Perhaps the two most common complaints against the American voting system single out the Electoral College and the two-party system. The former, of course, came under particular fire in 2000 after the controversial presidential victory of George Bush over Al Gore, in which Bush won the election despite losing the popular vote; similar situations, however, had already occurred in 1824, 1876 and 1888. It is impossible to know who would have really won if the popular vote had been implemented, because different voting schemes yield different voter behaviors, but the debate has been one of the longest-running in the history of American politics. Despite that it has raged since the founding of America, it does not seem like it will be resolved any time soon. However, stuck in our national solipsism as we tend to get, we often forget that many other voting systems exist, some of which could help us foster a climate for the opinions of multiple parties and a purer representative democracy.

It is important to look at the effects of the Electoral College to understand why it is flawed. Because each state gets a guaranteed number of votes (three, minimum) despite population figures, votes in smaller states are worth more per voter than votes in more populous states. Certainly this is not conducive to a democratic outcome. Because smaller states get a disproportionate number of votes, they also get a similarly disproportionate share of power. Why should this be the case?

The Electoral College is only one example of the United States government’s tendency to subsidize less-populous states at the expense of the most populated ones. This trend is not unique to the Electoral College – we all pay a flat rate for first-class postage, but the cost of sending a letter from New York City to Los Angeles is only a few cents, while sending a letter to the middle of Alaska can cost several dollars. Postage is one thing, but do we want these kinds of subsidies when we are deciding how to run our elections? Should someone in Wyoming have more say in the government than someone from California, as is currently the de facto situation? Though states’ rights could be violated through EC reform, the current system is fundamentally unfair to the individual citizen.

The other major complaint – the existence of only two serious parties – is actually the result of our voting system. In the United States, we have what is known as a “first past the post” or “winner takes all” system. Everyone casts a single vote, and whoever gets the most votes is the winner. There is a principle in political science known as Duveger’s Law which states that a plurality voting system like ours will move in the long-term toward two polarized parties. There are a few counter-examples today, but this has proven to be a very reliable long-term trend.

While this principle may not be intuitive, a quick thought experiment will show why this bifurcation occurs. Suppose there are three parties in a fictional country, the Liberal Party, the Conservative Party, and the Green Party. If there are 1,000 voters in this country, suppose 450 would vote for the Conservatives, 350 would vote for the Liberals, and 200 would vote for the Greens. If every voter voted for his true preference, then the Conservatives would win. Now, if the Greens and the Liberals have the closest political platforms, it is in the Greens’ interest to shift their votes to the Liberal Party, if for no other reason than to keep the Conservatives out of power. In plurality voting systems, “third parties” generally only arise at the expense of another major party. In the United States, for example, the Republican Party replaced the Whig Party after the Civil War.

The solution to the two-party system, if it is indeed considered a problem, is to change the way we vote for our public officials. Other countries, as well as theoretical studies, provide viable alternatives. While many foreign countries use proportional representation, in which the number of seats a party gets is equal to its proportion of the popular votes, we can still maintain our current direct-election structure while changing how we vote. In our current system, we choose one candidate, and that is our only vote. Alternative systems would allow us to rank candidates according to our preferences, and then combine those preferences to pick a winner.

One of the most popular of these methods is runoff voting. This involves multiple rounds of plurality voting, after which one or more candidates are eliminated, until only one remains. This can be prohibitively expensive in practice, so many countries only have a few rounds, making it very similar to regular plurality voting. A popular variation of this idea is called instant-runoff voting, in which a voter only submits one ballot, but his candidates are ranked preferentially. That way, results can be obtained from a single election, with several rounds and very fast and accurate results. Student elections here at Dartmouth use such a procedure. Runoff voting is an advantage over plurality voting because it allows a voter to express his true preferences without worrying about a “wasted vote” if his first choice does not win.

Unfortunately, runoff voting is not immune to “tactical” voting, which is voting in some way other than by picking a sincere favorite, usually to the end of sabotaging one’s opposition’s chances. The most serious problem with runoff voting involves a strategy known as “push over.” If you want your candidate to win, you want him to be facing the weakest opponent possible. Thus it can be in your interest to rank a candidate other than your favorite first in order to push another, more threatening candidate out of the running early. This happened in the 2002 presidential election in France, where the extreme right-winger Jean-Marie Le Pen won out over the center-left Lionel Jospin early, to face Jacques Chirac in the final round of voting. Le Pen lost by an enormous margin in the final round, because the votes he got in the first round reflected strategic voters trying to edge out any serious competition for Chirac.

There are a few other systems in place that vary in effectiveness. Dartmouth trustee elections use a system of “approval” voting, in which voters cast ballots for whom they would tolerate winning, and check any number of boxes. While voting for one’s preferred candidate cannot lower his chances of winning (unlike in runoff voting), often voters will “bullet vote” and cast only one vote for their favorite candidate, rather than their true preferences for a plethora of candidates. If everyone does this, it has the same result as plurality voting, with the same outcomes. Approval voting can be considered a specific instance of “range” voting, wherein one ranks every candidate on some scale, the scale being zero or one. But range voting also tends toward bullet voting (all candidates being ranked at zero, and one at the maximum), making it unappealing.

Some of the best theoretical voting systems are the Condorcet methods. The Condorcet criterion states that if a candidate is preferred over all other candidates in pairwise matches, that candidate must be the winner. None of the previously-discussed methods necessarily elect the Condorcet winner, even though they may satisfy other voting criteria. In any Condorcet method, voters rank their preferences, and then each candidate is compared against the others. Whoever beats every other candidate in individual pairs wins the election.

Condorcet methods come under fire, because as a result of the “voting paradox” it is possible for every individual voter to have transitive preferences, but the collective preference cannot be. For instance, when all the votes are tallied, John Doe might beat Jane Doe, who in turn beats Joe Blow, but Joe Blow beats John Doe. These cyclical preferences mean that there is never a strict, decisive Condorcet winner.

Instead, each individual Condorcet method has different ways to resolve such circular ambiguities. For instance, the Ranked Pairs method ranks the victories from strongest to weakest, and then locks them in one by one. As soon as the method hits an ambiguity, the pair does not lock in, leaving only one winner. Similarly, the Schulze method drops the weakest wins until a winner emerges, usually producing the same results. Minimax picks the candidate with the weakest pairwise defeat.

The Condorcet method, like every other voting system, still suffers from tactical voting to some extent. The strategy in Condorcet voting is to “bury” a candidate who you think is a strong contender to beat your favorite, putting him very low on your ranking of preferences even if you think he is the second-best. This allows the strong candidate to lose in some pairwise contests, potentially knocking him out of the race.

No preferential voting system is completely perfect, as the Nobel laureate Kenneth Arrow proved in his Ph.D. thesis. However, our current plurality voting enforces the two-party system, and promotes two polarized candidates and few realistic alternatives, while the Electoral College devalues certain individual votes in favor of others. Under a different system of voting and elections, the United States could begin to see true third parties emerge in the political system. This would not only hold Republicans and Democrats to a more competitive standard, but it would also allow more diversity of opinion in the leadership of our nation. Our political leaders should represent our real preferences for the government, not those presented to us by the entrenched parties.