Abolish the
Electoral College
America's leaders should be chosen in instant
runoff elections
The CRIMSON staff
November 02, 2004
Of the tens of millions of voters who will swarm the
polls today, only a fraction that is, those living in the hotly
contested swing states will have a real say in choosing the next
president. For this reason and others, this page has advocated the
abolition of the Electoral College and the determination of the
presidency based on a national popular vote.
But the current system of electors maintains one
important attribute: it builds a theoretical majority coalition out
of a plurality of votes. This, in turn, strengthens the institution
of the presidency by bestowing upon the winner a legitimacy he would
otherwise lack. (After all, no presidential candidate has received a
majority of the popular vote since former president George H. W.
Bush garnered a slim 53 percent in 1988.) Still, there is a superior
solution that combines popular voting with a majority winner:
instant runoff voting (IRV), in which voters rank candidates instead
of just voting for one.
In an instant runoff election so-called because the
majority winner is determined from a single round of voting the
candidate with the fewest first-choice votes is eliminated from
contention, and the voters who voted for this candidate have their
second-choice votes awarded to remaining candidates. Successive
eliminations and vote redistributions occur until there are only two
candidates left, at which point one will have a majority of
votes.
The advantages to an IRV election are plentiful.
Besides guaranteeing a majority winner, it gives voters the ability
to express a clearer statement of their political views. Citizens on
the fringes of the political spectrum would not have to settle for a
candidate too moderate for their tastes; instead, they could cast
their first vote for the candidate of their choice and still have
their second-choice vote count should their first choice be
eliminated. Furthermore, when the winner of an election examines the
vote total, the breakdown of his or her rankings will reveal the
extent of the politicians popular support.
Even before voters head to the polls, IRV would
generate a ripple effect on the campaign process. Efforts to bar
third-party candidates from the ballot would be moot, since they
would have little chance of playing a spoiler role in any election.
More significantly, candidates without a clear majority would need
to depend on more than just first-place votes to gain victory, so
IRV would curb negative campaigning.
Of course, selling the idea of IRV to the American
people is a difficult task, as evidenced by its sparse usage
nationwide. One significant barrier to its implementation is a
perceived threat to the two-party system. But IRV, at least
initially, will likely strengthen the two-party system, because it
will decrease the chances of a third-party spoiler. So politicians
have little excuse not to push for it. More serious concerns involve
educating voters about the ranking system and refitting (or
replacing) older punch-card and pull-lever voting technologies. But
asking voters to rank candidates in their order of preference is
hardly an overwhelmingly unreasonable (or confusing) request, and
the proliferation of electronic voting machines increases the
prospects for widespread IRV elections. Indeed, IRV voting has been
successfully implemented for elections in several spheres, including
Republican congressional nominations in Utah, city council elections
in Cambridge and Harvard Undergraduate Council legislative
elections.
While we welcome the attention that these small-scale
elections have brought to IRV, determining the presidency through a
ranked voting system would require considerable changes in how
citizens and politicians view the act of voting, not to mention the
passage of a constitutional amendment. But the cost of overcoming
these barriers will pale next to the result: a system of voting that
gives all citizens an equal and precise voice, and an election in
which the president is elected by a true majority.
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