Your correspondent is, as a rule, highly skeptical of ideas to change voting systems. The lesson from not only the US but the multiple democracies of Europe and elsewhere, it seems to us, is that whatever the voting system, the same kind of realities end up happening. Voting reform usually ends up having the opposite of the intended effect.

For example, proportional representation is supposed to be more representative of the diverse voices in a democracy, but the need to add up many different parties to put a governing coalition together often means you end up with a government at odds with the voices expressed in the polls. In places with full proportional representation like Israel, smaller parties famously wield disproportionate influence because they are needed to put a coalition together. In Germany, the two main establishment parties of the center-right and center-left increasingly see their vote margins slim as the public rejects these incumbent parties—and the outcome, most often, is a "grand coalition" of precisely these parties the voters have rejected, since they prefer to govern with each other than with the extremists on their side.

The "least democratic" system is the Westminster System with first-past-the-post constituency voting, and yet it has proven the most stable and enduring, and it is certainly not immediately obvious that it is notably more or less responsive to voters' concerns than proportional vote systems in countries like Germany and Italy.

And yet, we were recently informed of a movement afoot to make Final Five the voting system in as many American states as possible.

Here's the way Final Five works:

• You start with an open, non-partisan primary (as in California) where all candidates, Democrat and Republican, run on the same ballot.

• The top five, not top two, candidates, make it to a runoff. (Hence "Final Five.")

• Instant runoff voting determines the winner. This means that in the runoff, voters rank their choices from 1 to 5. If no candidate receives over 50% of first-choice votes, the last-place candidate is eliminated and their votes are redistributed to voters' next choices. This process continues until one candidate achieves a majority.

The first thing to note about Final Five is that it is not just some pie-in-the-sky idea. A real movement is afoot. Alaska voters adopted a close variant, “Final Four Voting,” in 2020. Similarly, Nevada voters approved a ballot initiative in favor of Final Five in 2022 and will vote on whether to fully adopt it in November. A bipartisan Final Five bill has been introduced in Wisconsin, and there have been similar efforts in Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, and Oregon.

The other reason why conservatives might be interested in Final Five is that, notoriously, in the Republican Party, elected officials are often at odds with their own voters. Why? It's a much broader question, but it clearly has something to do with the amount of safe seats.

The Institute for Political Innovation, which promotes Final Five, partnering with Patrick Ruffini's excellent public opinion firm Echelon Insights, has commissioned a survey. One thing we really enjoy about Echelon's surveys is that instead of just putting voters on a spectrum of conservative to moderate to liberal, or polling them on just specific issues, they have instead identified various sub-conservative tribes ("Populists", "traditional conservatives", etc.) and identify which voters fit best into which buckets.

And so: comparing 239 roll call votes in the House with a survey of 2,247 likely voters, Echelon Insights measured the ideological divisions between Republican U.S. Congressmen and likely GOP voters across four key dimensions: 1) social conservatism; 2) populism; 3) traditional conservatism; and 4) moderation. What they find is that Republican voters are at once more moderate, populist, and traditionally conservative than their Representatives. How is that possible? Among voters, there is considerable overlap between those holding both populist and moderate viewpoints. Yet, in Congress, Republican moderates and populists rarely overlap. The syncretic politics of a figure like President Donald Trump – who espouses many views that are more moderate than the traditional GOP, even if many of his positions are stridently populist – more closely resemble that of the typical Republican voter than those of either moderate or populist Republicans in Congress.

Congressmen, under the current electoral system, have very few incentives to faithfully represent the views of their constituents, especially when they’re rewarded with status and influence for conforming to the views of their adopted milieu in Washington. The idea is that under Final Five—even in strongly Republican districts—incumbents will have to face competitive primaries. Most importantly, these primaries will not just be about who is "more conservative" in an age when it's unclear what that means, exactly.

The idea is that Final Five would allow candidates of varied ideological priorities to play a tangible electoral role even if they are unlikely to win outright. The process would be more competitive, and candidates with more diverse viewpoints would have a better chance of winning.

As your correspondent wrote at the outset, we are usually highly skeptical of notions that changing the voting system can act as a sort of magic wand. But the more we thought about Final Five, the more intriguing we found it. So we thought we'd call it to your attention.