After the definitive failure of campaigns from countless preferable candidates, President Biden and former President Trump finally received their party’s nominations. No powerful Democrats were willing to stand in opposition to Biden, and Trump’s grip on his loyalists was so strong that he managed to become nominated by ignoring his opponents. It’s difficult to view this as anything other than our political system eating itself, and I hope that it will at least change the mind of anyone who still hasn’t been convinced that electoral reform is needed. While this demand for reform often refers to grievances with the Electoral College, I want to bring attention to a more urgent side of the issue: ranked-choice voting.
This portrayal might come across as over dramatic, so let’s walk through the implications of Biden and Trump running as the 2024 nominees. Both candidates already served a term as president, and did so with horrendously low approval ratings. Both are controversial within their party, outright despised by the other, and largely viewed as “the lesser of two evils” by the Independents who voted for them. Both were accused of interfering with the election that brought them into office, causing supporters of their opposition to see the results as unfair. Both will be more than 80 years old if they live through another term, and prominently display the cause of bipartisan demand for younger politicians. Both have caused concern about their electability. Despite all of these alarming realities, neither party was capable of pushing a candidate different from who they put on the ballot for the previous election.
For anyone doubting that this mess could be even worse than I’ve already described, I’d like to highlight just how much of a political trainwreck is waiting for us in the near future. First, while voting third-party is universally viewed as a pointless act of self-destruction that can’t lead to anything other than spoiler candidates, despite this, Gallup Poll still found that approval for some kind of third-party alternative soared to a precedent-shattering 63%. Next, even though running as a third-party candidate is synonymous with giving up on a political career, a former Democrat has already announced that he will run as a third-party candidate (RFK Jr), the leading Republican made threats to do the same if he wasn’t nominated (Trump, before his nomination), and at least two primary candidates from the last presidential election have hinted at following suit after publicly distancing themselves from their former parties (Andrew Yang and Tulsi Gabbard). These are strong indications that voters have grown tired of the two mainstream parties, or at least the candidates who those parties are offering.
So, what caused this debacle, and what options are there to either untangle it or at least prevent it from happening again? Put simply, we can explain the ongoing problems as consequences of our current electoral system, specifically its first-past-the-post (FPP) two-party structure. Bear with me while I define some terms before unpacking why the existing procedure is in such desperate need of change. FPP means that each voter chooses a single candidate, casts one vote in their favor, and whoever receives the most votes wins. In the case of US presidential elections, this is made a bit more complicated by the Electoral College, but for simplicity we don’t have to distinguish votes from electoral votes right now. To win as a candidate in a FFP system, candidates theoretically don’t need more than half the votes (“absolute majority”), they just need a larger portion than any of their opponents (“plurality”). However, the US only has two parties capable of winning, so viable candidates must run as members of one of them. As a result, the election’s winner will end up gaining more than half the total votes. In practice, this leaves us with two-party elections, even though more parties are technically allowed to participate. A two-party election forces voters to choose between a party that vaguely lands somewhere left of center on the political spectrum and one that vaguely lands somewhere right of center, with a variety of radical and moderate results depending on the year.
So far, this system might not seem like a particularly disastrous way to bring our leaders into power, but I would argue that the details of its execution cause unignorable incentive problems. Our general elections come down to a single nominee from each of the two mainstream parties, which means that candidates have no reason to focus on beating the other side before the primaries end. This presents a glaring issue that this year’s electoral season highlights well: until after they defeat all other candidates from their own side, candidates don’t need to worry about appealing to voters from the other party. Worse, they actually have an incentive to ignore them because primary voters tend to be a more radical audience.
After thinking about how our primaries work, it should be no surprise that when election day comes around, many people feel like they’ve been robbed and blackmailed. The feeling that they were robbed comes from the absence of a third option, who they saw in the primaries and would prefer over the current nominees, but was already eliminated. The feeling of blackmail comes from the necessity to participate in an election that they’d rather sit out, but the other side is so disconnected from their interests that the stakes are too high to justify inaction. This leaves them with no choice but to support their own party, even if they aren’t on board with much of what that party may support. Voters in this position might not be opinionated enough to feel strongly about a topic that their candidate represents a horrible policy for, or maybe aren’t informed enough to feel qualified to determine how we should address topics that get less national attention. Regardless, they end up going along with positions that don’t represent them for the sake of standing by policies they care about.
There are several options for changing these conditions that lead to scenarios like the one we’re in now, but I believe that ranked-choice voting has the most merit. For those who don’t know what this entails, it differs from FPP in a few crucial ways. First, instead of the two-candidate process that we’ve grown accustomed to, we could have more options on the ballot. For example, two options for left-wing candidates and two options for right-wing candidates, with one more radical and one more moderate from each side of the aisle. These could either be from a total of four different parties, or simply two separate pairs of candidates running as Democrats and Republicans. The second major difference in ranked-choice voting is that, as opposed to deciding which single candidate they hate the least, voters would rank their preferences for every candidate on the ballot in a list (in this example, from one to four, but there is no limit to the number of candidates).
As for how this plays out in practice, the politicians who one side of the political spectrum would rank highest are the same ones who the other side would rank the lowest, so the candidates with the best chances of winning are those who earn the most “twos” and “threes” (rather than “ones”). By extension, we should expect the winners of these elections to earn pluralities rather than absolute majorities, assuming that parties are not allowed to build coalitions (which they shouldn’t be, because that would take us back to square one with only two viable options). In other words, the winner probably won’t be the first choice of the majority of voters, but I’m more than alright with that because they also probably won’t be their last choice. Not only does ranked-choice voting conceptually address fundamental shortcomings in FPP elections, but there’s also proof that it works in practice: this system has already seen success in foreign governments (including Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, and Scotland) and US states for statewide elections (Hawaii, Alaska, and Maine).
Many people are weary of such fundamental changes to something as central to American governance as the democratic process, and understandably so — we should be skeptical of significant adjustments to how our government operates, and the timing of its implementation will always feel unfair. Still, with this in mind, I’ll wrap up with a question for those who oppose a new system: regardless of which candidate you’re rooting for in the upcoming election, aren’t you disappointed with where our current electoral model has led us? Republicans, aren’t you disappointed that you can’t represent your party with someone who won’t drive away international allies in the West and worsen our country’s already unprecedented polarization? Democrats, aren’t you disappointed that you can’t represent your party with someone who didn’t turn the Taliban into the most effectively armed terrorist organization on the planet? For voters of either party, aren’t you disappointed that we’re stuck with one of the two presidents who’ve had the lowest approval ratings in decades, and who will break their own records for the oldest candidates in history? Are you satisfied that we’re stuck with a rematch that an unbelievable amount of polling shows that the majority of us don’t want?
At best, the situation today is dissatisfying. At worst, it’s outright embarrassing. Ranked-choice voting is not the only way to improve our ongoing mess, but it’s easily the one that I think deserves the most attention. Choosing an alternative to our current system is necessary because too many people have been forced into the routine of voting against candidates they hate rather than voting for candidates they’re excited to support, and ranked-choice voting is the most promising answer that I’ve found so far.
Alex Lee ‘25 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. He can be reached at alex.b.lee@wustl.edu.