 Here's the thing I never want to have to do again. Vote for the lesser of two evils. But every time an election rolls around, we end up with the same two choices, over and over and over again. Instead of positive, issue-focused campaigns that encourage us to vote for the person we like the most, we get mudslinging, outrageous lies, fear-mongering, and campaigns that make half the country hate the other. How is it that in a country with so many different people and ideas, we keep getting stuck with the same two options? It's no accident. The way we vote only ever gives you two choices who have any real chance of winning. It's literally built into the system. On the surface, the American system makes a lot of sense. Every citizen gets one vote, and the candidate with the most votes wins. But it also creates a huge flaw called the spoiler effect. Here's how it works. Let's take the entire electorate and boil it down to 100 voters. And let's put everyone in order of their political preferences. The most conservative on the right, the most progressive on the left, everyone else falls somewhere in between. Now, when we've got just two candidates to choose from, the folks on the right vote for the Republican, those on the left vote Democrat, and the 5-10% in the middle who might vote either way end up tipping the election. But what happens when you introduce a third-party candidate? If that candidate is progressive, the progressive vote is split between two good candidates and the conservative wins. If they're conservative, their vote is split and the progressive wins. Voters get that by voting for that third-party candidate, they make it more likely that their least favorite candidate is going to win. So rather than voting for the candidate they like best, most voters choose the lesser of two evils. In this system, the winning candidate almost always wins with support from less than half of the votes. They don't even have a majority of support, yet they win and represent the whole electorate. And this is how we pick the most powerful human on the planet? Come on. Repeat this pattern over and over, and you can quickly see how we get a race to the bottom. Here's the good news. There's a small tweak we could make that lets you vote for whichever candidate you want without having to worry about the spoiler effect. It's called ranked choice voting, and here's how it works. Instead of choosing just one candidate, you rank candidates in order of preference. If your first choice is mathematically eliminated, your vote automatically goes to your backup. Let's look at how this would work using the example of the 2016 presidential election. Say you're a conservative who wants to vote for Gary Johnson. In our current system, you probably felt pressure to vote for Trump because you didn't want to split the conservative vote in elect Hillary. But with ranked choice voting, you just put Johnson first, and Trump is your backup. If Johnson doesn't win, your vote is automatically transferred to Trump. Or say you're a progressive who loves Jill Stein, and instead of being forced to use your one and only vote on Hillary, you could put Stein first, and Hillary is your backup. You get it. The beauty of ranked choice voting is that it lets you vote for the candidates who most closely align with your values, and gives America a much clearer picture of what the electorate really wants. No more settling for the lesser of two evils. You can vote your conscience without hurting your own interests. So now you're probably thinking, that sounds amazing, but that's never going to happen in the U.S. But here's the twist. It already has. RCV is already in use in cities across America, and Maine just changed their statewide elections to RCV. We're bringing conservatives and progressives together to pass more laws just like this, state by state, so we can fix America's corrupt political system from the bottom up. These laws are based on model legislation called the American Anti-Corruption Act. We fix our broken elections, stop political bribery, and end secret money. Go to www.represent.us to join us.