Electoral Reform

Our current constitution employs a very familiar, time honored and ancient method of voting, in which we vote for the one candidate of our choice.

But even though it's familiar and time honored, it has a few disadvantages. Let's look at an example.

Let's say that three candidates, Bill, George, and Ross, are all running for the same office. Ross happens to be your favorite of the three, but if it comes down to it, you'd much rather see George elected than Bill. Unfortunately though, Ross isn't polling very well --- he has 20% of the population supporting him, whereas the other two have about 40% each.

Now on election day, what do you do? Do you vote for Ross, your first choice, because he's still got a shot even if it's unlikely? Or do you vote for George, your second choice, because he's neck and neck with Bill and a few votes like yours could make the difference? If you vote for Ross, will you feel like you're throwing your vote away?

On the other hand, you also have to ask yourself what happened when other Ross supporters were polled before the election; what were thinking when they were asked who they would vote for? Were they thinking essentially along the same lines as you? Did they give the name of their second choice? Maybe Ross is really more popular than the polls say --- maybe if voters like you ignore the polls and stick to your your first choice, he'll win.

A better way

Voters shouldn't have to play guessing games and choose between voting for the lesser of two evils or "throwing their vote away" on a third party candidate who's unlikely to win. America wasn't settled upon the idea of settling for second best, or yielding to the most entrenched establishment. But come every election, that's exactly what we do. If you think about it, there's a reason almost every election is won by either a Democrat or a Republican.

It's 2008. We've split the atom, landed men on the moon, and sequenced the human genome. We've solved far more complicated, mathematically intensive problems. It's time to update our method of voting.

On election day, instead of being asked to vote for a single candidate, voters should simply be asked to rank their choice of candidates in their order of preference. So in the example above, with a couple of extra write in candidates, your ballot would simply look like this:

The best part of this is that it would work for any number of candidates, even if by fluke or happenstance hundreds (or an even more ridiculous number) of candidates were running. A voter would never be in the position of having to rank hundreds of candidates, however --- only those for whom he or she has a preference over all the others. However, she could vote for as many candidates as she desired, enjoying a virtual guarantee that voting a preference for one candidate over another will not undermine the second candidate in a contest with others, should the race come down to it. A voter could even afford to vote for write-in candidates without diminishing the power of their vote for any of the more likely candidates.

Granted, the mathematics of how to tally up the results are not quite as simple as casting the vote itself. But it's far from landing a man on the lunar surface.

But expecting professional politicians --- Democrats and Republicans --- to support a change that would undercut their duopoly? Now that is lunacy.

We the people will have to make that change. That's why we need a constitutional convention.

And while we're at it, there are now known ways to allow any voter to verify --- for sure --- that their vote has been counted correctly, while still preserving the secrecy of the vote. We might as well implement one of them --- the integrity of the vote is important enough.