Opinion: Why The US Election System Is Broken

The US elects a president every 4 years, and the process is a super huge deal. But, is it broken? Definitely, and big time, in a major way.

The way the system is broken is the way an official is elected in the first place. The country uses a system known as first-past-the-post, or plurality. In this system, the candidate with the most votes wins. Sounds fair enough? No, for two important reasons.

Here's a random example: three candidates ran for governor. Candidate 1 received 48% of the vote, Candidate 2 received 35%, and Candidate 3 received 17%. This means Candidate 1 wins. See one of the problems now? Candidate 1 got more votes than anybody else, but more people voted for anybody but Candidate 1. Many people, like to refer to this as "minority rule."

The other problem comes the next election. Suppose the same three candidates ran. The people who voted for Candidate 3 saw that by taking votes away from Candidate 2, they inadvertently helped their least favorite, Candidate 1, win. Not wanting them to win a second time, they strategically voted for Candidate 2. When election time came, Candidate 1 got 48%, Candidate 2 got 52%, and Candidate 3 got 0%. After this, Candidate 3 saw their bad results and dropped out from any elections in the future. This is called the spoiler effect, and it results in a two-candidate, or two-party in real-life, system.

There are two solutions to the problem.

In order to solve the first-past-the-post problem, we could implement a system like France's, where they have 2 rounds of voting. In the first round, everybody who wants to run runs. The top 2 candidates in the first round immediately qualify for the second round. There, voters are able to focus on the major candidates. Whoever wins the second round wins the position. We could implement this in the U.S., but it would take a lot of time and cost too much.

Fortunately, there is another voting method, called instant-runoff voting. It's pretty much the same thing as France's method, but it's automatic. Here's how it works: election time comes and you go to vote. You pick up a ballot and rank the candidates from 1st choice to last choice. If you don't like a candidate, you don't have to rank them. Here's how everyone's 1st choice goes: Candidate 1 gets 48%, Candidate 2 gets 35%, and Candidate 3 gets 17%. Candidate 3 receives the lowest number of votes, so he is eliminated. His voters put Candidate 2 as their second choice, so in the end, Candidate 2 wins the election with 52% of the vote. This way of voting also trends to a two-party system, but voters are able to support third-party candidates without having to let their least favorite candidate win.