly complex and expensive processes the parties have created, the party system became competitive in its own right for its own purposes – subverting the idea that it was the voter who was most important. Many pundits identify Newt Gingrich as the politician who made winning as a party more important than winning as a nation. This has grown intense over the decades to the point today where party victory counts far more than compromise in behalf of the electorate. Note only the shenanigans of Federal and Supreme Court nominations in recent years. Today the Senate Majority Leader (McConnell) controls every aspect of business in the Senate; in the House the Speaker has the same role (Pelosi) – the Party comes first.

Lastly, because the founding fathers left voting procedures to the States, there are many different election procedures for each state, each city, each county and each Representative district. In this age of cultural change at the speed of light, even the ballot is under pressure to change for the twenty-first century. The familiar list includes government supported elections without private funding; eliminate the Electoral College; reallocate the Senate to represent the population; allow referendums at the Federal level. Now add ranked choice ballots.

Ancient Mariner