America has repeatedly expanded democracy by changing the rules. Ranked-choice ballots may be the next reform capable of bringing more women and more voters into the process.

For 250 years, the story of American democracy has been a story of expanding who holds power and who gets to decide who yields it. The 15th Amendment, the 17th, the Voting Rights Act, the 19th Amendment and the 26th—each was a structural intervention, a deliberate redesign of the rules to bring more people into the democratic process. And at each iteration, a bet was made on the same proposition: Democracy works better when more people have real power within it.

We are overdue for the next chapter.

Women make up 51 percent of the American population and hold fewer than 29 percent of seats in Congress.

That gap is not a product of insufficient ambition, inadequate candidates or a thin pipeline of viable women. It is the product of an electoral system that was designed before women could vote, and has never been fundamentally redesigned since.

The ranked ballot changes that. It is the single most powerful, best-documented structural reform available for advancing women’s political participation, and it serves every voter, at every level of government, on every ballot.

The dominant electoral system in the United States creates conditions that consistently work against women candidates, particularly women of color, younger women, Independent and unaffiliated women, and Republican women. In a plurality race, voters fear wasting their vote on a candidate who can’t win, negative campaigning is rewarded and candidates who attack their opponent most aggressively tend to win. Women are disproportionately disadvantaged by all these dynamics.

This cycle, fewer than 40 of 435 House seats are considered competitive—meaning that in roughly 400 districts, the outcome is effectively decided before the voters cast a ballot.