How did we get here? You’ve probably read a hundred different articles about what went wrong in this election, and who is to blame. But I have not seen any mention of the voting system, so I hope this discussion will be new to many of you. The reason Trump was nominated, and the reason he was elected, is that we use the wrong voting system, plain and simple.
How did Trump get nominated? At one time there were 16 candidates for the nomination. Most of them were reasonable human beings and knew something about politics and policy. Then there was Trump, the nuclear bomb. Trump was attractive to a significant fraction of the Republican voters, let’s say, 30%. The “reasonable” 70% of the Republican voters did not like him, but they split their votes among the other 15 candidates. Naturally Trump got more votes than anyone else, and started winning primaries. The others slowly dropped out, but until the very end, continued to split the non-Trump vote, which was usually larger than the pro-Trump vote.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Our voting system allows you to vote for one and only one candidate. By voting for candidate X, you are denying a vote to candidate Y, even though you may feel that Y is perfectly acceptable, perhaps almost as good as X. Why shouldn’t we be able to say so? We could, if we used almost any other form of voting. In this essay I will describe Ranked Choice Voting (RCV), formerly called Instant Runoff Voting, but there are many others that share the same key feature, namely, that you can declare who else you like.
So let’s imagine that the Republican primaries used this system. 70% of the voters would have voted for one of the 15 non-Trump candidates. No one would have received many votes, but one would have received the fewest. That person is eliminated, and the ballots that listed that person as their first choice are now redistributed among the remaining 14 candidates, according to the second choice listed on those ballots. Each of the remaining 14 candidates now has more votes than before, but one of them has the fewest. The process is repeated, using third and fourth and fifth choices as necessary, until one of the candidates has more than 50% of the votes.
Since Trump would probably have been last choice for 70% of the voters, the winner would have been one of the others. If Trump had not won any of the early primaries, he likely would have dropped out, and we would not be here.
But let’s imagine that he did win the Republican nomination, presumably because they did not use RCV, and that Hillary won the Democratic nomination. We still could have avoided this, and again, the right voting system in the general election would have done it.
What happened after Hillary clinched the nomination? There was a huge push among the Bernie crowd for him to run as an independent. He didn’t, because he knew he would take votes away from Hillary, but probably not enough to win, and he certainly did not want Trump as president. Then Bloomberg thought about jumping in as an independent, but he came to the same conclusion. The problem is, a vote for Bernie, or Bloomberg, is a vote that Clinton does not get, thus ensuring Trump’s victory.
But what if that were not true? What if the voting system in the general election encouraged third parties, by allowing voters to express their preferences and then transfer their votes to someone else if their candidate loses? Both Bernie and Bloomberg would likely have run, and given how the campaign went, one of them likely would have won. (And Gore would have won in 2000.)
Now let’s talk about the campaign process. It seems like we say this every four years, but this one certainly was the most disgusting campaign ever. Each campaign wanted you to vote for them in order to keep the other candidate, who was the devil, out. As long as A ends up with more votes than B, A wins, so A can say anything s/he wants to make B look bad.
But with RCV, this is not the case. With more than two candidates in the race, it is unlikely that anyone will get more than 50% in the first round. So when A is out campaigning, s/he not only has to try to convince voters to vote for A, s/he also has to try to convince people who don’t vote for A to make A their second choice. If A goes around saying that B is the devil, it is unlikely that supporters of B will give A their second choice vote. Candidates have to make voters from the other side like them. In other words, a voting system that allows people to register second and more choices encourages nicer campaigning, and rewards candidates who can attract broad support rather than appealing to the fringes.
So what are the downsides of RCV? Almost all practical. It is unfamiliar; voters would have to be educated to register their lower choices, and how; counting will be more difficult, in some cases requiring different machines; and counting might take longer. All of this is an extremely small price to pay for a system that actually produces winners that most people want.