Electoral Reform Is Upstream from Every Other Cause
Approval voting in general elections and top-4 pick-one primaries don't just fix elections — they unclog the bottleneck blocking progress on climate, healthcare, AI safety, poverty, and every other issue philanthropy tries to solve.
A tiny, unrepresentative primary electorate controls American policy
Most races are decided in low-turnout primaries, not general elections. The incentive structure is broken at the root.
Partisan Primaries
Only party-registered voters participate, in most states. Turnout: ~20% of eligible voters.
Safe Seats & Gerrymandering
Only ~15% of House seats are competitive in the general election. The primary IS the election in 85% of districts.
Perverse Incentives
Politicians optimize for the ~10% of Americans who vote in their party's primary. Bipartisan problem-solving is punished.
Every downstream cause flows through the political system
No matter how much evidence exists for a policy, it must pass through elected officials who answer to primary voters — not the general public.
Broken Electoral Incentives
Primary voters are more ideological and less representative. Plurality voting punishes consensus candidates.
Polarization & Extremism
Politicians must play to their base or face a primary challenge. Moderates and problem-solvers are filtered out.
Legislative Gridlock
Cross-partisan coalitions can't form. Evidence-based policy is dead on arrival. Government lurches between extremes.
Every Cause Area Is Blocked
Climate, healthcare, housing, AI governance, education, criminal justice — all require legislation that can't pass through a broken system.
Philanthropy spends 52× more influencing a broken system than fixing it
Spending to influence political outcomes vastly outpaces spending to improve the underlying political infrastructure. [source]
Influencing the Broken System
in a game where the rules reward extremism
Fixing the System Itself
Two structural reforms that change the incentives
These aren't abstract theory — they've been adopted and tested in real U.S. elections.
Top-4 Pick-One Primaries
All candidates run on one ballot. All voters can participate. The top four advance to the general election — regardless of party.
Adopted by Alaska voters in 2020, used in 2022 and 2024. Similar measures have appeared on ballots in Idaho, Nevada, and other states.
All candidates on one ballot — no party gatekeeping
All voters can participate — not just registered party members
Top 4 advance — voters get real choices in November
Candidates must appeal broadly to win
Approval Voting
Vote for as many candidates as you approve of. Most approvals wins. No spoilers. No vote-splitting. No wasted votes.
Used in St. Louis (2021–present). Previously used in Fargo, ND. Championed by the Center for Election Science.
Vote for every candidate you find acceptable
No fear of "wasting" your vote or spoiling the race
Consensus candidates — broadly acceptable to voters — win
Dead simple: no ranking, no new technology needed
Fix the incentives, unlock progress on everything
When politicians must appeal to broad electorates instead of narrow bases, evidence-based policy can finally advance.
Abundance & Growth — Cross-Partisan Collaboration
The $120M Abundance and Growth Fund explicitly seeks cross-partisan collaboration on housing, energy, innovation, and state capacity. But pick-one voting makes cross-partisan collaboration structurally impossible: a Republican who works with Democrats on housing gets primaried from the right; a Democrat who compromises on permitting reform gets primaried from the left. The YIMBY movement keeps hitting this wall. The problem isn’t that legislators don’t want to collaborate — it’s that the system punishes them when they do. Fix the incentive structure and cross-partisan legislating becomes safe.
AI Governance
Emerging technology moves faster than partisan legislatures can act. Bipartisan technical literacy is the only path to timely regulation — but primaries reward culture war, not frontier risk.
Housing & Land Use
NIMBY vs. YIMBY, rent control vs. market solutions — pragmatic compromises die in primary elections where narrow constituencies hold veto power.
Global Health
Foreign aid budgets and public health infrastructure are easy targets in primary season. Stable commitments require representatives who answer to the broad electorate.
Biosecurity
Pandemic preparedness requires sustained bipartisan investment. Partisan primaries reward candidates who defund agencies and undermine scientific institutions.
Animal Welfare
Factory farming regulation has broad public support but no legislative champions willing to spend political capital in a primary system that punishes it.
Climate & Energy
Cross-partisan climate policy becomes viable when legislators don’t fear primary challenges for compromise. Energy abundance requires permitting reform that both parties block for different reasons.
State Capacity
Effective governance requires institutional independence — the Fed, CBO, public health agencies — that authoritarian-captured governments actively undermine. Primary incentives reward dismantling institutions, not building them.
Fiscal Responsibility
Debt and deficit reduction is popular in polls but toxic in primaries, where tax cuts and spending increases win votes from narrow bases.
This movement is already winning
Real jurisdictions, real elections, real results — and a closing window to scale in 2026.
Fargo adopts approval voting
First U.S. city to adopt approval voting for local elections. [source]
Alaska adopts top-4 primaries + St. Louis adopts approval voting
Alaska voters pass Ballot Measure 2. St. Louis voters pass Prop D with 68% support. [source]
First top-4 primaries held in Alaska
All voters participate in a single nonpartisan primary for the first time. Top 4 advance to general.
Utah holds first approval voting special election
First use of approval voting to select a sitting officeholder. CES active in 5 states. Maryland shows 74.6% voter support for reform. [source]
Scale or stall
Reform organizations are active in multiple state legislatures. The 2026 midterm cycle is a critical window to build momentum before attention shifts to the presidential race. Learn more at Fortify Democracy.
Critical mass
If enough states and cities adopt these reforms, the demonstration effect makes adoption self-reinforcing at scale.
The highest-leverage intervention almost nobody funds
By any effective altruism framework — scale, neglectedness, tractability — electoral reform scores off the charts.
The political system allocates ~$6.8T annually. Reforming that system's incentive structure costs a tiny fraction of what we spend trying to influence it. [CBO] [EA Forum]
Fix the plumbing, not just the leaks
Every dollar spent on electoral reform is a dollar that multiplies the impact of every other philanthropic cause. The 2026 window is closing.