So what if in 2016 you could have listed your first and second choices for president so if your first choice is out of the running, or there is no majority winner, your vote then goes to your second choice.

If most Jill Stein voters had listed Hillary Clinton second in WI, MI and PA she could have won those states despite the protest vote.

Maine is actually utilizing this ranked choice system for the first time ever in two weeks.

The system works like this: Voters rank candidates. A candidate garnering a majority of first-place votes is the winner.

If there’s no majority winner, the last-place candidate is eliminated and the losing candidate’s second-place votes are reallocated for another voting round. The computerized tallies are repeated in a game of political survivor until someone captures a majority.

This is a step forward in fixing the many, many, many flaws in our system.

Also, a thought:  of course we need to get rid of the Electoral College, but that will get tremendous resistance from the small states that dominate our senate (that’s the damn problem).  It’s a compromise that would also require an amendment, but it might be more universally acceptable if we changed the system so that the winner had to get the majority of both the popular votes and Electoral College votes.  If no candidate wins both there’s an instant runoff between the top two vote getters, say two weeks later.

Not a bad idea?

We often talk about the disparity in population that the founding fathers could never have foreseen whereby California has something like 70 times the population of Wyoming but they have the same 2 senators.  Bad.  It occurs to me that New York City, which shares its senators with the rest of the state has 16 times the population of Wyoming.  Or as many people as Wyoming, Vermont, Alaska, the Dakotas, Montana, New Hampshire, Delaware, Rhode Island and Maine. That’s 20 senators representing around the same population as NYC.

Unsustainable.