Proof That Better Is Possible
The U.S. isn't broken beyond repair. Around the world, democracies have solved the exact problems we face: corruption, polarization, money in politics, broken elections. This page documents what actually worked.
Electoral Reforms That Actually Work
Most electoral dysfunction is solvable. The evidence is global.
A. Ranked-Choice Voting (RCV)
Voters rank candidates 1, 2, 3. If no candidate earns a majority in the first round, the last-place finisher is eliminated and those ballots are redistributed to their next-ranked choice. The process repeats until one candidate holds a majority.
Where it's working
- ›Maine (2016): First U.S. state to adopt RCV for federal races. Rep. Jared Golden won the 2018 congressional race despite not being anyone's first choice outright. Broad second-choice support carried him to a majority victory.
- ›Alaska (2020, used 2022): Brought Mary Peltola (D) and Lisa Murkowski (R) to Congress, both with documented bipartisan support, both prevailing over same-party challengers in a competitive field.
- ›Australia (since 1918): Has used preferential voting, the equivalent of RCV, for over a century. Coalition building is structurally incentivized; outcomes consistently skew more moderate than single-round systems.
- ›New York City (2019, used 2021): Adopted RCV for primaries. The 2021 Democratic mayoral primary had 13 candidates. The process ran without collapse or chaos.
What it changes
- ›Eliminates the spoiler effect. Third-party and independent candidates can run without splitting the vote.
- ›Reduces negative campaigning, because candidates want their opponents' supporters' second-choice votes.
- ›More candidates can run viably, increasing voter choice.
B. Open / Nonpartisan Primaries
All voters, regardless of party registration, participate in the same primary. The top 2 finishers (or top 4 in Alaska's model) advance to the general election.
Where it's working
- ›California Top-2 (since 2012): Reduced the number of uncontested general elections. Created pressure on candidates to appeal to the other party's voters, pushing some toward the center.
- ›Alaska Top-4 + RCV: Considered the most advanced model currently in use in the U.S. Creates direct structural incentive for cross-party cooperation at every stage of the race.
What it changes
- ›Reduces the outsized influence of primary voters (who tend to be more ideologically extreme) over the final electoral outcome.
- ›Opens a viable path for moderate candidates who would otherwise be knocked out in partisan primaries.
C. Automatic Voter Registration (AVR)
Citizens are automatically registered to vote when they interact with government agencies (DMV, social services, etc.) unless they explicitly opt out.
Where it's working
- ›Oregon (2015): First U.S. state to adopt AVR. Voter registration climbed to 93% of eligible citizens. Turnout among newly registered voters exceeded the national average in the first cycle.
- ›21+ U.S. states have since adopted AVR. Canada, Australia, and most of Europe have had equivalent systems for decades, treating voter registration as a government function, not a citizen burden.
What it changes
- ›Removes administrative barriers to voting that have historically suppressed registration among low-income and mobile populations.
- ›Registration rates increase 5–10 percentage points in the first election cycle after adoption.
Anti-Corruption: Where It Actually Worked
Systemic corruption is not inevitable. These countries and institutions proved it.
Independent Anti-Corruption Agency
Problem: Pervasive bribery across government, business, and the judiciary, among the worst in the OECD.
Solution: Created the Korea Independent Commission Against Corruption (KICAC), later merged into the Anti-Corruption and Civil Rights Commission (ACRC). The body was insulated from executive control, with mandatory financial disclosure and real prosecutorial backup.
Outcome: Within 15 years, South Korea moved from one of the most corrupt democracies in the OECD to a middling one. In 2017, President Park Geun-hye was impeached and imprisoned for corruption. The system worked.
Anti-Corruption Push After the Rose Revolution
Problem: Post-Soviet endemic corruption. Traffic police routinely extracted bribes. Customs was a shakedown operation from top to bottom.
Solution: Saakashvili's government fired the entire 15,000-person traffic police force in a single day and rebuilt it with new training and wages high enough to make bribery unattractive. Customs corruption was dismantled. Licenses and permits moved online, removing human gatekeepers.
Outcome: Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index: Georgia went from 124th in 2003 to 50th by 2012. Police bribery was essentially eliminated.
Crowdsourced Constitution After Banking Collapse
Problem: After the 2008 banking collapse, all three of Iceland's major banks failed and public fury at a system captured by financial and political elites.
Solution: A citizens' assembly of 950 randomly selected people set national values. A 25-person Constitutional Council (elected from 522 ordinary citizen candidates) drafted a new constitution openly via weekly public posts, Facebook/Twitter participation, and 3,600 public comments incorporated into the text.
Outcome: The document passed a referendum by a two-thirds majority. It included explicit limits on corporate money in politics, environmental rights, and media ownership caps. Parliament did not ultimately ratify it, but the process demonstrated participatory democracy at scale is operationally possible.
Disclosure That Changed Political Culture
Problem: Secret and anonymous money flowing into elections, with donations untraceable and influence unaccountable.
Solution: The Electoral Finance Act requires real-time public disclosure of all donations over NZ$1,500. Hard spending limits on campaigns. An Independent Electoral Commission with genuine enforcement authority.
Outcome: New Zealand consistently ranks in the top 5 least corrupt countries globally on Transparency International's index. Donation disclosure shifted the culture around political money, and the expectation of secrecy evaporated.
Universal Healthcare: What It Looks Like
Every other wealthy democracy provides healthcare to all its citizens. They do it in different ways, at lower cost than the U.S. pays for partial coverage.
Single-Payer / National Health Service: Canada & UK
Federal government sets standards; provinces administer. All residents covered for hospital and doctor care. Zero point-of-service fees. Funded by taxes.
Tradeoff: Longer wait times for elective procedures. Private supplementary insurance covers extras (dental, vision, drugs).
Government owns hospitals and employs doctors directly. Free at point of use for all residents. One of the most equitable systems globally.
Tradeoff: Underfunded in recent years; long waits in some specialties.
Key factor: removing administrative complexity. U.S. hospitals spend an estimated $500 billion per year on billing and insurance administration alone.
Multi-Payer with Strong Regulation: Germany & Switzerland
105 nonprofit “sickness funds” compete for enrollees under strict rules: community rating, comprehensive mandated benefits, income-based premiums. Employers share the cost.
Competition is allowed. Profiteering is not.
Mandatory private insurance, heavily subsidized for low-income residents. Nonprofit required for basic coverage. All insurers must offer the same basic benefits package.
Longest life expectancy in Europe.
Taiwan's National Health Insurance (NHI)
The fastest universal coverage rollout in history.
In 1995, Taiwan went from 57% insured to 100% insured in a single year.
Built on a single government insurer. Any licensed provider accepts the simple ID card. No claim forms for patients. Electronic health records in place since 2000. Taiwan handled COVID-19 better than nearly any other country.
- •Every system above has: mandatory participation, regulated pricing, and nonprofit administration of core coverage.
- •The U.S. already has elements of all three: Medicare/Medicaid, the ACA marketplace, and employer coverage.
- •The missing ingredient is not the model. It's universality combined with administrative simplification.
Democratic Innovation: New Ways of Deciding Together
Beyond elections, democracies are finding new ways to make collective decisions that are more representative, more deliberative, and more resistant to capture.
Participatory Budgeting
Residents directly vote on how a portion of public money is spent. Not advisory: binding decisions on real allocations.
The original. The city devolved ~20% of its capital budget to neighborhood assemblies. By the early 2000s, 50,000 residents participated annually. The result: massive infrastructure investment in the poorest neighborhoods.
Sewage connections in underserved neighborhoods: 49% → 98% in 10 years.
Allocates €100M/year (roughly 5% of the investment budget) to resident-submitted projects. Over 100,000 Parisians vote annually, online and in-person.
~$35M/year distributed via participatory budgeting. Studies show it directs more money to lower-income neighborhoods than traditional budget allocation processes.
What makes it work: real money, real decisions, ward-level implementation. City-wide votes are too abstract. Neighborhood scale creates accountability.
Citizens' Assemblies
A randomly selected group of ordinary citizens (like jury duty) is given expert testimony, time to deliberate, and asked to make policy recommendations on difficult or politically deadlocked issues.
99 randomly selected citizens deliberated for 18 months. Their recommendations formed the basis of a referendum that passed with 66% of the vote, ending a 35-year political deadlock. The same assembly process was used for same-sex marriage (2015) and climate policy.
35-year legislative deadlock resolved. 66% referendum passage.
150 randomly selected citizens deliberated on climate policy for 9 months. Produced 149 specific proposals. The majority formed the basis of France's Climate and Resilience Law.
108 citizens deliberated for 8 months. Assembly findings influenced the UK's net-zero legislation.
Why it works: random selection breaks partisan capture. Ordinary people, given time and real information, make thoughtful, evidence-based decisions. “Mini-publics” are a more accurate mirror of the population than elected bodies.
Proportional Representation
Most established democracies use proportional representation (PR) rather than winner-take-all districts. Parties receive seats proportional to their vote share. A party that wins 30% of votes gets roughly 30% of seats.
Voter turnout is typically 10–15 percentage points higher than in U.S. elections.
PR systems elect roughly twice as many women as winner-take-all systems.
Smaller parties get represented, so public opinion is reflected more accurately across the spectrum.
Less extreme policy swings between governments, because coalition dynamics create continuity.
New Zealand switched from a UK-style winner-take-all system via referendum in 1996.
Tradeoff: PR can require coalition governments, which can be unstable. Israel's highly fragmented PR system is a cautionary example: too low a threshold for representation creates chronic instability.
Online Democracy: Estonia
Estonia has built the most advanced digital government in the world. 99% of government services are available online, 24/7, via a single digital identity. Built after independence from the USSR in 1991, starting from scratch with no legacy systems to retrofit.
Online voting since 2005. In 2023, 51% of all votes were cast online. Zero verified cases of fraud in 18 years of operation.
Security model: voters can change their vote multiple times before the deadline, eliminating coercion. The vote is cryptographically separated from identity before counting.
X-Road is the data exchange layer that lets all government agencies share data securely, without centralized storage. No single point of failure or surveillance.
Non-Estonians can obtain a digital identity to run businesses, sign documents, and access EU digital services, from anywhere in the world.
What the U.S. can learn: building digital government infrastructure requires political will and sustained investment, not exotic technology. The barrier is institutional, not technical.
Part V
Campaign Finance: What's Actually Working
Citizens United didn't end all campaign finance reform. At the state and local level, significant experiments in public financing are changing who runs, who wins, and who elected officials listen to.
A. Small-Donor Matching Programs
New York City's matching program is the most studied in the United States. Enacted in 1988 and expanded multiple times, as of 2021 it matches the first $250 of small donations at an 8-to-1 ratio with public funds.
NYC Results
- Candidates using the system raised a higher share of their money from within their own district, not large outside donors.
- 2021 mayoral race: all major candidates participated; roughly 70% of campaign money came from small donors.
- NYU Brennan Center: candidates in public financing systems spend less time fundraising and more time with constituents.
Connecticut's Citizens' Election Program (CEP) goes further: full public funding is available to any candidate who collects small qualifying donations from constituents.
Connecticut CEP: Outcomes Since 2008
- Uptake: roughly 80% of state legislative candidates now use it.
- More women and candidates of color participate compared to pre-CEP elections.
- Legislators report spending significantly less time on fundraising and more on governing.
B. Maine Clean Elections Act
Passed by citizen initiative in 1996, Maine's Clean Elections Act provides full public funding to qualifying candidates who collect small donations from constituents to demonstrate viability.
- 2018: 77% of Maine state legislative candidates used the program.
- Participants are significantly more likely to come from working-class backgrounds, not career politicians or wealthy self-funders.
- Bipartisan appeal: Governor Janet Mills (D) and multiple Republican legislators have used it.
C. Seattle's Democracy Voucher Program
In 2017, Seattle launched a direct-access experiment: every registered voter receives four $25 “Democracy Vouchers,” funded by a property tax levy, to donate to local campaigns of their choice.
Results
- Small-dollar donation participation tripled.
- The donor pool became measurably more racially and economically diverse.
- Candidates raised more of their money from actual Seattle residents.
The lesson: the barrier to small-donor participation is not desire. It's access to disposable income.
D. International Models
Germany
Partial public funding tied to vote share and small-donor fundraising. Corporate donations to parties are banned. Result: parties must maintain broad membership bases to access public funds, keeping them structurally connected to ordinary voters.
Canada
Corporate and union donations banned since 2006. Annual donation limit: $1,675 to federal parties (inflation-indexed). Result: federal parties are genuinely mass-membership organizations, not vehicles for concentrated wealth.
What these programs have in common
- Small donations amplified or replaced by public money, reducing dependence on large donors.
- Disclosure requirements so voters know who is funding campaigns.
- Spending limits or caps where legally permissible (harder in the U.S. after Buckley v. Valeo, but still available at the state and local level).
None of these systems require a federal constitutional amendment to implement.
Part VI
Open Government: Transparency at Scale
Corruption thrives in the dark. These countries built the infrastructure to make the dark places smaller.
A. Estonia: The World's Most Transparent Government
Estonia's X-Road system does more than move data efficiently : it creates a complete audit trail. Every time a government official accesses a citizen's data, a log entry is created that the citizen can view. You can see exactly who looked at your file and why.
- Data minimization: agencies can only see what they need for their specific function. No browsing.
- Real accountability: government employees have been fired for looking up celebrity records without cause, because citizens reported it using the audit log.
- Business registry: fully public and free. Company ownership is completely visible to anyone.
B. Open Contracting: Slovakia and Ukraine
Slovakia
In 2011, Slovakia passed a law requiring all government contracts to be published online before they take effect. A contract not published within three days is legally void.
- Average contract prices dropped 10–15% immediately; vendors knew they'd be compared publicly.
- Bid rigging became significantly harder to execute without detection.
Ukraine: ProZorro
In 2016, Ukraine launched ProZorro, an open procurement system requiring all government purchases above a threshold to go through a competitive online process with all bids publicly visible.
- By 2018: $5 billion in annual government procurement processed through the system.
- Price savings estimated at 5–7% on procured goods and services.
- Won the World Procurement Award in 2016.
C. FOIA and Public Records: Gaps and Models
The U.S. Freedom of Information Act (1966) is among the oldest such laws in the world, but it has significant structural weaknesses: slow response times, widespread use of exemptions, and litigation routinely required to force compliance.
The U.S. Backlog
Federal agencies have over 900,000 FOIA requests pending. Average response time: 6 months to never.
Sweden (1766)
The world's oldest freedom of information law. Every public document is presumed accessible. Officials face personal liability for unlawful secrecy. Responses required within days, not months.
New Zealand
Official Information Act responses required within 20 working days. An independent Ombudsman can compel compliance. Litigation is rarely needed.
D. Beneficial Ownership Registries
Anonymous shell companies are a primary vehicle for hiding corruption, tax evasion, and foreign influence in domestic politics.
- UK (Companies House, 2016): All company beneficial owners must register. Anyone can look up who owns any UK company for free. Result: 100,000+ companies struck off for suspicious activity within two years.
- EU (2020 Anti-Money Laundering Directive): All member states required to build public beneficial ownership registries.
- U.S. (Corporate Transparency Act, 2021): Small companies must report beneficial ownership to FinCEN. The data is not yet fully public, a significant gap compared to the UK and EU models.
What these models prove
Transparency is not anti-government. The countries with the most open governments also consistently rank highest in public trust in government. The relationship runs in that direction, not the reverse.
What This Means
Every example on this page shares a common thread: the problem was designed in. It was also designed out. The countries that fixed corruption built institutions that made corruption expensive: costly to execute, easy to detect, hard to hide. The ones that improved democracy built systems that made participation easy and political capture hard. None of it happened through good intentions alone. It happened through structural change.
The U.S. has the raw materials. Maine's public financing law. Alaska's ranked-choice voting. Seattle's Democracy Vouchers. New York City's small-donor matching program. Hundreds of participatory budgeting programs running in cities from Boston to Oakland. The pieces exist. They are not theoretical, they are operating. What's missing is scale, and the political will to scale them from experiments into infrastructure.
This is not a partisan argument. Ranked-choice voting has been adopted in red states and blue states. Anti-corruption reform has historically attracted coalitions across party lines, from progressive activists to libertarian watchdog groups. The frame of “what works” is more durable than left vs. right. Systems that reduce capture and expand participation tend to benefit whoever is currently being shut out, and that is never one party forever.
What You Can Do
Start local. The most successful reforms began at the local and state level before going national.
Support RCV in Your City or State
Find out if your state or city has a ranked-choice voting ballot initiative or legislative effort. FairVote tracks active campaigns by state.
See Elections Tracker →Track Campaign Finance in Your District
Daonra's money-flow tracker shows who is funding your representatives and how those contributions align with their voting records.
Follow the Money →Push for Public Records
If your local government is slow or unresponsive to public records requests, your state's press freedom law may give you recourse. MuckRock makes filing and tracking requests easy.
MuckRock ↗Join a Reform Organization
The organizations below work on systemic reform across these issue areas. All are nonpartisan or cross-partisan, so you don't have to agree on everything to work on structural fixes together.
See Organizations ↓