In the aftermath of the United Kingdom’s recent, endlessly fascinating elections (which resulted in a “hung parliament,” with no party securing a governing majority) both of Britain’s traditionally dominant parties, Labour and the Tories, need the support of the third-party Liberal Democrats in order secure control of Parliament. The result of this three-way standoff is that Lib-Dems might finally succeed in their decades-long push to score the most important item on their agenda, comprehensive electoral reform, in exchange for their votes in parliament. Should this come to pass, it would be incredibly fortuitous for the British population, as the electoral system used by Britain — on which our own system is modeled — is outdated and easily corruptible. Regardless of whether the Brits luck into such reforms, the United States should adopt comprehensive electoral reform and enact a system of proportional representation.

In the United States, we use single-member plurality districts to elect members of Congress. This system has a number of consequences that are positively toxic for our country.

The most pressing of these problems is that these electoral rules nearly always create a two-party system — not at all a natural feature of democracy , but one that occurs in a plurality-rule system because third parties, even if they receive a significant vote share, cannot gain seats in the legislature without actually winning districts. As a result, voters who would otherwise prefer third parties vote strategically for the closer of the two dominant parties to increase the likelihood that their votes will be meaningful, and third parties do not survive for long.

The effects of the two-party system are widespread and profound. It is extremely difficult to pressure or change the policies of either party in this system because voters on the far-left and far-right, respectively, have no realistic alternatives, and knowing this, the mainstream parties embrace watered-down policies designed to appeal to independent voters. This utter lack of responsiveness by Democrats and Republicans creates massive frustration for millions of Americans and contributes to the voter apathy that is pervasive in our political system. This frustration occasionally bubbles up in the form of insurgent movements such as Ross Perot’s presidential candidacy in 1992, or the current Tea Party movement, but none have recently been powerful enough to overcome the rules of the game.

Additionally, this system causes mainstream parties to be systematically over-represented, encourages gerrymandering and creates a plethora of uncompetitive seats. In 2008, the Democrats won approximately 53 percent of the national popular vote, but controlled 59 percent of the seats in the House and Senate because of our electoral quirks. With only two parties, there is no outside force to prevent either from gerrymandering our nation’s congressional districts to maximize regional party influence and federal representation. As a result, most seats are constructed to be uncompetitive or protect incumbents, which not only washes out the voices of millions of Americans, but also makes our legislature less directly responsible to the American people.

All of these factors contribute heavily to both the perception, and to some extent the reality, that our political system is an unproductive mess. A proportional representation system with a reasonable threshold for inclusion (to avoid repeating the mistakes of Israel’s Knesset, where any party can get seats with under 2 percent of the vote regardless of legitimacy) would fix most of these problems, and make our system more democratic, accountable and responsible.

Conservatives and liberals would finally have the opportunity to vote for parties that consistently represent their core beliefs, all Americans would have the chance to cast meaningful votes in federal elections and the policy inertia in our current system would be severely challenged. Voter turnout would likely increase, as most countries with some sort of proportional representation have higher voter turnout rates than in the United States. Furthermore, it would be far more difficult for corporate money to play such a dominant role in our politics, because incumbents would be more prone to seeing their vote shares peeled off by third-parties if they strayed too far from their constituents.

Our electoral system is an outdated holdover from the days when the Framers feared uneducated farmers. It has no place in our society today, and it desperately needs to be reformed if we are ever going to see good governance.