Voting Reform
Score Voting — Rate Every Candidate, Elect the Best
The Problem
Winner-take-all, pick-one voting forces Americans into a false choice. You can't vote for who you actually want — you vote against who you fear. Third parties are "spoilers." Primaries reward extremes. The system itself manufactures polarization.
Primaries compound the problem. Closed primaries lock independents out entirely. Partisan primaries reward candidates who appeal to the base — the loudest, most ideological slice of each party — not the broader electorate they'll eventually have to serve. By the time the general election rolls around, voters are choosing between two candidates the rest of us didn't pick.
In most elections, the winner doesn't represent the majority — they represent the plurality that showed up. That's not democracy. That's a rounding error with power.
Why Score Voting
Score voting (also called range voting) lets you rate every candidate on a scale — say 0 to 5. The candidate with the highest average score wins. Simple. No complicated rankings. No "instant runoffs" that confuse voters and hide what's actually happening.
Score voting eliminates the spoiler effect entirely. You can give your favorite a 5 and the lesser evil a 3 without hurting either. Every vote carries real information about what the voter actually thinks.
It's been studied extensively. It consistently elects candidates closest to the median voter — the person most people can actually live with. Not the most extreme. Not the best-funded. The most broadly acceptable.
What We Propose
Adopt score voting for all federal and state general elections. Start with willing municipalities and states, build the evidence base, and scale nationally.
Eliminate partisan primaries entirely. With score voting, you don't need them. All candidates — from every party and none — appear on a single ballot. Voters rate each one. The highest-rated candidate wins. No two-stage filter. No party gatekeeping. No taxpayer-funded elections that exclude half the country.
Fund voter education so people understand how to use the system. It's not complicated, but change requires explanation.
The Trade-offs
Any voting reform faces resistance from incumbents who won under the current rules. Ranked choice voting (RCV) has more political momentum right now, even though score voting is simpler and has better mathematical properties. We'd rather push for the better system than the more popular one — but we'll take any reform that moves away from plurality voting.
Implementation costs money and takes time. But the cost of bad representation is orders of magnitude higher.