One concrete, executable thing we can do to improve civility in our political life is to implement Ranked Choice Voting (RCV).
We mostly elect representatives from single member districts with a simple plurality. You don’t even have to get a majority of the vote to win.
A single-member form of RCV is currently used in several Bay Area cities. Voters rank candidates in preference order. If no one gets a majority on the first round then the candidate with the lowest vote total has their votes transferred to each voters’ second choice. This is done in as many rounds as necessary to ensure the winner gets a majority. People can feel free to vote for a minor or 3rd party candidate know their vote won’t be wasted on the looser. Or worse “spoiled” and help to elect the person they want the least. The 2000 Presidential election debacle in Florida and the election of Paul LePage as governor of Maine twice despite most voters rejecting him are but the most prominent examples.
But I think we should go further. HR 3057, the Fair Representation Act, was introduced by Rep Don Beyer (D-VA) last July. The House is currently exclusively elected from single-member districts. The proposal would replace this with multi-member districts elected via RCV.
The system is called Proportional Representation (PR). It’s the system most democracies use. The FairRep Act proposes a form of PR called Multi-Member Ranked Choice Voting (MM-RCV). Voters would rank order their choices for Congress. In a five-person seat, a candidate who gets 16.67% of the vote would be elected. Votes they receive over this amount are proportionately redistributed to other candidates. Here’s a handy YouTube video.
With the “wasted vote” and “spoiler vote” problem largely eliminated, the vast majority of voters would be able to point to one or more of their district’s Congress members and know that they helped elect them. Multi-member districts would be a spectrum of their community’s politics. Because candidates don’t want to alienate voters who may put them as their second or higher choice they’ll tend not to go negative. PR is a better way to deal with diverse, pluralist societies.
Single-member district elections “manufacture” majorities that voters don’t give them. Some of this is due to Gerrymandering no doubt. (The FairRep Act also mandates non-partisan redistricting). But mostly it’s due to the very nature of the single-member district electoral system – literally the math of it.
Third parties would become likely. Green Party, Libertarian Republicans, and breakaway Bernie-crats immediately come to mind as groups that would get representation so long as they don’t alienate voters’ subsequent ballot preferences. Republicans would be elected from urban districts. Democrats from rural conservative areas. Nearly all congressional Districts would now have farms, cities and suburbs. Red District, Blue District distinctions would fade.
A Proportional Representation Congress would have to find consensus. This kind of coalition building is seen all the time in democracies around the world.