A constant refrain during this American presidential election season has been a call for the end of “politics as usual” — the idea that the system is broken is the only thing that Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump supporters seem to agree on.
The field, which started with six Democratic contenders and an incredible 17 Republicans, will soon be narrowed to two names for the November election.
This isn’t a preordained norm everywhere, though. If America were a European country, the candidates wouldn’t be trying to shoehorn themselves into two pre-formed moulds. Bernie Sanders would surely be the Socialist candidate, and Hillary Clinton the Democratic one. John Kasich would be the Republican standard bearer, Ted Cruz would represent the Tea Party and Donald Trump would be the head of his own, independent party, the Trump Party, spelled out in large gold letters. And they’d all have a viable chance of winning.
This more egalitarian alternative won’t work in the United States — thanks to America’s specific political history. When the US constitution was being written in the late 1780s, a number of proposals were put forward for selecting the president, including a lottery. Some stakeholders advocated having the chief executive chosen either by the members of congress or by individual state legislatures.
These ideas were rejected for fear that it would concentrate too much electoral power in the hands of too few. But the alternate idea — the direct election of the president by the people — was also rejected as being too unwieldy and to prevent voters from only choosing candidates from their home states or who had national name recognition.
The compromise position was to form an electoral college where the number of electors for each state would be equal to the size of its congressional delegation. Each elector was given two votes to cast; the candidate receiving the most votes would become president and the runner-up would become vice-president.
George Washington was elected unanimously, so the first real presidential election contest took place in 1796 between John Adams and former secretary of state Thomas Jefferson. The mostly northern Federalists aligned with Adams against Jefferson’s anti-Federalists, centred in the south, who became known as Democratic-Republicans. When Jefferson lost, the Constitution mandated he become vice-president, despite the fact that Adams had his own running mate, Thomas Pickney.
Four years later, Jefferson and Adams faced off again. This time, the Democratic-Republicans prevailed. But there was another problem: Jefferson and his running mate, Aaron Burr, each garnered an equal number of electoral votes. This threw the contest to the House of Representatives, which deadlocked for 35 ballots before finally picking Jefferson over Burr.
Realising this system was untenable, Congress quickly ratified the Twelfth Amendment, which codified how separate votes for the president and vice president would be cast. Elections proceeded smoothly until 1824, when four Democratic-Republicans vied for the presidency. Though Andrew Jackson won both the popular vote and the largest share of the Electoral College, no candidate had a majority, and again the House of Representatives had to intervene. Supporters of third-place candidate Henry Clay transferred their votes to second-place candidate John Quincy Adams, making Adams president and Clay the secretary of state.
This “corrupt bargain” was seen as Congress intentionally interfering with the will of the people, and since that time, the biggest advantage of America’s two-party system has been its ability to thwart the House of Representatives from having the power to pick the president. (In 1876, corruption within the electoral college and fraudulent voting led to the election’s winner, Samuel J. Tilden, being denied the presidency in favour of Rutherford B Hayes, but that’s a unique case.)
Today, with congressional approval ratings hovering around 14 per cent, it’s little wonder that no one fancies a repeat of 1824, which is what would likely happen if there were had multiparty contests. Imagine a Trump v Cruz v Kasich v Hillary v Sanders election in November. Since nearly every state uses majority voting for allocating electors, it’s easy to envision America’s 538 electoral votes being carved up such that no candidate would reach a majority. That would push the decision to the current Republican-controlled House.
There are solutions to this problem that are more fair than the current US system. Though some have advocated eliminating the electoral college altogether, that would require an unlikely constitutional overhaul. However, since the Constitution doesn’t specify the mechanics of how states choose members of the electoral college, altering how Americans vote in November wouldn’t be as hard to do.
As I’ve advocated before, ranked choice voting is one workable solution, in that it provides voters with the opportunity to vote for more than one candidate, and a simple mechanism for winnowing multiple candidates down to one winner. If America was more like Europe, where parliamentary politics allow minority candidates in a five-way race to form coalition governments, perhaps the Democrats and Republicans would pull together to forge a bipartisan ruling coalition. But if the Obama years have taught us anything, it’s that such a scenario seems highly unlikely, making ranked choice voting all the more appealing.
Let’s take the hypothetical November match-up between our five candidates in a state like New York. Hillary wins 33 per cent, Sanders 25 per cent, Trump 25 per cent, Kasich 10 per cent, and Cruz 3 per cent. (I’m making these numbers up, but they don’t seem implausible.)
In an instant runoff, Cruz, with the least votes, is eliminated first. His supporters’ second-choice candidates then get all his votes. For simplicity’s sake, let’s argue that every Cruz voter’s second choice was Trump, who gets bumped up to 28 per cent of the vote. Then Kasich is eliminated. Let’s say half his votes go to Trump (now at 33 per cent) and half to Hillary (now at 38 per cent). That means Sanders is the next to go. Even if just 13 per cent of Sanders voters picked Clinton as their second choice, she’s now won the state.
Would people still be upset if we used this method? This is American electoral politics, so of course they would. But this system would not only give people more choice, it would allow candidates like the Green Party’s Jill Stein to compete better on a national stage, and it would allow voters to pick their preferred candidate in good conscience, rather than be forced to vote along party lines for someone who someone doesn’t necessarily represent their views.
And if the same methods were also applied to elections for the House of Representatives, maybe we’d stop being so scared of the real possibility that some future presidential contest would end up in hands of Congress.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
James Nevius is author of multiple books about New York City history, most recently Footprints in New York: Tracing the Lives of Four Centuries of New Yorkers.
