Protect Voter Choice

Written By Jamie Joyce

We can fix our elections for roughly 0.019% the cost of our defense budget.

Want a Deep Dive? Read the MAD Act Fact Sheet

The way Americans vote is broken — and not in the way most people argue about.

Forget voter ID laws and mail-in ballot debates for a moment. The deeper problem is simpler: the system we use to count votes is a 250-year-old design that routinely produces winners most voters didn't want, punishes people for voting honestly, and keeps qualified candidates from ever running in the first place.

Plurality voting — the system where you pick one candidate and whoever gets the most votes wins — sounds intuitive. But it has a structural flaw that has shaped American politics for generations: the spoiler effect. If two candidates who share similar ideas both run, they split the vote and hand the election to the candidate the majority opposed. Voters know this. So they don't vote for the person they actually want. They vote against the person they fear most. And candidates who might be exactly what a district needs never run at all, because they know their presence in the race will destroy the candidate closest to them.

This isn't a theory. It's how we got the two-party lock on American politics, and it's a mathematically predictable consequence of the voting method itself.

The MAD Act would give every state the option to fix it — and put a billion dollars on the table to help.

What the Bill Would Do

Title VI of the MAD Act creates a voluntary federal framework for states to adopt alternative voting methods for federal elections. No state is required to do anything. But any state that wants to move beyond plurality voting would get financial support, technical assistance, and clear legal guardrails to do it.

The bill recognizes two qualified methods: ranked-choice voting and STAR voting. Both have been tested. Both have real track records. And both represent substantial improvements over the system Americans currently use.

Under ranked-choice voting, you rank candidates in order of preference. If no one wins a majority, the last-place candidate is eliminated and those votes transfer to each voter's next choice. The process repeats until someone crosses the majority threshold. It's been used in Australia since 1918. It's used statewide in Alaska and Maine. More than 50 U.S. jurisdictions currently use it, serving roughly 17 million voters. Surveys consistently show that 90 percent or more of voters in these jurisdictions say they understand how it works.

STAR voting — Score Then Automatic Runoff — takes a different approach. You score every candidate from 0 to 5. The two highest-scoring candidates advance to an automatic runoff, where every ballot counts as a vote for whichever of the two finalists the voter scored higher. Peer-reviewed research published in Constitutional Political Economy found that STAR voting achieves the highest voter satisfaction efficiency of any single-winner method tested — between 91 and 98 percent, compared to 79 to 92 percent for ranked-choice voting and 70 to 85 percent for plurality.

The bill doesn't pick a winner between the two. That's the state's decision. What it does is set a floor: whichever method a state adopts has to let voters express more than a single preference, eliminate the spoiler effect, and not punish voters for being honest about who they actually support.

The Grant Program

This is where the bill puts real money behind the idea. It authorizes $1 billion over five years, administered by the Election Assistance Commission, structured across four tiers.

Tier 1 is planning grants — $50,000 to $500,000, no strings attached, no matching requirement, no obligation to adopt anything. A state can take the money, study whether an alternative method makes sense, and walk away. Even states that currently ban ranked-choice voting are eligible for planning grants. The bill explicitly says a ban doesn't disqualify you from exploring the question.

Tier 2 is implementation grants for jurisdictions that have actually passed legislation or a ballot measure authorizing a new method. These range from $100,000 for small jurisdictions to $25 million for the largest states, determined solely by voting-age population — not by which method the state chose. A state adopting STAR voting gets the same grant as one adopting ranked-choice voting. If STAR costs a fraction of what ranked-choice costs to implement — and the evidence suggests it does, because it requires only a software upgrade rather than new tabulation hardware — the state keeps the savings and can spend them on voter registration, cybersecurity, early voting expansion, or anything else that improves elections.

Tier 3 is competitive comprehensive grants of up to $50 million for states going all-in with statewide adoption across every level of government.

Tier 4 is where the bill does something genuinely unusual in federal legislation: it pays states to evaluate whether their chosen method is actually working, and to switch if a better option emerges. After two general election cycles, a state can apply for a grant to run a rigorous comparative evaluation, pilot a different method, or transition entirely — without any penalty and without restarting the clock on its commitment period. The bill explicitly states that deciding to evaluate alternatives is not an admission of failure.

Why This Structure Matters

Most election reform bills pick a method and push it. The MAD Act doesn't. It sets evidence-based criteria, identifies the two methods that currently meet those criteria, and then gets out of the way. The framework is designed to evolve. If a third method emerges that meets the bar — eliminates spoilers, lets voters express real preferences, doesn't punish honest voting — Congress can add it. But the bill closes the door to plurality voting itself, which fails every one of those tests.

The maintenance-of-effort provision requires states that take implementation money to stick with their chosen method for at least 10 years or 5 general election cycles. If a state takes the money and then reverses course, it has to pay back a prorated share — 100 percent if it quits within the first 20 percent of the commitment period, scaling down to 20 percent if it makes it 80 percent of the way through. But switching to a different qualified method triggers no repayment at all. The bill is agnostic about which alternative you use. It just doesn't want you going backward.

What This Doesn't Do

The bill doesn't mandate anything. A state that wants to keep plurality voting can do exactly that. No funding is withheld, no penalty is imposed. The bill explicitly prohibits any federal agency from discriminating against a state based on whether it has adopted an alternative method.

It doesn't favor one method over the other. Grant amounts are population-based, not method-based. The bill's findings section lays out the strengths of both ranked-choice voting and STAR voting with equal rigor. Where the methods differ — ranked-choice satisfies the later-no-harm criterion; STAR has higher resistance to strategic voting and eliminates the center-squeeze problem — the bill presents both sides and leaves the choice to the state.

It doesn't break existing election infrastructure. The bill builds on the Help America Vote Act of 2002, uses the Election Assistance Commission that already exists, and follows the federal-state partnership model that's been working for two decades.

Why This Matters

Nineteen states have passed laws banning ranked-choice voting or other alternative methods. Not because the evidence showed these methods were harmful — every peer-reviewed study points in the opposite direction — but because the two major parties have a structural interest in a voting system that locks out competition. Plurality voting isn't a neutral default. It's a system that mathematically guarantees two-party dominance, and the parties that benefit from it have been legislating to protect it.

Arrow's Impossibility Theorem tells us no voting system is perfect. Every method involves tradeoffs. But that's not an argument for keeping the worst option on the table. It's an argument for doing what the MAD Act proposes: adopting the best available methods, measuring their performance with real data, and improving them over time.

The current system asks voters to lie about their preferences and then calls the result democracy. The MAD Act would let them tell the truth.

Sources

A note to readers: We are committed to providing the public with accurate, factually grounded information. If you identify any errors of fact, gaps in sourcing, or flaws in the reasoning presented in this article, we would be grateful if you would bring them to our attention so they can be corrected. Mistakes are possible in any work of this kind, and we take corrections seriously.

Jamie Joyce
Previous

Epstein Act Part II
Next

Prevent AI & Autonomous Weapons Harms