Authoritarian capture isn’t inevitable.
Between our “pick-one” plurality voting system and partisan primaries, extremists are able to win elections without broad support.
We’re deploying proven reforms in congressional districts before the 2026 midterms to make minority rule much harder to keep. A few simple upgrades to our systems protects our democracy against would-be autocrats.
Change the system. Change the math. Change our country for the better.
How Extremists Control Everything without Majority Support
American democracy has a simple structural defect that has produced catastrophic outcomes and brought us to the brink of authoritarianism.
The vulnerability: Our electoral system. Specifically, plurality voting and partisan primaries, which conspire to allow well-organized ideological minorities to dominate our politics and government.
Because of its “pick-only-one” mechanic, plurality voting allows extremists to win partisan primaries by causing vote-splitting among multiple more moderate candidates. Look no further than the 2016 presidential primaries for the most impactful recent example of this — it’s where everything started going wrong.
But there are examples all over the place. In 2022, nearly 30% of congressional primaries were decided by vote-splitting. And in most congressional districts, winning the primary means an easy path to general election victory. The partisan lean of most congressional districts makes the general election all but a formality.
We never had a real chance. And if you’re reading this, you’re not to blame. It was always the system.
The window to fix this is closing.
After the 2026 midterms, any faction that achieves unified control will have zero incentive to reform the system that gave them power. The cost of change explodes exponentially.
We may not have time to fix the flaws in our electoral system before the 2026 midterm elections, but we can make addressing our system the rallying cry that changes the national conversation from left-vs.-right to democracy-vs.-autocracy. We just need candidates — Democrats and Republicans alike — to run on making our system work better for everyone.
If they do, we can elect a congress that will serve as a real check against abuse of executive power. But we have to act now.
Fortify Democracy supports common-sense electoral reforms that address the root cause of today’s political dysfunction.
Fortify Democracy aims to future-proof our democracy by disincentivizing extreme partisanship and empowering voters to support every candidate who reflects their values.
Our 21st Century democracy is running on an 18th Century system, and is desperately in need of an upgrade to meet today’s challenges and future-proof it against the threat of authoritarian capture. We support upgrading the American electoral system in order to protect democracy from rising authoritarian threats and ensure all voters have genuine choices at the ballot box.
Our prescription for a more resilient and representative democracy include:
Approval voting: A simple change. Profoundly better results. Instead of picking just one candidate in the general election, voters can choose all they approve of. The candidate with the most approvals wins. The impact: broader appeal becomes the winning strategy, which forces politicians to seek support beyond a passionate base.
All-Candidate Primaries: Every candidate. Every voter. One election. Voters should be able to participate in this critical stage of our political process. Advancing up to four candidates to the general election would give voters more options instead of the binary choice they’re given today.
National Popular Vote: The Electoral College is outdated and is incompatible with the future of our democracy.
We call for broad nationwide adoption of these reforms, making expanded voter choice the central issue for the upcoming midterm elections and uniting diverse groups — displaced conservatives, independents, and frustrated liberals — behind a common cause of restoring representative government
Fortifying Democracy through Electoral Reform
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Approval Voting
The plurality voting system we use today is the root cause of the problems our country now faces. The best solutions address root causes. That’s why we support a simple change to how we select candidates when we vote.
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Nonpartisan Primaries
Our system works better when everyone has a voice at every step in the process. That's why we support all-candidate primary elections with up to four candidates advancing to the general election — diversity of thought protects us from any one faction becoming too strong.
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National Popular Vote
Every vote should matter. Every vote should be equal in its influence on the outcome of our presidential elections. And if we’re going to use approval voting in every election, we need every election to work the same way.
How did it come to this?
It doesn’t matter who you voted for before now. If we’re going to fix the problems with our country, what matters most is what we do next. And we can all play a role in addressing the root causes that led us to this moment.
But in order to understand how we fix this — how we get back to the America that we once knew and loved – we first have to understand how we arrived at this moment.
This is not the America our Founding Fathers envisioned.
In Federalist 10, James Madison warned of the danger of what he called “Faction.”
Madison believed that as our country grew, so would its diversity of thought. He believed that the larger number of groups would stop our country from being taken over by any single one of them, protecting us from those who would trample on the rights of others to get their way.
Madison and his fellow Founding Fathers didn’t realize — and couldn’t have known — that the voting system we use would ultimately make the very thing that worried them most a reality.
Contact Us
It will take a concerted effort to safeguard our democracy against future attempts at authoritarian capture. We welcome your feedback and ideas about how we can ensure a brighter future for American democracy.