[metic(?) status: Totally useless in the near-term. Maybe interesting to develop in the background in case US elections get updated sometime.]

I think most of the readers here are quite familiar with ranked-choice voting as a proposed alternative to the default first-past-the-post voting. Roughly, instead of letting a plurality make their favorite candidate a winner, it would allow the intuition of everyone involved to influence who wins. Typically more relevant to many-candidate races in local politics than to large general elections with two major parties.

I won't try to argue against ranked-choice here, but I don't think it addresses the biggest national issues like polarization effectively. In a typical general election, each candidate has only needed to directly appeal to their primary voters, much less to moderates, independents, and voters in other parties. To voters, getting to pick the lesser of two evils may feel like little consolation. General elections are not a reliable filter against extreme candidates when both nominees are narrowly optimized by minorities of voters. Polarized ranked-choice primaries may still result in polarized nominees, and in a general election ranked-choice may be useless or have unforeseen consequences with third-parties. (Maybe many-party ranked-choice systems will turn out to be better, but I don't think that's a bet that American voters want to take now. The two-party system is stable and comprehensible. It's just horribly polarized at the moment.)

So, what might be a better way to address polarized candidates in general elections? Maybe less polarized primary elections would help. Currently, US voters can usually vote in either zero or one primary, totally at their discretion. They can donate money to various campaigns, which has strange side effects, and is not inclusively democratic. Registering for a party has an opportunity cost of not registering for other parties, so it sends a real signal about preferences.

What if each voter had a registration budget of 100 primary points, for example? They could register as an independent to vote in general elections, exactly the same as before, and not worry about it. They could do a "simple" registration for a party and make one full vote, the same as before. But if they want, they could register as say 70 points Democrat, 25 points Republican, and 5 points Green. Then they c...

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