I live in Massachusetts and we have a primary on Thursday. In my area there are 5 Democrats running for the state senate seat being vacated by Susan Fargo.
I guarantee that there will be a winner, but there's no guarantee that the person that wins is the person that the majority of people prefer.
Let me say that again, the winner in the Democratic primary will probably have fewer than half of the vote and so we won't know whether most of the voters would prefer them over one of the other Democrats in the race.
This problem happens all the time. Remember how people here complained about Ralph Nader taking votes away from Gore in 2000, and people on the right complained about Buchanan taking votes away from Bush? We can fix this.
Voters could say who their 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc.choice is. There are lots of ways of figuring out the best person for the job once you know who people prefer. Cambridge uses choice voting, San Francisco uses Instant Runoff Voting, I prefer ranked pairs voting. Once the candidates are ranked, any of those methods can be used and they all give better results than having someone win with less than half the vote.
With Instant Runoff voting (IRV), you look at the results.
1. If someone has more than half the vote, then that person wins.
2. Otherwise, you take the person with the lowest number of votes and count their second choice.
3. Return to step one.
Although IRV is better than just taking the plurality, ranked pairs is even better. Wikipedia has a wonky descriptionof how it works, but I'd rather use an example:
Assume there are three candidates:
R - a right wing candidate gets 40% of the vote
A - a center left candidate gets 25% of the vote
B - a progressive candidate gets 35% of the vote
Using the current system, R wins, and 60% of the voters are unhappy.
Let's assume people could let us know their second and third choice.
R, A, B - 40%
A, R, B - 5%
A, B, R - 20%
B, A, R - 35%
If we used IRV, A gets thrown out and B has 55% of the vote and thus B wins. Now 45% of the voters are unhappy. Although that's better than 60% unhappy, it can be better.
If we use Ranked Pairs, we see that voters prefer
A over R 60%
A over B 65%
B over R 55%
B over A 35%
R over A 40%
R over B 40%
More voters prefer A over the other choices, so ranked pairs chooses A. A was no one's last choice, so everyone is somewhat happy.
Ranked voting can be used in the general election, state elections, and even local elections.
We should be proud that we have the oldest continuous democracy in the world. Unfortunately our voting system hasn't been updated since before the telegraph was invented. Let's improve what we have to better reflect our intentions.