So, right about now, America is sleeping on the eve of one of the most consequential elections in US history. Regardless about how you feel on the candidates, they couldn't be more different, and less representative of the American public as a whole. And that's a bad thing for a democracy. Electing a moderate Republican or a moderate Democrat to office should be the goal - these figures represent compromise, but in the end are able to form a stable government through bipartisan support.

When we start seeing hyper-partisan elections like we're seeing in 2016, the time has come to do something about it. We can't force the population at large to change their discussions around the candidates, nor is that a particularly good goal in a democratic society. What we can do is look at how we're arriving at our final two (or three, four, or however many) nominees.

There are concrete steps that we can take to improve the way that we handle our primaries, and I'd like to examine three that could be dramatically beneficial: open primaries, ranked choice voting system reforms, and increasing voter's candidate knowledge.

21 of our 50 states have some form of open primary. In most cases, this is truly open, but in many, only the Democratic or Republican primary is open, and in some, only open for those not affiliated with a political party. Open primaries allow for all voters to have a say in who their possible representation will be, regardless of the result going to the Democratic or Republican party. This means that regardless of who wins, there's a higher likelihood that voters at least feel included in who they're going to be represented by, which is something that we're struggling with in our current election. One great aspect of this reform is that all that is required is for one or both of the parties to make the decision to implement open primaries. Since primaries aren't mandated by law, and are strictly constructs of their respective parties, this is one of the easier ways to attempt to net a less partisan voting outcome. But open primaries alone aren't enough. A study of the 2012 California election by UC Berkeley found that open primaries aren't a complete solution. So open primaries aren't a magic bullet, they're just a partial solution.

One path forward would be to implement a ranked choice voting system during primaries. These systems can tend to create winners out of less divisive candidates by requiring candidates to seek second and third choice support rather than simply trying to get a majority. One of the things we saw in the 2016 primaries was that Trump managed to win a great number of state primaries with between 30-40% of the Republican vote. This means that not only is he less representative of the country as a whole (a Gallup poll from 2010 showed the country divided 31% Democratic, 29% Republican, 38% independent), but also not showing a majority even among his own party (Trump carried 44% of the primary vote, but much of that was because so many candidates ended up dropping out of the primaries from the initial field of 12). The benefits of ranked choice voting:

Promotes majority support - The way in which the ballots are tabulated under RCV means that the final winner must have majority support.
Discourages negative campaigning - Because each candidate needs to court not just their own voters, but also those of their opponents, only candidates that share broad support can hope to win, and candidates have a much harder time finding support among other candidates' voters if they negatively campaign.
Provides more choice for voters - RCV allows for a wider number of candidates while still retaining a simple voting solution.
Minimizes strategic voting - RCV means that voters can choose to cast their primary vote for the candidate that they love, rather than for a candidate that they think of as the lesser of two evils. If we think about it from the perspective of the 2016 national election, people could vote for Johnson or Stein as their primary vote, without necessarily feeling like they might accidentally help elect Trump or Clinton by doing so.
Mitigates impact of money in politics - Since RCV encourages positive campaigns, or campaigns on the issues that voters care about rather than negative campaigning, additional money doesn't necessarily translate to more votes if the candidate's stance on the issues aren't aligned with those of the voters.
Saves money when replacing primaries or runoffs - There will always be a winner when using RCV.
Promotes reflective representation - This is a little bit more subjective, but in general, RCV tends to be appreciated more by minority voters, at least according to studies on the subject.

Overall, ranked choice voting would be a great additional measure in the primaries to help reduce partisan divides. Like the idea of open primaries, RCV can also easily be implemented by the respective parties for the primaries, but could also be implemented on a national level if desired, though this would require legislation to change how the US votes as a whole, and that seems unlikely to happen right now.

So what's the last thing to consider?

Maybe the most important - increasing voter knowledge. Or maybe put another way, decreasing media misinformation. This is an issue that has been universally terrible for the 2016 election. With social media really coming to the fore, we've seen the rise of memes and click-bait sites being the source of peoples' opinions on the candidates, neither of which are good for an informed electorate. It is absolutely vital that we reduce the spread of viral misinformation.

“A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.”

— Winston Churchill

When the American population seems generally confused as to the difference between facts and opinions, something has gone horribly, horribly wrong.

Two places to start here:

Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites opt to block (or are regulated and required to block) the most partisan news sources.
Independently sourced candidate rankings on trustworthiness added to the ballots, combined with stances on major issues.

Neither of these are uncontroversial. The first either requires self-censorship or an amendment to the Constitution, and the second requires painful legislation that would undoubtedly be difficult to pass. However, drastic times call for drastic measures, and our founding fathers weren't infallible. They knew that changes would be required to keep the government relevant. It's in our best interests to act when we see problems and carefully measure the outcomes of our solutions.

Let's all go into 2016 with the goal of fixing the process that we have and offering ways to do so, rather than stalemating government and then finding it so distasteful when they're unable to do their jobs because of partisan gridlock.