Very interesting ideas spread from Andrew Yang’s brain to mine:

1. Ranked-Choice Voting
2. Open primaries

Ranked choice voting could help us out of political extremism being incentivized. I believe the ideas is that ranked-choice selects for candidates that appeal to a larger portion of the population than in our current voting system. Currently you can win the presidency if 35% of the population love you, even if the other 65% strongly dislike you. Ranked-choice would force you to be at least tolerable by 50% of the population. This could select for candidates with less divisiveness and more reasonableness.

Open primaries are something that I had never heard of. The ideas, as I understand it, is that everybody should be permitted to vote in primaries. This will change the incentive structure for incumbents to act in the interest of their entire constituency rather than cater to the extreme of their party. A crystalized example: Voting to impeach Trump. No republican with any game-theory sense would do such a thing due to the repercussions in their upcoming primary. In a closed primary, fringe republican voters would choose a new representative. In an open primary however, the incumbent who voted to impeach would have a good shot at reelection because of the support we would have gained from middle-of-the-road independents and liberals.

Upgrade democracy?