# Once you see it, it’s hard to miss: when shared majority candidates compete for first-choice rankings, their support gets split — while polarized candidates stay intact.

The promise of democracy is simple: **your vote should count just as much as mine**—no matter who you are, where you live, what party you belong to, or how many candidates represent your ideas.

But many election rules quietly break that promise.

When voters are limited to supporting only one candidate, something strange happens. If several candidates represent the same broad majority of voters, their support can split between them. Meanwhile, the opposing side remains unified.

The result? **A candidate opposed by most voters can still win.**

This is known as the **spoiler effect**—when the majority divides itself and unintentionally elects the very candidate it preferred least.

The U.S. Supreme Court once declared that equality in voting means the **weight and worth of each citizen’s vote must be as equal as practicable.** But notice the quiet qualifier: *as practicable.*

At the time that standard was written, no voting method in common use could fully achieve that ideal.

**That limitation no longer exists.**

Today, **better options exist.**

(In this election: Polarizing Side A: Eric Adams / Polarizing Side B: Maya Wiley. Ideologically opposite, and behaved the most divisively during the election. Lesser evil: Kathryn Garcia. Popular candidate/ideas: Andrew Yang. The rest were never viable, no matter what math you use.)

The ratio of competitive options that lean left / lean right: **3 : 1**

**Votes on the left had 1/3 less weight than votes on the right. Eric Adams then winning is a spoiled election.**

When votes flow to one option at a time, voters who agree end up canceling each other out, while others count normally.