Forums / Discussion / Serious Debate

Let's face it: America's voting system was decided 240 years ago by a bunch of old white dudes who had to smoke weed to keep themselves sane against fighting the largest world power of the time. It's not great. It is especially disheartening it you are one of the 46% of Texan voters who apparently gets no say in the electoral college. And that's not even mentioning that power was handed to a small group of people to vote because there was no way for the public to know everything we are now forced to know about candidates in time for the election.

So how do we fix it? One simple way is to implement Rank-Choice Voting, where, as the title implies, you don't just vote for one person, you list who you'd rather see. The lowest gets eliminated, and you continue from there, moving all the people who voted for the now-eliminated candidate to their second-most voted. Wash rinse repeat until you get a winner.

Maine has already switched to this for all elections, and NYC is planning on following next year. This would seem to be more ideal, as if your prominent candidate doesn't win, at least the next guy on your list is likely to win. It's still barely better than Winner Take All, the current method, but it is better.

Another would be to redistribute the electoral college, which is partially going to happen anyway because of the census. In addition, maybe it is a bad idea to have only the most popular get the entire state's vote. Instead, the EC votes should be distributed close to the actual percentages in the state. There are two ways to do this: look at the EC votes as a whole and find the "best-fit", or go through each vote at a time, appointing to the most underrepresented party.

As an example of the latter, let's take the generic state of Jefferson. It has 5 electoral college votes, and its people vote 48% Republican, 46% Democratic, 2% Libertarian, and 4% others in a mixed bag. Let's appoint the votes. The first obviously goes to the Republicans, the second to the Democrats, but the third goes to the Libertarians, because the two major parties are actually over-represented, and Libertarian is the largest party with no votes. The fourth and fifth votes then go to Republicans and Democrats again. Now Jefferson is split 40-40-20. It's not the true 48-46-2, but it seems to me to be better than 100-0-0. I understand that Nebraska and Maine already appoint their votes this way, but I feel like it should be nationwide. If this was implemented, more people would feel like their vote does matter, and thus be more likely to vote. In addition, third parties get more representation as they are almost guaranteed one vote.

Any thoughts?

I'm all for just straight up abolishing the EC, but I recognize that's not exactly likely to happen in the next 20 years. I think your percentage-distribution would at least alleviate some of the problems, however.

If we aren’t getting rid of the ec than maine and nebraska’s way should be how we use it
and we need ranked choice more than anything else

Ranked choice is the last thing this country needs. It comes pre-baked with center-squeeze because moderate candidates will get lower rankings, and thus get kicked out early, compared to winged candidates. The downsides of introducing a voting system that favors partisanship to a country that has been experiencing increasing political polarization over the course of decades should be self-evident.

What?
all we ever get are moderate canidates, trump was the first one sonce reagan to do anything but toe the line, and even then the only thing he did differently was be unprofessional and rile up the crazies

I would personally like to see more districts like Nebraska and Maine, was talking with a friend at work, and our state (Ohio), could be split into five districts, with each being worth 3, with a extra 3 going to the overall popular vote in the state