Resolved: The United States should adopt ranked-choice voting for its federal elections.

The mechanism and the promise

Ranked-choice voting lets voters rank candidates. The last-place finisher is eliminated and those votes are redistributed until someone has a majority. Pro’s theory of change follows from that. Spoilers disappear, so third parties can run without electing their opposites; candidates have to court second-choice votes, so scorched-earth campaigning gets costly; and winners can claim a real majority. The deeper Pro claim is systemic: plurality voting produces the two-party doom loop, and polarized politics won’t get better until the incentive behind it changes.

Where the promise leaks

Con has several empirical tools. Ballot exhaustion means voters who rank only a few candidates drop out of the final count, so "majorities" are majorities of the remaining ballots. Errors and confusion concentrate among elderly, low-income and limited-English voters. Slower counts feed distrust in an era of low trust. And studies of jurisdictions that use RCV show modest effects at best on civility and polarization. Con’s sharpest framing is the reform mirage: RCV changes the arithmetic of losing without touching the sociology of division, and spending limited reform energy on it crowds out changes that matter more.

Federalism and implementation

"For its federal elections" makes this a national question. Fifty states with different equipment, laws and administrative capacity would adopt a new system at once, in a country where election administration is already a battlefield. Con turns rollout into offense, since every glitch becomes a legitimacy crisis. Pro’s counters are that adoption can phase in (as real jurisdictions did), that the status quo’s spoiler crises are legitimacy crises too, and that places using RCV keep choosing to keep it. Weigh a baseline known to be broken against transition risk, and make the judge pick explicitly.