America’s Elections Won’t Be the Same After 2020
This year’s Democratic presidential primary was tumultuous from beginning to end—starting with a record field of two dozen major candidates and ending in the middle of a pandemic.
But its lasting legacy could be far more fundamental: The chaos of the 2020 election season could radically, even permanently, change how Americans vote.
By November, a majority of the country—and possibly the overwhelming majority—could cast their ballot by mail for the first time. In the years to come, more and more voters will pick their candidates not by selecting one favorite, but by ranking several under a system designed to give people more choices and less chance for regret. And by 2024, the final vestiges of a 200-year-old tradition—caucuses—could be gone, buried for good by the debacle in Iowa that launched this year’s nominating process.
“I have this very sinking feeling that life in America will never again quite be the same,” says Phil Keisling, the former Oregon secretary of state who oversaw elections when the state switched to a vote-by-mail system in 1998. “Election systems have to evolve too.”
In just the past few months, ideas that languished in relative obscurity, with little hope of overcoming the political gridlock, have moved into the mainstream. “We may be entering a new era in which we look back a few years from now and see a transformation in the way we do democracy in our country,” says Nick Troiano, the executive director of Unite America, an advocacy group promoting electoral reforms such as voting by mail and ranked-choice
