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The backbone of every functional democracy is a free and fair election, in which the candidate with the strongest support from the majority of the citizens, a candidate that could beat any other candidate in a 1-1 match, is elected into office. It sounds simple, and yet the electoral system in the United States is broken. It has resulted in what we have accepted as the status quo of our democracy - bipartisanship. Run-off elections. Bad candidates. Voting for the lesser of two evils. Swinging the vote. Billions of dollars and years of our attention as a nation that are wasted on presidential campaigns that are no better than a for-profit sporting event. An event in which the citizens, and not the politicians, are the losers. All of these phenomena are symptoms of a broken electoral system. So how do we fix it?
On Type One Planet, we are working to answer this existential question. Our guest in this episode, Aaron Hamlin, tells us that — “there May be a solution to this puzzle.” Aaron is the co-founder and Executive Director of The Center for Election Science, where they bolster a simple idea - Approval Voting. Put simply, every citizen has as many votes as there are candidates, and they can vote for all of the candidates that they think could do the job. The candidate with the most overall votes wins. That’s it. Sounds too good to be true, or is this the future of modern Democracy.
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