For a century, Australia has been using ranked choice voting (RCV) ballots, giving their voters the option of picking backup choices if they fear their first choice would not get a majority of votes.

If the Australian model was used in our U.S. presidential elections, the 98.2 percent of Wisconsin voters who prefer either Joe Biden or Donald Trump would not even need to mark down a second choice because they would know the race would come down to those two candidates. However, the 1.8 percent of the remaining voters who picked either of the three alternate candidates that finished third, fourth, or fifth place would have had the option of choosing Trump over Biden as their second choice.

The only place in the U.S. where ballots offered an unlimited number of candidates 60 years ago was in Cambridge, Mass. Shortly afterwards, dozens of additional liberal localities adopted their own ranked choice voting.

A recent study identified 43 localities across the country that allow an unlimited number of candidates on their ranked ballots. Those localities only gave Trump a 24 percent median vote in the 2020 election. Ranked choice advocates nationwide are now trying to follow this system used by the 43 localities that is only accepted, thus far, almost exclusively in liberal communities.

Suddenly in 2021 and 2022, a series of........

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