Top Reads, Listens & Follows of the week
Ranked Choice Voting
Takeaways:
Andrew Yang, the entrepreneur who ran as a Democratic Presidential candidate in 2020, is a pretty pragmatic guy. Over the past years he’s been focused on combating the political polarization at a national level that appears to be steadily increasing.
One of his primary goals now is to make non-partisan open primaries and ranked choice voting the standard in state elections across the country, replacing traditional party primaries and single-choice, winner-take-all elections.
The way it works is that all candidates, regardless of affiliation, participate in an open primary with the top four progressing to the general election. In the general election, voters rank candidates by preference: first, second, third, and fourth. If one candidate receives >50% of the first-choice votes, they win. If not, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated and voters that ranked that candidate 1st have their vote counted for their next choice. This process continues until one candidate receives a majority of voters’ choices. Here is a good video explaining.
This system has been adopted in Alaska and Maine so far, and 14 states will consider bills to move them to this model this year. In an age when decency and pragmatism seems to be in limited supply in politics, this election model may serve as a healthy step in the right direction. Incentivizing politicians to appeal to all the people they hope to lead, as opposed to serving the vocal fringes of their party, and offering citizens more choice instead of forcing a vote for the lesser of two evils seems like a no-brainer to me, but will undoubtedly be fought by vested interests. We will see.
Reads: If you have trouble accessing some of these reads, try this
Why AI Will Save the World by Marc Andreessen (here)
Some things I like about Germany by Chris Arnade (here)
Hidden Forces by Tom Morgan (here)
Cargo Cult Diversification by Taylor Pearson (here)
Listens:
Kyle Boddy, founder of Driveline Baseball, on pitching, baseball & gambling (here)
How Exactly Joe Lonsdale Would Fix The Public Sector (here)
Chris Sacca – Hustling to Save the Planet at Lowercarbon (here)
Follow, Watch & Other great content:
The New Yorker Documentary: Inside Louisiana’s Sinking Communities (here)