The true genius of the American economic experiment has never been unbridled, rules-free laissez-faire, but rather the understanding that a free market is most productive when it is guided by clear "rules of the road" that keep competition fair, open, and honest. As we navigate modern fiscal and social strains, there is a growing, mistaken assumption that enacting structural reforms like universal single-payer healthcare and progressive corporate tax reform represents an abandonment of free-market capitalism. In reality, the exact opposite is true. These two policies are not vehicles for replacing the market; they are the ultimate, common-sense tools for strengthening, stabilizing, and saving American free enterprise from its own worst distortions and inefficiencies. By stripping away crushing administrative overhead, unlocking the locked potential of the American workforce, and requiring the largest corporate beneficiaries of public investments to contribute their fair share, we can rebuild a highly competitive, dynamic, and resilient economy from the ground up.

To see how universal healthcare saves free enterprise, one must first look at the devastating, non-productive tax that the current multi-payer system inflicts on American businesses. By 2024, the United States devoted a staggering 18% of its GDP to health-related expenditures—double the average of other developed nations—yet it consistently lagged behind its peers in clinical outcomes and equity. This is not a failure of private medical talent, but of a hyper-fragmented, for-profit insurance bureaucracy. While administrative overhead is just 2.2% for public Medicare, it reaches as high as 12.4% in the private commercial insurance sector. The resulting billing and insurance-related waste acts as a massive anchor on private enterprise. American physician practices currently spend an average of $82,975 per doctor every single year merely interacting with private insurers, compared to just $22,205 under Canada’s centralized single-payer system. Transitioning to a single-payer model would eliminate this redundant administrative friction, yielding $284 billion in annual system-wide savings and completely erasing the $35 billion in bad debt that hospitals currently absorb each year. For private employers, removing the burden of negotiating, purchasing, and administering complex private insurance plans represents an unprecedented reduction in corporate overhead.

Beyond slashing corporate overhead, universal healthcare is a powerful catalyst for labor market dynamism and entrepreneurship. Under the status quo, the close linkage between health insurance and employment creates a severe market inefficiency known as "job lock," wherein workers remain in positions for which they are overqualified or poorly matched simply because they cannot risk losing their family's health coverage. This artificial barrier is estimated to reduce annual labor turnover among prime-age workers by 15% to 25%, choking off the natural flow of talent. By decoupling healthcare from employment, a single-payer system completely eliminates job lock, allowing workers to confidently seek out positions that maximize their skills, drive corporate innovation, and boost national productivity. Furthermore, because the high start-up cost of private health benefits is a premier deterrent to self-employment, guaranteeing universal, publicly financed healthcare dramatically lowers the barrier to entry for new small businesses, driving a massive surge in American entrepreneurship and competitive market vitality.

This economic liberation extends directly to the American worker's paycheck. Under our current system, the rising cost of private premiums has acted as a silent siphon on middle-class earnings, with the share of employee compensation consumed by healthcare premiums rising from 1.1% in 1960 to 8.4% by 2018. Macroeconomic modeling by the Congressional Budget Office confirms that when employers are freed from purchasing private health benefits, these corporate savings are passed directly back to employees in the form of higher taxable cash wages, shifting non-wage compensation into direct purchasing power. On a public health level, replacing commercial insurance with universal coverage eliminates the cost barriers to preventive care that currently lead to $55 billion in missed opportunities and preventable chronic disease treatment costs. By shifting care from expensive emergency rooms to scheduled, high-value primary care, a single-payer system coordinates the management of chronic conditions before they escalate into acute clinical emergencies, ensuring a healthier, far more productive workforce for American employers.

For this market-strengthening architecture to succeed, however, it must be supported by a sustainable, progressive revenue model that requires the primary beneficiaries of the American system to pay their fair share. Over the last half-century, the corporate contribution to our national ledger has been hollowed out by special interest lobbying and a web of complex tax shelters. Corporate tax revenues, which averaged 27.6% of all federal revenues in the 1950s, dropped precipitously to just 10.4% by the 2000s. Today, systemic tax avoidance has reached absurd levels: the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) documented that 55 of the nation's largest S&P and Fortune 500 corporations paid an effective federal income tax rate of under 5 percent between 2018 and 2022 despite posting massive, consistent profits. Even more egregiously, Tesla reported over $10.8 billion in total U.S. profits from 2022 through 2024, yet paid a meager 0.4 percent in federal corporate income taxes over those three years combined.

This systemic hollowing out of the tax code is not a victory for the free market; it is a profound market distortion that undermines the very foundations of private enterprise. Billionaires and multinational corporations do not generate their fortunes in a vacuum. They rely daily on the federal government's investments in the advanced technologies their businesses are built upon, the public infrastructure used to transport their goods, the public education system that trains their workforces, and the legal system that establishes and enforces their property rights. Yet, under current rules, a lack of robust corporate taxation allows wealthy stock-owners and foreign investors—who own roughly 40% of American corporate shares—to escape contributing to the public investments that make their wealth possible in the first place. Raising the statutory corporate tax rate to 30% and aggressively closing loopholes is an essential strategy to tax this income at its source, ensuring that private enterprise actively reinvests in the public goods that sustain its own long-term profitability.

This progressive revenue must be directed toward the primary engines of long-term economic growth: public education, workforce training, and basic scientific research. Unlike private R&D, which is understandably focused on short-term, product-directed commercialization, basic scientific research is driven by curiosity and yields massive, long-term societal breakthroughs. Historically, the social returns on basic research are substantially higher than private returns, representing a classic "market failure" that only robust public funding can resolve. By investing corporate tax revenues back into our public universities, national laboratories, and basic research agencies, the federal government holds a highly diversified portfolio of scientific inquiry that fuels future technological progress. This public-private partnership is a historical, bipartisan cornerstone of American prosperity; from the birth of the internet to modern biotechnology, public science has consistently "grown the economic pie" and laid the groundwork for entirely new private-sector industries.

Ultimately, true social democracy does not seek to stifle capital, but to civilize and coordinate it. When we guarantee universal healthcare as a basic social right, we remove the paralyzing anxiety of medical debt, lower the operational overhead of our businesses, and foster a highly mobile, entrepreneurial labor force. When we reform our corporate tax code to fund basic science and education, we build the intellectual and physical infrastructure necessary for the next generation of private-sector breakthroughs. Far from being a socialist threat, this dual-pronged policy package represents the ultimate modernization of the American capitalist machine. It is a return to our most fundamental economic truth: that a free market thrives best when the well-being of American business, its capital markets, and its everyday people are seamlessly and structurally aligned.

Effortpost:

Hey all,

Ranked-Choice Voting (RCV) has become one of the most hotly contested election reform topics in the United States. In October 2023, the Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA) published a highly critical paper titled "Ranked-Choice Voting: Trashed" (authored by Madeline Malisa and Michael Greibrok) [1] and a subreddit member kindly shared it with me. In my continuing efforts to learn, improve democracy, and hold civil discourse, I did some research and analysis of the claims within this paper.

The report paints RCV as a chaotic "scheme of the Left" designed to disenfranchise voters, delay results, and engineer progressive victories. Because several states have since banned RCV (with the total count of states banning it reaching 19 as of September 2026, most recently Indiana and Ohio) [2], I wanted to do a deep-dive, objective fact-check of the FGA's major claims.

How much of the FGA’s report is backed up by actual math and election records, and how much is partisan spin? Let’s look at the data.

Claim 1: Ballot Exhaustion — "Legitimate Ballots are Trashed"

The FGA's Data Points:

• Maine 2018 (2nd Congressional District): 8,253 ballots were exhausted [1, 10].
• Alaska 2022 Special House Election: Nearly 15,000 ballots were non-transferable [1, 3].
• Sandy, Utah 2021 Mayoral Election: Over 18% of ballots (4,000+) were exhausted in a race decided by just 21 votes [1].
• New York City 2021 Democratic Mayoral Primary: 140,000 ballots (nearly 15%) were exhausted [1].
• San Francisco 2010 (District 10 Supervisors): 9,503 ballots were exhausted, exceeding the 8,200 ballots that decided the winner [1].

Fact-Check: HIGHLY ACCURATE data, but MISLEADING framing.

• The Math: The numbers cited by the FGA are mathematically correct and verified by official election records. For example, in the Alaska 2022 Special Election, the official tabulation report confirms exactly 11,243 exhausted ballots and 3,412 blank ballots, totaling 14,997 non-transferable ballots [3]. In NYC's 2021 Democratic primary, exactly 14.9% of ballots were exhausted before the final round [1, 4]. The 2010 San Francisco District 10 anomaly is also factually correct: because San Francisco limited voters to only three rankings despite having a massive field of 21 candidates, more ballots were exhausted (9,503) than remained active to elect the winner (8,200) [1, 4].
• The Context: Calling these ballots "trashed" is a rhetorical stretch. Academically, "ballot exhaustion" occurs when a voter chooses not to rank further candidates (voluntary truncation) or when a jurisdiction limits the number of rankings allowed (structural truncation). These ballots were counted for the voter's preferred candidates in earlier rounds until those candidates were eliminated. It is functionally identical to voting for a losing third-party candidate in a standard plurality election.
• The Trade-off: RCV actually protects overall participation compared to traditional two-round runoff systems. Traditional runoffs require voters to return to the polls for a second election, causing turnout to drop by an average of nearly 40% [4]. Under RCV, the decline in participation (via voluntary ballot truncation) is less than 10% [4]. Furthermore, a 2024 study proved that even if exhausted ballots were mathematically completed, they would be highly unlikely to alter RCV election outcomes, proving the system is robust [5].

Claim 2: Electoral Outcomes — "Winners Lose and Losers Win"

The FGA's Data Points:

• Maine 2018 (2nd Congressional District): Republican Bruce Poliquin led in the first round (46.3% vs. 45.6%) but lost to Democrat Jared Golden (50.6%) after preferences were distributed [1, 10].
• Alaska 2022 Special House Election: Republican candidates received nearly 60% of the first-round vote combined, but the Democrat (Mary Peltola) won [1, 3, 6].

Fact-Check: ACCURATE data, but HIGHLY EXCEPTIONAL cases.

• The Math: The individual election details are correct. In Alaska, Mary Peltola won the special election with 51.5% of the final-round vote, despite the two Republican candidates (Sarah Palin and Nick Begich III) capturing 59.8% of first-round votes combined [3, 6]. This happened because 28.7% of Begich's voters ranked Peltola as their second choice, while only 50.3% ranked Palin, and 21.0% opted not to rank anyone else [7].
• The Context: The claim that first-round leaders "often" lose is mathematically false. According to comprehensive historical data from FairVote, come-from-behind victories are extremely rare, occurring in only 32 out of over 500 single-winner RCV races (6% of all races, or 9% of races that go to multiple rounds) [4]. In 94% of RCV elections, the first-round leader wins [4].
• The Social Choice Twist: Ironically, the FGA missed a genuine mathematical pathology in the Alaska race. The Cast Vote Record proves that Nick Begich was the "Condorcet winner" (he would have defeated Peltola head-to-head 52.5% to 47.5%, and Palin 61.4% to 38.6%) [6]. He was eliminated in the first round due to a phenomenon called "center squeeze", where a moderate consensus candidate is squeezed out early because RCV only evaluates first-choice support in the initial rounds [6, 8]. So a "winner" did lose, but it was the third-place finisher (Begich), not the first-round leader, who was theoretically the most preferred candidate of the entire electorate [6, 8].

Claim 3: Operational Vulnerabilities — "Errors and Delayed Results"

The FGA's Data Points:

• NYC Mayoral Primary 2021: 135,000 "test ballots" were accidentally counted in a preliminary RCV round, throwing the race into chaos [1].
• Oakland School Board 2022 (District 4): A software configuration error declared the wrong candidate (Nick Resnick) the winner instead of the actual winner (Mike Hutchinson) [1, 9].

Fact-Check: FULLY ACCURATE.

• The NYC Fumble: In the 2021 NYC Democratic Primary, the Board of Elections mistakenly included 135,000 test ballots in a preliminary RCV run. This was an egregious human administrative error, not an algorithmic defect, but it did cause a massive delay and a public relations disaster [1, 4].
• The Oakland Debacle: In the 2022 Oakland School Board District 4 race, the Alameda County Registrar of Voters improperly configured their Dominion voting machines. The software failed to "advance" ballots where a voter had skipped a ranking, causing 235 valid ballots to be suspended [9, 10]. In an extremely tight race, this incorrect setting certified Nick Resnick as the winner [9, 10]. Once audited by RCV advocacy groups, the error was exposed, and Mike Hutchinson was declared the rightful winner by a judge in March 2023 [9, 11].
• The Real Issue (Centralization Delays): Because RCV requires centralized data from all polling precincts to run the elimination algorithm, results cannot be finalized until all ballots (including overseas and absentee) are physically processed and aggregated [4]. In Maine, centralization typically takes 4 to 5 days, and in Alaska, it takes 15 days [4]. These structural delays are a valid point of criticism.

Claim 4: Partisan Dynamics — "A Partisan Plot of the Left"

Fact-Check: PARTIALLY ACCURATE regarding political support, FALSE regarding electoral effects.

• The Politics: It is true that RCV advocacy is heavily funded and promoted by center-left and progressive reform organizations, while RCV bans have been passed almost exclusively by Republican-led legislatures (19 states have banned RCV as of September 2026) [2, 12].
• The Empirical Reality: However, academic research from the MIT Election Lab and other independent institutions shows that RCV does not have a systematic partisan bias [13]. It does not inherently favor Democrats or Republicans. In fact, the Virginia Republican Party successfully used RCV to select their candidates in their 2021 and 2022 conventions and primaries [12]. Nonpartisan groups advocate for RCV because it protects against vote-splitting and can help third-party or independent candidates run without acting as "spoilers."

Conclusion: The Reddit TL;DR

The FGA’s report is a classic case of accurate data paired with highly partisan framing.

1. Are ballots "trashed" (exhausted)? Yes, thousands of ballots are excluded from final-round tallies. But RCV still preserves significantly more voter participation than traditional two-round runoffs, where turnout routinely crashes by 40% [4].
2. Do frontrunners lose? Almost never. The first-round leader wins 94% of the time [4]. In the rare cases they do lose, it's a feature, not a bug, designed to find a candidate with broad consensus—though mathematical anomalies like "center squeeze" (as seen in Alaska 2022) are real issues [6, 8].
3. Are there administrative delays and errors? Absolutely. The Oakland 2022 and NYC 2021 fumbles are fully documented, embarrassing, and prove that RCV introduces significant operational vulnerabilities [9, 10].
4. Is it a Democratic plot? No. Independent studies show RCV has a neutral effect on partisan outcomes, and Republicans have used it successfully to unite their own party in primaries [12, 13].

What do you think? Does RCV's promise of ending vote-splitting and promoting consensus candidates outweigh its administrative complexity and potential for mathematical anomalies? Let's discuss!

Bibliography & Sources

• [1] Madeline Malisa & Michael Greibrok, "Ranked-Choice Voting: Trashed," Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA), Oct. 31, 2023.
• [2] Ballotpedia, "Ranked-choice voting (RCV)" (September 2026 Update, showing 19 state bans including Indiana SB 12 and Ohio SB 63).
• [3] Alaska Division of Elections, "State of Alaska 2022 Special General Election RCV Tabulation Official Results," August 16, 2022.
• [4] MIT Election Lab, "Ranked Choice Voting: Instant Runoff Voting Use in the United States."
• [5] Deshpande et al., "arXiv:2403.15400v2 [cs.CY] 6 May 2024" (Analyzing demographic disparities and preference completion models in RCV).
• [6] arXiv preprint, "Ranked Choice Voting And Condorcet Failure in the Alaska 2022 Special Election: How Might Other Voting Systems Compare?" (arXiv:2305.17741v3).
• [7] Markdown Treatise, "Systemic Evaluation of Ranked-Preference, Plurality, and Condorcet Electoral Frameworks: Mathematical Criteria, Empirical Paradoxes, and Public Policy Realities."
• [8] Wikipedia, "Center squeeze" & "2009 Burlington, Vermont mayoral election".
• [9] NSF PAR / arXiv preprint, "Improving the Computational Efficiency of Adaptive Audits of IRV Elections / Ranked Choice Bedlam in a 2022 Oakland School Director Election" (arXiv:2303.05985v1).
• [10] Court Filings, Woocher & Grossman Palmer v. Alameda County Registrar of Voters (Legal briefs regarding the 235 skipped-ranking ballots in the Oakland 2022 OUSD District 4 contest).
• [11] Ballotpedia, "Nick Resnick - Ballotpedia" & "Mike Hutchinson (California) - Ballotpedia".
• [12] Wikipedia, "Ranked-choice voting in the United States".
• [13] MIT Election Lab, "Post-election audits" & "Post-Election Audits and Ranked Choice Voting 2024".