Too many of us walk into the booth voting against somebody. Score voting lets you rate every candidate from 0 to 10, so you can back the one you believe in without helping the one you fear.
Sample ballot · Score voting
Your next election
Score every candidate from 0 to 10. 0 = worst, 10 = best. Skip anyone you don’t know.
Go ahead: tap a bubble for each one. Tap it again to clear it.
The first lines of Score the Vote.
Governor
Vote for one
Fill in the oval next to your choice. If you mark more than one, your vote for this office will not count.
“You didn’t show up with one opinion; you showed up with a dozen.”
Score the Vote, ch. 1
“Your entire political conscience, flattened into a single oval.”
Score the Vote, ch. 1
63%
want a third major party.
About2%
vote for one.
“Sixty-three percent want the option; two percent exercise it. That gap isn’t hypocrisy, and it isn’t apathy. It’s arithmetic.”
Score the Vote, ch. 2
Source: Gallup, Oct 2023 (63% say a third major party is needed); third-party share of the 2020 and 2024 presidential vote.
It’s called score voting. You rate every candidate from 0 to 10, the way you already rate a restaurant or a movie.
Every candidate gets a row like this. Give the one you believe in a 10, the one you could live with a 6, and the one you fear a 0, all on the same ballot.
Ten means “this is who I want.” Zero means “I do not want this person in office.” Give the same score to as many people as you like.
Never heard of someone? You don’t have to score them.
Every ballot counts toward every candidate, all at once, in a single round.
Pick-one voting punishes whichever side runs one candidate too many. It has done it to the right and to the left.
The right split
Denied the Republican nomination, Theodore Roosevelt ran anyway as a third-party candidate and split the vote with William Howard Taft. More than half of all voters chose one of the two. Woodrow Wilson won with 41.8%.
Roosevelt 27.4% + Taft 23.2%
50.6%
Wilson (won)
41.8%
Share of the national popular vote. The dashed line is half.
Source: 1912 presidential popular vote.
The left split
George W. Bush’s certified margin over Al Gore was 537 votes, out of nearly six million. On the same ballot, Ralph Nader drew 97,488: 181 times the margin.
Nader’s votes
97,488
Bush’s winning margin
537
That sliver is the 537. Both bars are drawn to the same scale.
Source: Certified Florida results, 2000 (Florida Dept. of State).
“Under plurality, third-party candidates are spoilers. Under score voting, they’re just... candidates.”
Score the Vote, ch. 14
“Change the ballot, and you don’t have to go looking for better leaders. You simply unlock the door and let the ones we already have walk through it.”
Score the Vote, ch. 1
Score the Vote: How One Change to the Ballot Fixes Everything That’s Broken
By Chris Borgia: 19 short chapters you can read in about an hour.
“We were promised self-government. What we got is the lesser of two evils, rebranded every four years as a moral emergency.”
Score the Vote, ch. 1
Launch price: 50% off every edition
Score the Vote, ch. 1
Score the sample ballot, or type in your real race, and send it to someone. Paste the link anywhere and it shows up as a picture of your scores.
Score and sharePrint a blank score ballot and pass it around the table. Pizza toppings, a movie, club officers: anything with more than two options works.
Print a ballotScore the Vote is a project of Super Citizen, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit; gifts are tax-deductible. Book sales and donations fund the work.
Make a giftIf you back score voting, say so in public. Add your name to the candidate pledge.
Take the pledgeNo. Ranked choice asks you to put candidates in order, then eliminates them one round at a time. Score voting asks how much you support each candidate on their own, and counts everything at once.
Ranked choice is a real improvement over pick-one, and the book gives it a chapter of credit. But in Burlington, Vermont (2009) and Alaska (2022), it eliminated the candidate who beat every rival head-to-head. Scoring everyone in a single count avoids that trap.
No, and the record cuts both ways. A spoiler split the right in 1912 and the left in 2000. In Alaska in 2022, ranked choice eliminated Republican Nick Begich even though he beat both finalists head-to-head; in Burlington in 2009, it eliminated Democrat Andy Montroll, who also beat both finalists.
Better counting finds the candidate the most voters can stand behind, whatever their party. As the book puts it: the spoiler effect has no party.
Some will, and that’s fine. Every voting method can be gamed. Under score voting the “gaming” move is to give only 10s and 0s, which turns your ballot into an approval ballot: still far better than picking one.
What you never have to do is rate your favorite below anyone to protect yourself. Plurality forces that choice on millions of voters every election.
Its simplest form has. Approval voting is score voting with only two levels. Voters adopted it in Fargo, North Dakota (2018, 63.5%) and St. Louis, Missouri (2020, 68%). St. Louis still uses it; Fargo used it three times before North Dakota’s legislature banned it in 2025.
Full 0–10 score voting isn’t used in any U.S. government election yet. That’s what this campaign is for.
From the ground up. Start where no law stands in the way: clubs, unions, student governments, party conventions, nonprofits. Next come cities with citizen initiatives, which is how Fargo and St. Louis did it.
Be clear-eyed: many states now restrict alternative voting methods, so check your state’s law before you organize. The last three chapters of the book are the playbook.
Score the vote.
Score the Vote, ch. 19
Stay in the fight.
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