For 250 years, the story of American democracy has been a story of expanding who holds power and who gets to decide who yields it.
The 15th Amendment, the 17th, the Voting Rights Act, the 19th Amendment and the 26th—each was a structural intervention, a deliberate redesign of the rules to bring more people into the democratic process. And at each iteration, a bet was made on the same proposition: Democracy works better when more people have real power within it.
We are overdue for the next chapter.
Women make up 51 percent of the American population and hold fewer than 29 percent of seats in Congress. That gap is not a product of insufficient ambition, inadequate candidates or a thin pipeline of viable women. It is the product of an electoral system that was designed before women could vote, and has never been fundamentally redesigned since.
Ranked-choice voting changes that. The ranked ballot is the single most powerful, best-documented structural reform available for advancing women’s political participation, and it serves every voter, at every level of government, on every ballot.
In a ranked-choice voting election, voters rank candidates in order of preference—first choice, second and third—and if no candidate wins a majority outright, the candidates with the fewest votes are eliminated and their votes are redistributed until someone reaches a winning threshold.
Under this system, voters can express a genuine preference without fear of wasting their vote on a candidate who can’t win, and qualified women candidates can run without fearing splitting the vote.
(This is part of a new series FEMINIST 250: Democracy’s Feminist Future, a special Ms. series examining the next chapter of U.S. democracy through a feminist lens. As the nation approaches its 250th anniversary, the series explores how women and marginalized communities have shaped democratic progress, what lessons history offers for the challenges ahead, and how a more inclusive, representative and equitable democracy can be built for the next 250 years.)
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