Fighting Polarization in Elections

By Minsung Kim ‘26 • Nov 10, 2025

Every election season, Americans brace themselves for the same storm.

The air fills with political ads, the debates turn hostile, and families tiptoe around dinner conversations. It’s easy to blame “partisan politics,” but polarization runs deeper than campaign slogans or Twitter threads. It’s embedded in the way we vote.

Most U.S. states use what’s called a first-past-the-post (FPTP) system. On the surface, it sounds fair—whoever gets the most votes wins. But beneath that simplicity lies a quiet flaw. Voters can only pick one candidate, even if their true preferences are more complex. Maybe you agree with Candidate A on economics but prefer Candidate B on social policy; the system forces you to choose one over the other. As a result, candidates stop appealing to the middle and start fighting for their most loyal base.

In 2022, Alaska tried something different. The state adopted ranked-choice voting (RCV), allowing voters to rank candidates in order of preference. The idea was promising: if your top pick didn’t win, your vote could still count for your second choice. On paper, it looked like a way to reward moderation and cooperation.

But reality was messier. Because Alaska’s electorate was already so polarized, moderate candidates didn’t get enough first-choice votes to stay in the race. Ironically, the very system meant to heal division ended up reinforcing it. The problem wasn’t the idea itself—it was how polarization had already shaped the playing field.

So where do we go from here?

I believe in refining the idea, not abandoning it. A system called Total Vote Runoff (TVR) offers a smarter approach. Instead of eliminating candidates based only on first-choice votes, TVR considers all preferences. It uses something known as the Borda method, where first-place votes earn the most points, second-place votes earn slightly fewer, and so on. In this system, candidates with broader appeal—not just extreme supporters—stay in the running longer.

That simple change could shift the incentives of American politics. Candidates would need to connect with a wider audience, not just their loudest supporters. Voters, too, would have the power to express a fuller range of opinion—beyond red or blue, beyond one checkbox.

Polarization didn’t appear overnight, and it won’t vanish with a single reform. But the way we vote shapes the way we think about democracy itself. Maybe the first step toward unity is giving people the chance to say more than one thing at the ballot box.