It’s no secret that the United States is a bipartisan nation.
While our elections are essentially a two-person race, other nations such as Canada usually have four or five major candidates running at the end of the race. This has caused many U.S. citizens to lean to the extremes of the two parties, and has turned elections into insult competitions. One way this could be resolved is if we implemented the alternative voting system.
Alternative voting is a system in which voters rank their preference of candidates. So if I liked candidate A, B and C in descending order, then I would put a one next to A, a two next to B, and a three next to C.
Alternative voting can be broken down into elimination rounds. So if A received 10 percent of the votes and B and C both received 45 percent of the votes in the first round then A would be eliminated and everyone who voted for A would then have their second choice used. If everyone who voted for A chose B as their second choice then B would have 55 percent of the total vote and win the election. While this may seem complex, it more than pays off by allowing voters to express their votes in a more dynamic way.
Currently the U.S. uses the “first-past the post” voting system, meaning that whoever gets the most votes in the election wins, excluding the occurrences when the Electoral College does not represent the votes of the people.
This usually forces voters to choose between two candidates or risk voting for a spoiler candidate — a candidate that takes votes away from another that would have won the election had they not lost votes. Alternative voting systems completely remove the variable of a spoiler candidate by making it possible to vote for who you really want and then vote for your next choices. However, if you prefer to only vote for one candidate then you can, and your vote will be used until that candidate is eliminated.
Another great benefit to alternative voting is that it highly discourages negative campaigning because it creates a possibility for candidates to receive the votes from another candidate in the next round. Could you imagine a campaign with no ads that demean and lie about other candidates? No ads would make wild accusations without punishing the candidate who runs the ad. This would also decrease the toxicity of American politics and encourage healthy debates.
Alternative voting is not perfect though. One of its flaws occurs in races with a close three way tie by eliminating the most widely liked candidate in the first round. It is also not a proportional voting system, but we already run into disproportional results with the Electoral College, like the 2000 election between George W. Bush and Al Gore.
In a little over one year many U.S. citizens will cast their vote for the next president of the United States. Some will even be doing so for the first time. Now is the perfect time to consider the best way in which we should vote. While a new system may be difficult to adjust to, its benefits could help us as a nation by allowing the voice of the people to do more than scream “red” or “blue."