Vote to Change the System as you Vote to Save our Democracy

Americans are unhappy with our government. Only ~12-15% approve of the job that Congress is doing.

As political polarization widens while politics becomes an increasing part of our identity, animosity grows. This has led to bipartisanship and compromise becoming negative words. Obstruct the enemy at all costs and work towards a supermajority to force your agenda through unchallenged. The current House of Representatives is the least productive in a century.

This is a turnoff for most of our nation, with Pew Research finding 35% of Americans identifying as independent and Gallup finding 41%. And yet, as most of America finds itself unhappy with our government, many still refuse to vote to change it.

For the 2020 election, one-third of all eligible voters stayed home, a record-high turnout for our country. The 2022 midterms saw a ~50% turnout.

Part of the issue is having only two political parties. They are failing to connect with large portions of the nation. Culture wars and the breakdown of political discourse are another. But the biggest problem is sitting right before us every election day: the plurality voting system.

America was established without political parties in mind. Even George Washington warned of the increasing consolidation of political groups in his farewell address back in 1796:

“However combinations or Associations of the above description may now & then answer popular ends, they are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the Power of the People, & to usurp for themselves the reins of Government; destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.”

In the end, the quest for power won out. Through the centuries, various political factions formed, combined, died out, were reborn, swapped positions, and eventually coalesced into the Democratic and Republican parties we know today.

Despite having third parties on the presidential ballot every election, none have made a dent or changed the course of politics. How much can the average American know about these parties or their candidates?

The most successful third-party presidential candidate in modern times was Ross Perot, who received ~19% of the popular vote in 1992. Perot received zero electoral college votes when he ran against Bill Clinton and George Bush. The popular vote total Perot received was high enough for his party to qualify for federal funding for the next presidential election, where Perot ran again and performed worse, receiving only ~8% of the vote. His political party never ended up impacting American politics, and no independent candidate has been able to reproduce his success since.

No member of the House of Representatives is an independent or third-party politician. Three Senators, Bernie Sanders, Angus King, and Kyrsten Sinema, call themselves independent but also caucus with the Democrats. When Sanders ran for President, he ran as a Democrat. 

One central claim about why independents and third-party candidates struggle to gain ground is that the two main parties have built the system to keep other parties out. This is true, but Ross Perot showed that receiving federal funding wasn’t enough of a solution.

How we vote is the most significant barrier to more political parties and independent voices. The plurality voting system relegates these candidates to little more than the possibility of being a spoiler, which is a serious issue when one of the primary presidential candidates has extreme views of dismantling our democratic processes.

Plurality voting is a poor system, even though its premise seems solid initially. The candidate who gets the most votes wins. But let’s look at how that quickly fails voters.

If four candidates are on the ballot, a candidate could win the election with just 26% of the vote, meaning that 74% of the electorate walk away without the representation they wanted to see. This is where the spoiler effect comes into play. 

A simple example is if one Republican and three Democrats were on that ballot. It may be an area that is 70% Democratic, but the voters are split on who to choose, so their votes are spread across three candidates, whereas all of the Republican votes were combined together on a single candidate. If that Republican gets more votes than any other candidate, they now represent a very liberal population while governing with conservative ideals.

This is why the two parties have primaries: to prevent this situation. However, third parties can still create this spoiler effect, especially in close races. If the race is tight, a third-party candidate doesn’t need huge support to affect the outcome, just enough to swing the vote from one candidate to the other.

In the 2016 presidential election in Michigan, Trump and Clinton were separated by only 11,700 votes, while over 242,000 votes went to other candidates. Similar results occurred in five states that year, accounting for 86 electoral college votes. All of those states went to Trump, who won the election by a margin of 77 electoral college votes.

While we can’t say that Clinton would have definitely won if third-party candidates hadn’t been on the ballots. We can say that they significantly impacted the outcome while doing nothing to elevate their political parties. This is an unfortunate way for a Democracy to operate.

Polling shows that fewer people identify with either party than with no party. Yet, the majority of the voting population is faced with a dilemma. If they vote for an independent or third-party candidate, the person they vote for can't win, but a candidate they genuinely do not want to be President can. If they vote for a main-party candidate to keep the other candidate out of office, then independent candidates never grow their support to become future candidates who can win.

Fortunately, the solution to this problem is quite simple. We need to change how we vote.

Many voting systems work better than plurality voting and ensure that the candidate with the majority support wins. My favorite system is Ranked Choice Voting, or Instant Runoff Voting, as it is typically called outside of the United States.

This system is straightforward, guarantees that the winner has the most support, and has the added benefit of creating a system where no primary elections are needed, nor are any later runoff elections required. Vote once and end up with the best candidate.

The way RCV works is that when filling out the ballot you don’t choose just one candidate, you rank your candidates in order of preference. If there are ten candidates, you can rank each candidate 1-10 or choose not to rank a specific candidate.

When the votes are tallied, if a candidate receives over 50% of the vote, they win. In that scenario, nothing is different from plurality voting. 

If no candidate reaches that threshold, then the candidate with the fewest votes is removed from the ballot. Everyone who voted for that candidate has their vote moved to their second-choice candidate. This is why it is called Instant Runoff Voting, as the runoff happens automatically without voters having to return to the polls. The votes are tallied again, and this is repeated until a candidate passes 50% support. 

If you don’t rank all the candidates and the candidates you did rank are eliminated, your ballot is removed from the total count.

Going back to my example earlier in the article, the one Republican candidate initially has the most votes compared to the three Democratic candidates in the heavily Democratic district. However, the majority of the votes are split across the Democratic candidates.

With RCV, the lowest Democrat is eliminated, and the votes are redistributed. A Democrat has likely already moved into the first-place spot or even reached the threshold for victory. The majority will be represented by a candidate they feel best aligns with their interests.

It isn’t hard to switch a state from plurality voting to RCV. A few states already have. All it requires is a ballot initiative to let the voters decide to switch their voting system.

As more states switch to RCV or other voting systems that remove the spoiler effect, independent and third-party candidates will grow in support and eventually begin appearing in Congress. They may even win the Presidency.

But until then, as far as Presidential elections are concerned, every voter must decide which of the two main party candidates they would rather have leading the country because one of the two will win. 

Here is another critical portion of Washington’s farewell address that is as poignant as ever:

“The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge natural to party dissention, which in different ages & countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders & miseries, which result, gradually incline the minds of men to seek security & repose in the absolute power of an Individual: and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of Public Liberty.”

We live in an age where this has come to fruition. There is one party supporting a candidate who is arguing for complete presidential immunity from any and all crimes, who attempted to steal a presidential election, and who told an insurrectionist mob to go to our nation’s Capitol and fight like hell. This candidate is supported by a group that wrote out their grand plans in a document known as Project 2025, where they discuss undermining our democratic processes and have members who believe a President should have king-like authority over the nation.

Vote to change our system to empower other voices, but also vote for a President who will ensure that you still have that vote in the future.

https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/05-20-02-0440-0002