A majority of Americans now believe that the government should do more to mitigate the consequences of climate change and that it should be a priority for the next president and Congress. There’s public support for regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant, forcing corporations to pay a carbon tax, and offering tax rebates for purchasing electric vehicles. This is a long cry from where the country stood a decade ago when less than a majority of Americans believed that global warming was caused by human activities. 

By many measures, policy has followed this shift in opinion: Local, state, and federal governments are returning land to Indigenous tribes, suing Big Oil for complicity in causing the climate crisis, and prioritizing development funding for communities impacted by environmental injustices. But progress isn’t happening fast enough to outpace the ballooning impacts of drought, habitat loss, and extreme weather like recent hurricanes Ian and Helene. We’ve already shot past the 1.5 degrees Celsius temperature increase and are on track for a 3.1 degrees Celsius increase by the end of the century, spelling unimaginable disaster. That’s because the public’s opinions on the risks of climate change and the adaptations needed differ widely from the elected officials who represent them. 

If public opinion isn’t reflected in policy, then climate change isn’t just an environmental concern; it’s an indicator of the health of our democracy. This decline in the health of civic life and public accountability is due in large part to the influence of corporations and private money in deciding who is elected and which laws or rules are implemented. For decades, the influence of money in politics has enabled oil and gas corporations to design civil, criminal, and tax laws that benefit their operations—business practices that are partially culpable for climate-warming emissions. As Truthout reported on the influence of dark money: “By some estimates, as much as a billion dollars a year is funding lobbying against climate change legislation, and opposing or supporting political candidates based on their climate stance.”

Some experts call it broken, while others call it flawed—outlining the ways that American democracy has civically silenced those suffering climate harm. The truth is that American democracy was always designed to exclude some voices, and now we see the impact of this reality. Climate health and public participation in government are linked—and climate change has gotten worse as fewer people have access to affecting change. Perhaps the most glaring example of this linkage is illustrated by the fact that those affected first and worst by climate change—Black, Indigenous, and people of color—suffer diminished access to the polls and civic life. People of color are more likely to vote for climate-friendly policies, yet they’re also the most likely to be underrepresented by elected officials and kept away from the ballot box. 

“Historically Black and brown voters do not have an open and available, accessible opportunity to vote,” said Aklima Khondoker, chief of programs and strategy at the nonprofit public policy organization Dēmos. 

So, how do we address the creeping threat of fascism that portends more extreme climate harms that people of color are already feeling? Prism spoke with experts about some fixes that can be made to American democracy. Here’s what they had to say:

Change how people vote 

One of the major problems with elections in the U.S. is that voters often only have a choice between two major party candidates—Democrat or Republican. Third-party candidates are often viewed as fringe options that can spoil election outcomes, pulling votes away from one of the major parties and ultimately handing the election to the less-liked candidate. For instance, in 2000, Green Party candidate Ralph Nader received votes that would have otherwise gone to Democratic candidate Al Gore, shifting the election in George Bush’s favor. However, in 2016, despite evidence to the contrary, media narratives about the vote-spoiling power of third-party candidates helped entrench the false belief that Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton lost because of insurgent alternatives. 

That thinking is holding true this year, where establishment Democrats are shaming the Uncommitted Movement, a coalition led by Muslim and Arab voters protesting the Biden administration’s unabashed funding of the Israeli genocide in Gaza. It appears that marginalized voters, who are so often expected to throw their weight unquestioningly behind the Democratic Party’s choice, are being vilified as selfish or shortsighted for voting in a way that may swing things in the Republican Party’s favor. In this election between Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris and former Republican President Donald Trump, many people are encouraged not to vote third-party and instead cast a ballot based on what they don’t want to happen rather than what they do want. 

But ranked-choice voting offers an alternative vision for how voters cast their ballots, one that’s based on what a candidate can add to the political conversation rather than the alternative, where voters feel compelled to vote for a candidate that isn’t ideal but whom they believe will do the least harm. “Why not let people vote their hopes and not their fears?” asked Seth Berry, a former Democratic member of the Maine House of Representatives. Since 2018, Maine has used ranked-choice voting in statewide primaries, general elections in races with more than two candidates, and presidential elections. 

With ranked-choice voting, voters rank candidates in order of preference. Candidates only secure a win when they receive a majority of the votes. If no candidate wins a majority of votes in the first round of counting, then vote tallying moves to the second-choice candidates. 

The benefits of ranked-choice voting to democracy are numerous, said Shannon Grimes, a democracy researcher at the research and communications think tank Sightline Institute. More people of color and women are elected with the ranking system. The ranked-choice voting system also impacts political campaigns: Candidates from underfunded parties can enter what would otherwise be considered a shoe-in for an establishment party candidate. Also notable as part of this system, collaboration and compromise between candidates can help them win first or second-choice votes. Because voters aren’t just choosing one candidate, candidates are far less incentivized to be negative to other candidates.

In a winner-take-all system, voters are often asked to cast a ballot for the “lesser of two evils.” Existing parties have a chokehold on the election, meaning newcomers aren’t able to throw their hat in the ring and candidates tend toward extremism. 

“Campaigns [in ranked choice voting] tend to be more issue-focused and less about spewing the party lines,” Grimes explained. 

More than 50 municipalities across the country have already implemented ranked choice voting for local and state elections. At least 10 Republican-led states, primarily located in the South, have banned it, with many GOP representatives falsely characterizing it as a form of voter fraud because it allows individuals to cast more than one vote in a single election. While someone may technically vote for more than one candidate in a race, their vote is only counted toward the winning candidate once. 

Republican opposition is driven by the fact that ranked-choice voting leads to a more representative form of democracy. “Governments across the globe that have proportional representation have better climate policies,” Grimes said. She said that proportional representation isn’t quite on the table in the U.S., she said, but ranked-choice voting is growing in popularity among Americans familiar with the benefits of changing how we vote. 

In the long term, ranked-choice voting may even prove beneficial for the implementation of climate policies. More moderate candidates tend to be elected when voters rank their choices, creating more stability in governance rather than the “giant pendulum swings back and forth that you might see in some places today,” Grimes said. Stability in governance is essential for carrying out climate policies that demand a long-term approach. 

Change who is elected

The lack of proportional representation goes deeper than the flaws of the winner-take-all status quo. Deb Otis, the director of research and policy at the nonpartisan research organization FairVote, said that the way we elect members of the House of Representatives “leaves a lot of voters behind.” That’s because we have heavily gerrymandered districts where white voters retain outsized input over who is sent to Washington. 

A solution for this is the Fair Representation Act, which FairVote helped draft and was introduced in Congress by Virginia Rep. Don Beyer. Currently, one person represents each of the 435 House districts in the country. The Act proposes shrinking the number of districts and increasing their size to elect more representatives from each district. As it stands now, representatives are only really motivated to listen to their district’s majority voters, most of whom are white, Otis said. However, if multiple members from each district were elected with ranked-choice voting, then districts where 20% of the population are people of color could reflect that in Congress. Despite the increase in the number of voters who are people of color, their votes are diluted.

Changing how the House of Representatives is elected allows candidates from diverse political backgrounds to head to Washington. Right now, political polarization in Congress means that there’s little room for compromise, creating power imbalances in different factions of the Democratic and Republican parties. Establishment forces within the GOP and Democratic operations mean that newcomers are often discouraged from running for office and face barriers to building power or coalitions on the Hill. 

More competitive congressional races can lead to more political party representation, which translates to diversity in political discussions and public policy. If we don’t advocate for more shared political power among a few major parties, the opposite will be waiting on the other side. As political scientist Lee Drutman wrote for the Boston Review, “Partisan conflict is a blasted terrain, but voters who don’t like it have nowhere to go. An overwhelming messaging machinery tells voters that even if they don’t like their party, the other side winning would be far worse—and that losing, therefore, is unacceptable. It is under these conditions—high partisan division, low system legitimacy, high citizen disaffection—that democracies typically crumble.”

Change what civic participation looks like

If elections are the end-all-be-all of democracy, maybe we should think beyond the two- and four-year cycles of election season marketing, door-knocking, and text-banking. Of course, elections are important. They can and should be improved. But fewer voters feel that American democracy is functioning democratically. Maybe one solution is for the public to participate in the stewardship of democracy beyond the ballot box. 

Michael Menser, an associate professor of earth and environmental sciences at the City University of New York, told Prism that innovations like climate assemblies and participatory budgeting give citizens a voice in what policies are implemented. Climate assemblies have their roots in Europe and function like juries: Individuals are given a summons to serve on the councils that help make decisions related to policy areas, like healthcare or transportation. The councils are representative samples of demographic groups, the goal being to intentionally include people historically excluded from decision-making processes. 

Something similar might work in the U.S., where people of color and other marginalized groups aren’t the majority of voters, but they experience the lion’s share of climate consequences and have the knowledge and lived experience needed to direct effective policies. And because of the jury-like structure, a climate assembly can offer a voice to everyone while prioritizing the “communities that have suffered the most,” Menser said.