In the 2024 general election, several states and cities across the country put forth initiatives aimed at adopting ranked-choice voting (RCV) and nonpartisan primaries. These measures were promoted as essential steps in reducing political polarization, creating more representative elections, and empowering independent and moderate voices. However, results showed a significant resistance to change, as most RCV initiatives failed at the statewide level, with the only notable success coming from Washington DC, which passed both open primaries and RCV. The outcome reveals substantial challenges...

A couple weeks back, the managing editor here at the Libertarian Institute, Keith Knight, posted on Twitter/X about voter ignorance. The post, which featured the headline “Monetary Policy by the Taylor Rule,” along with the associated equation, concluded with the comment: “What % of voters know this and can comprehend this? How long would it take to teach everyone? Democracy is a joke, privitize [sic] everything.” While voters might be forgiven for not being able to parse the arcane occult of highly mathematized macroeconomic policy—no matter their other scholastic qualifications, those...

From Plato to Acton, Thomas Jefferson to Bertrand Russell, it was regarded as a truism to many great thinkers that those who desire power are the least to be trusted with it. As such, it is unsurprising that from the first experiments in representative government, sortition—election or enfranchisement by lottery—was the popular method reached for by those who sought to safeguard the state from the entrenched tyranny of those who pursued power for its own sake or to enrich themselves. Indeed, the practice of selecting political officials or decision-makers by lot has a long historical...