Moreover these words are a continuous reminder of the responsibility we all share to keep pushing towards a more perfect union.

Core to this founding vision is the principle of “One Person, One Vote” – that all of our votes in representation are to carry equal weight, no matter how smart or dumb, rich or poor, nor entitled or humble we may be.

Scroll on to learn about the top three key problems with the vote itself that lead directly to our dysfunctional bipolar government, and the solutions and organizations working on critical upgrades.

When we are limited to picking one favorite in each election, the weight of our votes are inherently unequal. Any time there are more than two choices, voters who prefer more than one of the options have less weight in the choice since those voters will split support, leading to clearly non-representative outcomes.

This discourages good candidates from stepping up, compels voters to vote against their true preferences in order to prevent their worst outcomes, cements the polarized two-party duopoly, and gives an unassailable advantage to monied special interests, since “viability” of the polarized frontrunners is measured by cash.

Approval Voting lets all the voters support whichever candidates they like and elects the candidate supported by the most voters. Because Approval uses the same ballot format we use for most elections, it’s the simplest in terms of upgrade cost and voter education.

Approval Voting is the simplest form of “Score Voting”, a class of methods that allow the voters to express a weighted score on each option. You can learn more at The Center for Election Science, the chief national advocacy group for Approval Voting.

Ranked Robin lets the voters express a preference order (1st choice, 2nd choice, etc.) between the options, and like a round robin, the candidate most preferred over the others head-to-head wins. Ranked Robin is an ideal upgrade for jurisdictions that have already adopted Ranked Choice Voting, and see the need for an equal weight method.

You can do the deep dive on Ranked Robin at the Equal Vote Coalition’s website here.

STAR Voting is the new kid on the block. Invented a scant decade past, STAR , which stands for “Score Then Automatic Runoff”, combines the voting method concepts of scoring and ranking to empower a nuanced, equal expression for all voters in a simple, familiar format.

STAR tops the voting method charts in terms of accurately reflecting the will of the people, and its simple two-step count produces transparent results we all can understand. Further, STAR is summable by precinct, a core requirement for election integrity and voter confidence.

In STAR, we can express a level of support for each candidate using the ubiquitous 0-5 star scale. The winner is the majority-preferred choice between the two candidates who get the most stars overall.

Active chapters around the country are organizing initiatives for local and state adoption. You can plug in and learn more at STAR Voting Action.

Unfortunately, this system which was intended to give voters more voice in the electoral process now effectively shuts out the vast majority from having a meaningful choice.

A combination of factors, including population migration (the Big Sort), the continuing exodus of voters from both major parties, and deliberate Gerrymandering (drawing district lines to advantage one of the major parties), have made the vast majority of our electoral districts and states “safe” for just one party.

When a district or state is “safe”, the determinative choice is made in the primary election, not the general, meaning that only a small fraction of voters are actually choosing our representatives, instead of We The People as a whole.

The Top 2 Open Primary addresses the partisan division magnified by the partisan primary system and allows participation from all voters, regardless of which direction a district tilts.

But preserving the limit of one choice in a wider field magnifies the vote-splitting spoiler inequality endemic to our voting process today. In multiple elections in Washington and California, two candidates from the minority have advanced due to vote-splitting between candidates preferred by the majority, and minor party and independent candidates have been effectively shut out from the general election where most voters participate.

Furthermore, the question of partisan association rights deserves consideration. While the claim that private political party associations have an implicit general election nomination right is unsupportable by basic democratic principles, in the Open Primary concept, a candidate can advance to the general election carrying the label (and implicit endorsement) of a party, without any partisan endorsement process. As an extreme example, the Democratic Party in Alaska has filed suit this cycle to remove an out-of-state incarcerated felon from the ballot.

Several solutions have been proposed and adopted to address some of the issues with the California and Washington Top 2:

The Unified Primary, first petitioned in Oregon in 2013, combines Approval Voting in the primary vote with a top two runoff in the general election. Voters in the primary can support all the candidates they like, the two candidates supported by the most voters advance to the general election, and all the voters can choose between the two most supported overall. St.Louis was the first city in the nation to adopt the Unified Primary for local elections in 2022.

The Unified Primary has the distinct advantage that it utilizes the same ballot format we regularly use in “choose only one” voting today, minus the one-choice limit, so adoption and education costs are minimized. Show Me Integrity, Missouri’s leading cross-partisan election reform advocacy group, is now pushing for adoption statewide and in other jurisdictions.

The Top 4 and Top 5 Open Primary efforts aim to give general election voters more than just two choices by advancing the four or five most viable candidates in the primary to the general election. Open Primaries Advocacy now counts active efforts in more than a dozen states to bring Top N Open Primaries to the voters.

The fundamental issue with Top N is that the voting method used in the general election must be able to work properly when there are more than two competitive candidates. As Alaska demonstrated in its very first use of Top 4 + Ranked Choice Voting, the RCV component of this reform falls far short of that critical goal.

If you are a passionate advocate of open primaries, we recommend pairing that reform push with a general election method that truly offers a level playing field to the candidates and an equal weight vote to all the voters, such as Approval, Ranked Robin, or STAR.