“Americans have been using essentially the same rules to elect presidents since the beginning of the Republic.”
“In the general election, each voter chooses one candidate; each state (with two current exceptions) awards all its Electoral College votes to the candidate chosen by the largest number of voters (not necessarily a majority) in that state; and the president-elect is the candidate with a majority of Electoral College votes.”
“These rules are deeply flawed. For example, candidates A and B may each be more popular than C (in the sense that either would beat C in a head-to-head contest), but nevertheless each may lose to C if they both run.”
“The system therefore fails to reflect voters’ preferences adequately. It also aggravates political polarization, gives citizens too few political options, and makes candidates spend most of their campaign time seeking voters in swing states rather than addressing the country at large.”
“There are several remedies. Perhaps in order of increasing chance of adoption, they are: (1) to elect the president by the national popular vote instead of the Electoral College; (2) to choose the winner in the general election according to the preferences of a majority of voters rather than a mere plurality, either nationally or by state; and, easiest of all, (3) to substitute majority for plurality rule in state primaries.”
“It is hardly surprising that disappointed backers of Gore and Clinton, with more support from American voters than their opponents, should complain about the outcomes in 2000 and 2016. What is particularly relevant is the clear unpopularity of the Electoral College as an institution.”
“However, literally getting rid of the Electoral College would require a constitutional amendment”
“Somewhat more realistically, each of the forty-eight states that currently award Electoral College votes on a winner-take-all basis could instead award them either district by district, as is now the case in Maine and Nebraska, or in proportion to the statewide vote totals.”
“even if the compact succeeds (so that the Electoral College is in effect “replaced”), the election system will remain highly unsatisfactory unless plurality rule—election by less than a majority—is also replaced. Why is this the case?”
“This year’s Republican and Democratic nominees differed sharply on almost every major policy issue—trade, immigration, climate change, minority rights, and health care, to name a few. But they were also viewed “unfavorably” by a majority of the public.”
“Many citizens were appalled by Donald Trump’s personality and platform yet couldn’t bring themselves to vote for Hillary Clinton for various reasons (including, in the critical last days of the election campaign, baffling announcements from the Federal Bureau of Investigation).”
“It is worth noting that nearly 7 million voters ended up voting for third-party candidates who had no chance of winning; and 42 percent of those eligible didn’t vote at all.”
“Bloomberg and Sanders chose not to run as third-party candidates in the general election; they likely thought they would have taken away votes from Clinton and handed the election to Trump.”
“Bloomberg and Sanders were deterred by the prospect of “vote-splitting”—in which the votes for a group of roughly similar candidates are divided among them, allowing a very different sort of candidate to win.”
“Plurality rule, the current method for awarding electoral votes, is highly vulnerable to splitting votes, as Bloomberg and Sanders understood.”
“Are there election methods that always (i.e., for all rankings that voters might conceivably have) give us a clear-cut winner, respect everyone’s vote, and avoid vote-splitting (or equivalent conditions)? Unfortunately, the answer is no.”
“Some sixty-five years ago, the economist Kenneth Arrow published his Impossibility Theorem, showing that no electoral method can satisfy all three requirements (although there are many rules that satisfy two out of three—for example, plurality rule respects everyone’s vote and produces a winner, but often leads to vote-splitting).”
“The natural follow-up question is whether there is an election method that satisfies these requirements more often (i.e., for a wider class of voters’ rankings) than any other. Here, fortunately, there is a clear answer: the solution is the classic method of majority rule, strongly advocated by the Marquis de Condorcet, the great eighteenth-century political thinker.”
“Instead of limiting a voter to choosing a single candidate, Condorcet proposed that voters should have the option of ranking candidates on the ballot from best to worst. The winner is the candidate who, according to the rankings, would beat each opponent in a head-to-head contest.”
“majority rule entails comparing how many voters prefer candidate A to candidate B for every pair A and B.”
“Voters opposed to Trump need not face a choice between Clinton and Bloomberg; they can rank both candidates above Trump without fear that one will cancel out the other.”
“The example shows too how majority rule may reduce polarization. A centrist like Bloomberg may not be ranked first by a large proportion of voters, but can still be elected if viewed as a good compromise.”
“Majority rule also encourages public debate about a larger group of potential candidates, bringing us closer to John Stuart Mill’s ideal of democracy as “government by discussion.””
“Is majority rule a realistic alternative to plurality rule in presidential elections? We think so. It can be adopted state legislature by state legislature; no constitutional amendment or federal legislation is needed.”
“And, unlike the consequences of replacing the Electoral College, a state suffers no loss of influence by making the change unilaterally.”
“Indeed, since majority rule is such an appealing idea, one might wonder why it isn’t already being used for presidential elections. Apart from inertia, we suspect the main reason is technological.”
“Certainly majority rule is not a perfect system, and Condorcet himself showed that there are circumstances—rare in practice—in which no candidate can beat every other candidate in a head-to-head contest (that is, Arrow’s requirement that there be a “clear-cut winner” fails). In that case a tie-breaking method would be needed, such as having a runoff between the two top candidates.”
“Trump failed to get a majority in the first seventeen of the primaries he won. But the problem, again, is vote-splitting: the anti-Trump vote was dispersed among Cruz, Rubio, Jeb Bush, John Kasich, and other candidates. This enabled Trump to win the early contests and build the momentum he needed to win the nomination.”
“Would majority rule have defeated Donald Trump, either in the primaries or in the general election? Quite probably it would have.”
“But here we want to make a more general point about presidential voting methods. Majority rule comes closer to satisfying people’s preferences than any other method, including the current one. After 224 years, perhaps it is time to change the rules of the game.”