The most important item on your ballot next Tuesday is not for any elected office. It is for something that will make a much greater difference for good: Proposition 131. It would implement ranked choice voting, RCV for short. I urge everyone who is serious about making our country a better place to vote for it.

Pop quiz: Who said it?

“The alternate domination of one faction over another … has perpetrated the most horrid enormities.”

“A division of the republic into two great parties … is the greatest political evil under our Constitution.”

Give up? George Washington and John Adams, our first two presidents. They and other weavers of the American dream knew the dangers of a two-party system. Tragically, they could not to prevent it.

Our present two-party system is so broken that, in Colorado, independents are now the largest bloc of voters. Forced to choose between the lesser of two evils, they are increasingly refusing to be shaped by cookie-cutter politics. RCV will give them the voice they deserve.

Plenty of independents like Democrats on social issues but don’t like their economic policies. They’re just the opposite with Republicans. For voters like them (including me), RCV will be a welcome change.

Let’s be clear: There is no perfect voting system. This isn’t just some banal platitude. The Nobel Laureate Kenneth Arrow proved this many years ago with a theorem that bears his name. Ever heard the saying “The perfect is the enemy of the good?” That’s what’s going on here.

Fortunately, RCV doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to be better than what we have now. That’s a pretty low bar to clear.

The vast majority of 131’s critics are comfortably ensconced within the two major parties. They think competition is good for everybody but themselves. 131 is a direct challenge to their power and the establishment they represent. So they’re against it. What did you expect?

What makes so much of the criticism nonsense is that Republican and Democratic candidates will still be on every ballot. Party loyalists can vote exactly as before.

But under RCV, voters can also express their first choice, their second choice, and so on, increasing the chance their vote will matter and letting them support candidates that best reflect their views. RCV gives more options to voters, who according to critics are too stupid and ignorant to exercise them.

We tend to think of our two political parties as inevitable and natural, but among the world’s leading democracies we are the outlier. European countries, for example, tend to be dominated by two parties but have many smaller ones that are part of coalitions required to govern.

Change is hard. But it is time, and Colorado would be in the vanguard of this effort. Republicans and Democrats have been taken over by demagogues who drag the party to the extremes. The result has been an inability to compromise, a crushing debt burden for our children, pointless posturing that ignores our country’s challenges, and bitter divisions that any extended family sitting down to Thanksgiving dinner or a Passover Seder knows all too well.

RCV is not perfect. There will be the inevitable bumps on the road that accompany any form of institutional change.

Nor is it enough. We need proportional representation, entitlement reform, immigration reform, fiscal reform, a healthier spirit of civic engagement, and a host of other measures to make America the place of human flourishing we know it can be.

But RCV is a vital step on that path. Vote for Proposition 131. Then work with us. Help us make it work for Colorado today, and America tomorrow.

Barry Fagin is on the board of RCV4CO and senior fellow in technology policy at the Independence Institute in Denver. His views are his alone. He is the author of “The Conservative Case for Ranked Choice Voting”, available online at i2i.org. Readers can contact Fagin at barry@faginfamily.net.