Voting Rights for All
If we really want a Democracy...
It’s possible you’ve never asked yourself whether there’s a better way to vote.
I’m here to argue that there is.
To be clear: I am not a voting expert. And that matters, because this field has been researched more than almost any other. There’s even been a Nobel Prize for it.
What I do know is this: America uses the oldest, dumbest voting method in the developed world. Almost no one else uses it. We barely think about it. We just do it.
It’s called “First Past the Post.” Yep, the way we vote: you pick one candidate; we count up the votes; and if no one gets a majority—which happens a lot—the person with the most votes wins.
That’s not a majority; that’s called a plurality.
Imagine if legislation passed with a plurality. It wouldn’t. It doesn’t.
But that’s how we choose presidents, senators, governors, and almost everyone else.
A few states have already moved on. Not blue states; mixed ones. Maine and Alaska use Ranked Choice Voting. On those ballots, you rank candidates: first choice, second choice, and so on. When they count votes, they check whether someone got a majority. If not, they eliminate the last-place candidate and redistribute those ballots based on second-choice rankings. Then they repeat until someone has a majority.
This produces more moderate winners. Look at the only two moderate Republican senators left: Maine and Alaska.
And, crucially, it produces someone with majority support.
Georgia, Mississippi and Louisiana use a different method: the runoff. They start with First Past the Post, but if nobody reaches a majority, they hold a second election between the top two. It’s expensive, but it guarantees a majority winner.
Now, here’s where things get wild:
Voting systems can fail in weird ways. There’s a Nobel-winning result called Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem, which basically says: no ranked voting system can satisfy all the “fairness” criteria you’d logically want.
Veritasium does a great deep dive on this.
However, the key point is this: even with any theoretical flaws, these systems work much better in real life than the one we use.
And we haven’t even touched on “score” voting, where you rate candidates on a scale—like customer surveys. Those methods are often more scientifically sound and measure something deeper than simple preference.
They measure consensus.
But amazingly, here’s a huge problem: experts disagree on which system matches what humans want.
Majority? Consensus? Something else?
If the experts can’t decide after decades of research, then I say: okay: yes!
Let us have each State choose. That’s what they’re there for right? Laboratories?
But let us forbid the one system everyone agrees is garbage: First Past the Post with a plurality.
This should be part of a new federal Voting Rights Act for All.
This is about Fairness!
We keep the Civil Rights Voting Act (what’s left of it, and we’ll come back to re-stacking the Supreme Court to fix what they’ve broken).
But let us add basic rights for everyone:
• No gerrymandering;
• A federal holiday for voting;
• Full accessibility;
• No financial or bureaucratic barriers to voting;
• And a requirement that every election is decided by either a majority or a consensus.
Proposed legislation for this is on the Project Liberty 2029 wiki.
Now, a quick word about Georgia, Mississippi and Louisiana. Runoffs are actually intended there as a tool to block Black candidates. That is a real problem and I do not make light of it. But it’s also fading. Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia proves it can be beaten.
Finally though, here’s the rub: the authoritarian movement threatening this country got power with only about 33% of Americans behind them.
Trumpet did not win a majority, but now he’s our President.
We’ll never know if he would have squeaked over the top in another system, but we shouldn’t suffer what we are suffering today without knowing that answer.
That’s the core of my argument.
If we want real representation—if we want government by We the People—then we need no gerrymandering, holidays, the rest of it: and we need majority or consensus voting to replace First Past the Post.
Nothing less is worthy of our democracy.
Amen, America.
Music to go with the policy: