Voting Systems Shape Elections: Getting beyond Two Parties

Your weekly excerpt from one of my books. This week: "The Hidden History of the War on Voting"

The Republican War against your right to vote. Over the next few months the entire book will be here, new chapters posted every Sunday, for subscribers to read at no cost. If you want to get a physical book to mark up or share with others, just click on the picture above, visit your local bookstore, or check your favorite online seller.

Voting Systems Shape Elections: Getting beyond Two Parties

In United States elections, even if we abolished the Electoral College (or functionally abolished it), we would still likely have partisan gridlock. This is because the United States operates under a “first past the post, winner takes all” electoral system. This almost always produces a two-party system, where even basic governmental functions like passing a budget become partisan gauntlets.

It’s as close to a law in political science as there is—Duverger’s law, which says simply that systems that use first-past-the-post elections will end up with two parties, either because smaller parties lose support and “die” until only two remain or because smaller parties converge into larger parties until only two remain.34

Even though there are more than 30 nationally registered political parties in the United States, only the Republican and Democratic parties ever have a real showing, with secondary parties rarely garnering more than 5 percent of the popular vote, except in historically exceptional circumstances.

In first-past-the-post voting, a voter casts one vote per position, and whoever gets the most votes for that position wins. It has the advantage of being simple. But it also creates a system in which two parties will always dominate.

Combined with the partisan primary system, it also often forces voters into choosing the “least bad” candidate who is least offensive to everyone, instead of choosing the candidate whom a voter most strongly supports based on his or her positions on pertinent issues.

A ranked-choice, or instant-runoff, voting system addresses this. Ranked-choice voting also makes it impossible for a candidate to win without winning the support of a majority of voters.

The way it works is simple: instead of casting a single vote for a single candidate, each voter gets to rank the candidates, listing his or her first choice, second choice, etc. In the first round, only the voters’ first choices are counted. If one candidate wins a simple majority in the first round, that’s that.

If no one wins outright in the first round, then the candidates who finish last are eliminated. When those candidates are eliminated in the second round, their voters still get a voice, because their second choices are counted. This cycle repeats until there are only two candidates left, at which point the candidate with the most votes (which would then be a majority) wins.

Ranked-choice voting reduces the power of money in politics, because so much of it is used for negative campaigning, which becomes less effective in such a system. It also creates an elected political field that more accurately reflects the electorate, by giving voters a wider array of choices.

Ranked-choice voting is already in place in cities and for certain elections in places around the country, and it’s gaining popularity quickly.

While ranked-choice voting would be most transformative in federal and state elections, it could have a tremendous impact on our politics if the Democratic and Republican parties adopted ranked-choice voting for primaries, particularly for the presidential primaries. In fact, Democrats in Alaska and Hawaii did so in 2020.