Millions of Americans will shamble to the voting booths on Tuesday to choose between a candidate they despise and a candidate they can barely tolerate.

These days, that’s how democracy works in our two-party system dominated by monied interests and political elites. Our state is no exception. In November 2024, Nevadans rejected Question 3, a constitutional amendment that would have implemented open primaries and ranked-choice voting throughout the state. This local defeat echoed a nationwide failure of pro-democracy ballot initiatives.

In Nevada, Democrats and Democrat-affiliated PACs spent more than $2 million to oppose the measure. This resistance was not unexpected. The two entrenched political parties benefit greatly from maintaining their duopoly over our political landscape. Democrats know that by denying the voters an alternative choice, they have to be only slightly less terrible than their Republican counterparts to guarantee the votes of their liberal base. 

Resistance from party elites doesn’t explain the whole picture. In almost every one of these electoral defeats, the pro-reform side raised significantly more money than its opponents. In Nevada, backers of the measure had a nearly tenfold funding advantage. I sought to understand this result by asking friends and family who voted no on Question 3 for their reasoning. These conversations revealed a deep lack of understanding of why these reforms are necessary and a hefty measure of loss aversion bias driving a preference for the status quo.

The ideas of democratic reform have not even scratched the surface of our collective consciousness. Progressive candidates spend a lot of time talking about wealth taxes and health care reform without realizing that legislating on behalf of regular people is impossible in a system as heavily skewed as ours. Any positive change shoved through the grinder of politics morphs into a bloated handout to the economic elite on the other side. 

For example, the Affordable Care Act started out as a bill intended to help regular Americans. Lobbyists, corporate backers and purchased politicians molded it into blood tribute for health insurance companies. Our politicians no longer care what we think. They know that the surest path to re-election is pleasing their donors, not listening to their constituents. If we want to have a functional government that works for the people, we have to realign the incentives that guide our elected officials.

The “first past the post” voting system grants us a single vote for a single candidate. While easy to grasp, this system virtually guarantees the dominance of two parties over time because it is susceptible to the spoiler effect. A third-party voter in Nevada is afraid of voting their conscience because they know their party stands almost no chance of winning. They’d be throwing away their vote by doing that. So they vote for one of the two major parties they most align with instead. 

Ranked-choice voting fixes this problem by allowing candidates to transfer their vote to their second choice if their primary choice is not popular enough. This opens the door for independent candidates to actually win elections. In Nevada, unaffiliated voters represent 35.59 percent of the voting population, more than either of the two parties, and yet not a single Independent sits in our Legislature.

Due to “first past the post,” most incumbents do not fear losing in the general election. The main threat to their power is losing to a challenger from their own party in a primary. Because only members of the party can vote in Nevada primary elections, and only the most passionate and radical members of the party vote then, politicians are incentivized to move further to the radical extreme to retain their power. Open primaries solve this by ensuring that the electorate at large gets to decide who moves to the general election. This naturally selects only the candidates who are agreeable to most voters. This process was successfully implemented in Alaska in 2022 (not without challenges), resulting in greater participation and enfranchisement of unaffiliated voters.

Unlimited dark money in our elections corrupts our politicians. The Supreme Court has systematically dismantled the guardrails that have kept the robber barons away from the levers of power in decision after decision. Most legislative campaign funding is now obtained through wealthy donors, PACs and self-funding. This unlimited flood of cash drowns the morality and conscience of our representatives. They become puppets of donors whose interests do not overlap with those of the regular Joe. This is the reason that Congress has no problem passing crypto reform and tax breaks for the top 1 percent while at the same time shutting the government down to avoid providing health care for the most vulnerable.

But even in such a hostile environment, reform is possible at the state level. Arizona’s Clean Elections Act allows candidates who adhere to strict campaign contribution limits to access public funds for their elections. Seattle runs a democracy voucher program that gives every citizen a number of $25 vouchers they can use to support candidates they like, transferring campaign funding power directly into the hands of the people. Nevada can champion similar initiatives that level the playing field and realign the incentives of our elected officials.

In addition to opening the floodgates of dark money into our elections, the Supreme Court has ruled in favor of gerrymandering again and again. Our single-member district system is uniquely susceptible to unfair redistricting. Most mature democracies have long ago moved away from this archaic method. Most use party-list proportional methods, in which people vote for parties instead of individual candidates and the seats are distributed proportionally to the votes received. This results in almost perfect representation but enshrines the power of political parties, going directly against the words of many of the Founding Fathers.

Australia and Ireland can teach us a better approach. In these countries, voters are represented by five or six representatives in each district, as opposed to just one in the U.S. At the polls, voters rank the candidates using a system called single transferable vote, which functions similarly to the form of ranked-choice voting Nevada voters rejected in 2024. The result is a system in which the makeup of the legislature accurately represents the makeup of the electorate and gerrymandering is virtually impossible.

There is no reason Nevada should continue using a voting system that is susceptible to gerrymandering, disenfranchises third-party voters and results in representatives who do not reflect the political makeup of the state. The only thing standing in our way is the formidable task of educating voters on the benefits that come with better political systems.

Vote Nevada, the organization that brought ranked-choice voting and open primaries to the ballot in 2022 and 2024, is still active. (I’m not in any way affiliated with them, but I support their ideas.) They are working hard to place ballot initiatives on independent redistricting commissions and open primaries before voters in 2026. As responsible citizens of Nevada, it’s up to us to fix the deep flaws in our democracy. 

Real reform will not be handed to us from the federal government. It will flow up from the will and work of regular people that recognize that the current model is unsustainable. In the words of the U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, “a single courageous State may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.” 

Let’s become a laboratory of democracy that discovers the cure for the deep rot in our system.

Vitaliy Kubushyn is a software engineer who lives in Las Vegas with his wife, son and dog.