Yes, Thomas Jefferson was the first person to devise a system that gives every voter the same access not just to the voting booth, but far more importantly the same access to being part of the results.
The term used for the system is proportional voting. It means that the same portion of the voters gets the same portion of the seats. When ten percent of the voters pick the Orange party, then ten percent of the seats are taken in by Orange Party representatives. It is in use in Sweden, the Netherlands, Spain (in variations).
Pro-portion: The various portions seen among the voters and the portions of their representatives are identical.
For the voters, it is super simple.
Let's say there are thirty candidates for the nine council seats in your city. You listen to the candidates, and you pick the one that fits your political color best.
That's all. You need to know yourself, and you pick the candidate that fits you. You do not pick who has the best chance of winning. You pick your own political color.
Let me emphasize that this is very simple. It is very easy to see who you do not like, and who is closest to your political ideals. You don't have to weigh if they have any chance or not.
The system is intrinsic, which means it functions by itself. After you voted, your vote goes towards either the specific individual you selected, or if that person did not win enough votes for a seat, then your vote moves to the more popular individual in the same political category. Your vote will never go to political opponents. Your vote will go toward your political direction.
With nine seats, there may be -say- four different political groups. Your preferred candidate fits in with -say- three other candidates in a specific Alignment. Your candidate wins the seat straight out or your vote goes to the most popular candidate in that political group. Your vote does not go to the other political groups.
When there are nine seats, then the minimum that all voters get who they want is 90%.
In our system today, that is 50% (plus one vote).
The difference of that minimum guaranteed percentage is 40% difference. The difference between 90% and 50% is enormous.
If your city has just four seats on the council, this minimum is already 80%, so 30% more than what we have today. That is 30% more attention for what the voters want than today. The representatives have to pay better attention to what the voters want, because they will be gone quickly if they do not.
Representatives in nations with Thomas Jefferson's voting system are on average between five and ten years younger than our representatives. The incumbent is booted out faster in the clean voting system than in our voting system.
The real difference is that voters do not compete with the voters for the win. So, the dominant political party can't relax and listen to just the majority of the voters. Each party must compete with all other parties for the win of votes. All votes count toward the outcome.
If your city has nine council seats, then all seats are up for grabs in every election. That means that 10 to 11 percent of all votes equals 1 seat.
A candidate may pick a specific neighborhood to get his or her 10 to 11 percent of all votes. Or... a candidate can try find 10 or 11 percent of the votes from across the city (based on issues like, say, bicycling and transit).
You pick one candidate, and as a result all candidates have to listen much better to the voters in proportional voting.
The happiest nations in the world all have proportional voting (particularly when they do not have a president, which is again a single seat won by one person).
Proportional voting is like round-table representation. Every voter is present. We don't have that. We have a pyramid scheme, with many voters (up to 49.9% of the voters) not-represented at the table.
Let me know if you want to dig deeper (the voters do not need to know how the system works in all details; they need to know that it is pure and guarantees them their representatives). I can show you how it works behind the scenes, but the voters do not need to know how it works, so I left it out of this reply.
