Election Day is just a starting point. Where do we go from here?

After so much anticipation leading up to Election Day, it might feel like it’s time to take a breath. But even as I write this, before polls close, I realize the real work is ahead of us. Roughly half of us will feel like winners, and half like losers. The result won’t heal a divided country – in fact, it may leave many people feeling disenfranchised.

I sat down with Beryl Levinger to ask where we go from here. “You can’t do repair without reconciliation,” she says.

Levinger has a lengthy career in the practices of reconciliation and repair. She is a professor emerita at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, where she taught international development for decades. That work took her to more than 50 countries, including Rwanda and South Africa and Colombia. Four years ago, she turned her focus toward her own country when she began working for Root Change, a Washington, D.C.-based group seeking to strengthen democracy and civil society.

Clients include the Carter Center, which has long been interested in safeguarding elections, with an initiative to train election monitors worldwide. “It wasn’t long ago they decided that work was relevant to our country,” Levinger says. “The international work informs the domestic work. In the past, it used to be the other way around – it used to be that our experience, we would try to export to the rest of the world.”

What experiences, then, might Americans import from elsewhere? How can we cross the divide to engage with people with whom we disagree?

A spoiler alert is that Levinger does not know the answer. But she does have some insights, drawn from her decades of experience. “Information is not the path,” Levinger says. “Empathy and listening is better than debunking.”

That’s not to say facts don’t help, but they help most when they are delivered by trusted messengers – neighbors or faith leaders or news outlets that already have earned trust. Imagine, say, Fox News delivering the message that our election system has integrity and should be trusted – it would be a game-changer. “It may not be trustworthy but they are trusted, which is an important distinction,” Levinger adds.

The “trusted messenger” approach was widely applied to public health during the Covid-19 pandemic, quite successfully. Community health workers – trusted messengers – were trained by experts, and then disseminated information to their communities. “The idea is we are not delivering information. We are delivering support to people who might be delivering information,” Levinger says.

The metaphor to public health extends only so far though – who are the trusted messengers in politics?

A 2023 paper published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, titled “Polarization, Democracy, and Political Violence in the United States: What the Research Says,” notes an underlying transformation in how we perceive these issues, a “scholarly shift from thinking of polarization as an ideological, policy-based phenomenon to an issue of emotion, as well as the emerging understanding of polarization as both a social phenomenon and a political strategy.”

How we begin to reconcile with each other, and how people begin to reconcile with institutions and systems they feel betrayed by, is an important and necessary step. But there is also a political solution to part of this political problem. And that solution is ranked choice voting. This practice gives voters the ability to list candidates in order of preference, instead of choosing one – and by design, means the candidate who appeals to the most people, rather than to either extreme, stands to win.

“What’s the smallest thing we can do today that would make the biggest difference?” Levinger says. “Truth and reconciliation commissions, or whatever the American branding of that would be, would take a long time to make a big difference. For ranked-choice voting, there is a kind of a critical mass right now. If we want a political solution, ranked choice voting is the political solution.”

Of course, that is also a big undertaking and will take some time. There is another option, available to all of us. “Listening, not hearing – it does move the needle,” Levinger says.

SARA RUBIN is the Weekly’s editor. Reach her at sara@montereycountynow.com.