What Would Different Voting Methods Have Meant for the Outcome of the 2016 Election?
In the article that I found, the Vox journalist discusses different voting methods that would have possibly changed the outcome of the 2016 election. Given the discrepancies between the winner of the electoral vote, Donald Trump, and the winner of the popular vote, Hillary Clinton, it is interesting to consider which candidate other methods would have chosen. Just to be clear, this post is not political, merely an analysis of the outcomes that different methods of voting, a topic covered in class, would have yielded. For example, the Borda count method, according to the article, would have actually picked Gary Johnson, the Libertarian candidate, with Trump, Clinton and then Stein ranked after him. This is particularly interesting considering that Johnson was a third party candidate, and did not win a single state either in popular or electoral votes., and considering that his highest polling nationally was 13% according to CNN. This situation shows the downside of Borda Count voting, and although there is not one correct answer as to which candidate should have won, it is safe to say that the majority of the country did not want Gary Johnson as president.
While this method was not discussed in class, I would like to discuss the instant runoff voting method, which is used in Australia, Ireland, and San Francisco. This method chooses a winner by taking out the worst performing candidate in each round and distributing that candidate’s votes to the other candidates, using the rankings that the voters provided. Eliminating one candidate would distribute the votes of each person who voted for that candidate to their second place candidate. This happens for multiple rounds until a single candidate has a majority of the votes. Using this system, Clinton would have won by a slight margin over Trump.
There are several other methods discussed in the article. With some claiming a Trump victory and others claiming a Clinton victory. I highly encourage you to read the article- it is very interesting and a good assessment of different voting methods.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/11/25/13733322/instant-runoff-ranked-voting-2016