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Cato is non-partisan? On what planet?

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RCV would not have helped this year in Michigan. Other GOP candidates for governor were even more hard-right than Tudor Dixon. There was no one even remotely similar to Rick Snyder, a moderate Republican businessman who came out of nowhere to win the 2010 election and serve for two terms. While Donald Trump is active politically, there will be very few independent GOP candidates in the style of Snyder or Arnold Schwarzenegger in California. Alaska is an exception, not a rule, I am afraid.

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Ranked-choice voting works in the general election in Alaska because all of their federal offices encompass the state and more than two candidates run.. It works in primaries because there are more than two candidates. RCV is equivalent to simple-majority elections when there exactly two candidates.

A much more interesting and, I believe, effective structure is the combination of RCV with multi-member districts. In multi-member districts, there are always more than two candidates (there are more than two offices up for grabs). MMDs are also harder to gerrymander, and when successful, MMDs would mitigate the effects. For example, Pennsylvania has 24 seats in Congress. Rather than have 24 simple-majority districts, they could have 6 four-member districts or 4 six-member districts (or 3x8 or 8x3, of which 3 districts with 8 offices would be better). To win elections, candidates must appeal to a wider swath of the electorate in their primaries and general elections.

Another component of the solution to the extremism problem is to increase the number of Representatives to ensure that a representative in, say, California represent approximately the same number of constituents and to double the number of senators, which would make RCV effective.

Our winner-take-all, simple-majority system needs a complete overhaul. The questions are who is represented and for whom elected officers govern.

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Cato Institute is a libertarian think tank funded by right-wing centimillionaires and billionaires such as Robert Mercer and the Scafe family.

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