Now is the Time for Preferential Voting

In U.S. presidential elections, the candidate with the majority of electoral college votes wins. States assign their electoral college votes based on the popular vote in that state.

One challenge with this election scheme, is organizing the process so that a candidate can achieve this majority requirement.

Currently, we do this by having our political parties choose nominees. If a candidate can’t win a nomination from major party, the logic goes, they are unlike to win in the electoral college either.

So long as there are only two nominees competing for electoral college votes, one of them is bound to walk away with a majority.

This election cycle has revealed the problems with this system. Presidential candidates have always begun their campaigns by appealing first to their party base during the primaries, and then later switched their focus to appeal to a broader audience.

In this cycle, more than ever, a significant number of Americans are showing a lack of confidence in the party nominations. Donald Trump will be the republican party nominee, even though he is clearly not qualified to be president. As Colbert points out, “The last president to have never served in elected office was Eisenhower”

Trump’s immature policy suggestions: “build a wall”, “block Muslim immigration”, and silly campaign values: “political correctness is destroying America”, may be easy to relate to but don’t solve any real problems. It’s the kind of ideas you’d expect from a racist uncle in private, not from a presidential candidate who’s taken time to develop a serious platform.

The popularity of Trump has shown us America’s dissatisfaction with politics as usual, which is everything that Hilary Clinton represents.

The third choice is Bernie Sanders. Among the democratic base, he lost to Hilary Clinton. But the primary process makes the margins seem a lot larger than they were.

With preferential voting, you can choose both a first choice and a second choice for president(or more). If no candidate gets a majority of first choice votes, you eliminate the candidate with the least first choice votes and the second choice votes on all those ballots to break the tie.

The one good part of the electoral college is it could seamlessly allow us to transition to a preferential voting system. Because electorates cast the votes representing their state’s choice, we only need to change the way these electorates cast their vote to follow the preferential voting process.

I was skeptical of preferential voting at first. I thought it would make things too complex and merely change the process, not necessarily lead to better outcomes. Our leaders are accountable to the political process even if it is imperfect, I reasoned.

This election has taught me otherwise.