Pros and Cons of Different Voting Structures
After an incredibly frustrating election season, there are many Americans in search of a perfect voting system that seems impossible to find. Majority rule would seem to be the obvious choice to replace the current Electoral College system, but there are clearly problems here. First of all, neither candidate officially received the majority in this election because the presence of 3rd party candidates and write-ins made Clinton end with 48% and Trump with 47.2% (both well below the 50% required). Another possibility would be to have a Borda Count, except currently people in the US election can only vote for one president; there isn’t a way of ranking who we would prefer i.e. (1) Clinton (2) Johnson (3) Stein (4) Trump etc. However, even if we could create a voting system like that, we have a very high probability of electing a president who was very few people’s top choice. This would happen in a situation where the majority of Trump supporters put Trump as first choice and Clinton as last (and vice versa for Clinton supporters), opening a huge door for a 3rd party candidates to gain a lot of second and third place votes and ultimately win the election.
This article discusses some of the pros and cons of the current system that the US uses, but there isn’t much sense in being overly critical of the Electoral College since it is highly unlikely that 2/3 of Congress would vote to change it (and it seems that the pros outweigh the cons in a lot of the cases). The main fault of the Electoral College discussed here is that it gives too much power to “swing states” and allows the presidential election to be decided by a handful of states. This is basically stating that if you live in historically blue (NY, CA, DC) or red (WV, LA, MS) states, your vote hardly matters because of how many people are guaranteed to vote in that manner. What I think of as the largest benefit of this system of electing president is that it guarantees certainty to the outcome of the presidential election. What this means is that if it were just up to popular vote, particularly close elections could be stuck in a state of constant recounting or demands for run-off elections. Regardless of people’s thoughts about what America should do moving forward, there will be proponents and opponents to each argument and it is almost certain that January 20th will be one for the textbooks.
Link: http://www.procon.org/headline.php?headlineID=005330