A Panacea for American Democracy
The concept I am about to introduce is not, as my alluring and sensationalist title may suggest, the single answer to repair our population’s system of electing people to represent us. However, it has the potential to make a huge difference in how campaigns are run, how elections unfold, and, ultimately, how many Americans support the winner.
Political theorists may label the system in different ways, often as preferential or instant-runoff voting. But the idea is the same: it would supplant our system of voting for presidents, members of Congress, and many local offices. Here’s how it works:
Instead of selecting their preferred candidate, voters would rank candidates in their order of preference. They may rank as many or as few as they would like, and could opt to select only one candidate as we currently do today.
After all of the ballots are cast, the boards of elections would only look at the top-ranked candidate on each ballot. If that candidate was marked #1 on more than 50% of the ballots, they automatically win.
But that often doesn’t happen. Take the 2016 Republican primary. As of publication, not one of the sixteen-plus candidates for the GOP nomination has polled above 20%, let alone 50%, although Donald Trump has come very close. This is where the ranking system comes in. If there is no one with a majority, the candidate with the fewest votes is removed from contention, and votes they received are reassigned to the second choice of each voter. (Suppose Jimmy voted for the last place candidate; his vote would then go to whomever he ranked #2.) This process is repeated until someone has over half of the ballots.
This could be quite confusing, especially in a race such as the upcoming Republican primary in which the process would likely be iterated multiple times. But consider the infamous 2000 general election, where the race was extremely close in Florida. Gore would have unequivocally won the state, and thus the whole election, had a preferential voting system been in place. George Bush and Al Gore were just under 50 percent; Ralph Nader captured around 1.5 percent of the vote. Assuming most Nader voters would rather have Gore than Bush in the White House, in the alternative voting scheme Gore would have been ranked 2nd on most of the Nader ballots. When Nader was removed from contention, his ballots would mostly have been reassigned to Gore, who would have won. In the contemporary system, voting for Nader was effectively the same as not voting at all.
You may see now why the preferential system is much healthier than the status quo. It encourages citizens to vote for their favorite candidate, which today many voters do not do out of fear of their vote being “wasted.” It is much more appealing to be able to vote for one’s favorite candidate than to try to evaluate the political landscape by guessing who others will vote for to see if such a move would be disenfranchising. Finally, it encourages more people to run, and could eventually make primaries obsolete (so long as there is more than one viable candidate for each party in the general election), because it removes the Nader-esque effect of hedging (or “spoiling”) the vote.
In my mind, there are two classes of voters in America. The first group is those who vote for their favorite candidate. Most Nader voters fall in this camp, as do many who vote for the winning candidate. It is neither ignoble nor unreasonable for one to vote purely for his/ her favorite; people vote for different reasons, and often those who support a long shot candidate employ this strategy because they simply cannot support one of the mainstream contenders or they want to raise awareness for a specific cause. These people would be greatly rewarded in a preferential voting scheme, and more citizens would be incentivized to adopt this strategy as well—they could pick their favorite without unintentionally supporting their least favorite candidate as well (as many Nader voters did to Bush by hedging the liberal vote share away from Gore).
The second class of voters is the tactical group—those who vote against their least favorite candidate to have the best of the few realistic outcomes. Americans who may favor self-proclaimed democratic socialist Bernie Sanders, but who think only the comparably conservative Hillary Clinton could beat a strong GOP candidate in the general election and vote for her instead of their ideal candidate, are in this group. If the 2016 Democratic primary were a preferential vote, some of these voters might rank Sanders first, then perhaps Martin O’Malley, and then Clinton. They would be ranking their favorites and still not hurting their party’s chances in the general.
This system has some shortcomings in practice. For one, our democratic system is extremely change-averse, and the preferential voting process is a bit confusing. Especially in a crowded election like the upcoming Republican primary, many “rounds” of removing least selected candidates and transferring their votes to the respective next-choice candidate for each ballot could be hard to grasp, and the winner could be hard to predict. As in the current Electoral College, a candidate could win despite not capturing the popular vote, and this would also apply in smaller races where the popular vote currently does determine the winner. But that is the point—more people would be more content with the winning candidate than with the others.
This process is used in some local jurisdictions, and in other votes such as at the Academy Awards. As for national-level adoption? It will never happen. But next time you and a group of friends want to grab dinner but can’t decide where, try preferential voting. Everyone will be glad you did.