When voters in Alaska and Massachusetts cast their ballots this November (this year, it’s this October or November), they’ll have the opportunity to make their future voting more meaningful. Through measures on their respective ballots, they’ll be able to enact ranked-choice voting.

Under this system, voters can rank their preferences for a given office. If we can bear the pain of flashing back to the 2000 Bush-Gore fiasco, had ranked-choice voting been in place, voters who preferred Ralph Nader but didn’t want to see Bush become president could have ranked Nader first and Al Gore second. By that calculus, Gore would have carried Florida and we likely wouldn’t still have troops in Iraq.

What ranked-choice voting does is ensure that the electoral victor actually has the support of a majority of voters. If a candidate wins a clear majority of the votes, they’re elected. If they have a plurality but not a majority, the lesser-ranked voter preferences are added in until one candidate attains a majority. Such a system can bring a larger number of voters to the polls, as they can vote both for their heart’s desire and, if need be, their heart’s runner-up, as a way to ensure that the candidate who’s their stomach-turner isn’t elected.

Maine has enacted ranked-choice voting; it would be good to see Alaska and Massachusetts follow suit. As for other voting reforms that states have adopted in recent years, there’s one—jungle primaries—that should be shunned. Enacted through a byzantine set of circumstances in California, this system opens primary elections to all voters, which in California has meant that, with the Republican Party effectively kaput, pro-corporate candidates preferred by centrist and even conservative voters can prevail over more liberal Democrats who’d otherwise be elected. That begins to explain why a legislature that’s nominally three-quarters Democratic hasn’t enacted a program to address the state’s housing crisis, or even to rein in the police.

The worst electoral "reform" of the year is that promulgated by New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s election commission, which threatens to knock the state’s progressive, indispensable Working Families Party off the ballot in coming years. I’ll have more to say about how New York voters can keep that from happening in my next On TAP.