This year’s U.S. presidential election has left voters and commentators from around the world shaking their heads. We have somehow managed to nominate the two most disliked candidates in recent history.

What’s most striking is how a racist demagogue with no political experience can attract millions supporters based mainly on his personality. Donald Trump is the quintessential reality TV star. He gets attention no matter what he does — good or bad. His strongest supporters and his fiercest opponents are both equally intrigued by his actions. By hijacking the primary process, he has revealed that perhaps our nominating processes has come to favor personalities that make for good TV rather than politicians who make good policy.

What can we do about this?

A man by the name of John Donvan believes he has the answer. You may have heard of him before. Donvan is the host of a debate series called Intelligence Squared U.S. Debates. What makes Donvan's debates different from the presidential debates that we saw in the primaries is that he uses an Oxford-style debate format. Essentially, an Oxford-style debate is centered on a "motion" that consists of an opinion statement about a specific issue. The participants than argue for or against that motion. In theory, this would allow our presidential candidates to go into more thorough detail about the issues they are debating, rather than simply allowing the discussion to devolve into a yelling match jumping from topic to topic.

I have been following Donvan's show for the past year or so, and I have always been struck by how the Oxford-style debates allow for much more substance than you would find on television or even in print media. Here's Donvan pitching his proposal to apply the Oxford-style debate format to our presidential debates:

Donvan has launched a petition on Change.org to change this year's presidential debates to an Oxford-style format. As a disgruntled voter myself, I am hugely supportive of this move. Will it completely fix our nominating process to prevent more Donald Trump-like figures from gaining popularity in the future? Most likely not.

But, from just a few minutes of listening to debates in the Oxford-style format, you'll notice the difference it makes. I would be particularly interested in hearing Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump debating in this style because this is how policy really gets implemented. As presidents, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump wouldn't walk into a cabinet meeting with a set of scripted talking points about a hundred different issues. In reality, they would sit down and discuss the different ways that they can approach the issue at hand before deciding on a course of action.

It's no question that this election year has exposed major flaws in our election process here in the U.S. But, no matter who we each end up supporting in November, we should all agree that reforms in all aspects of the nominating process must be considered. I may be optimistic, but it is my hope that, in a few year’s time, the President of the United States will go back to being a voice for the issues of the people rather than a performer interested only in reality TV.