With the Electoral College under fire from critics who believe it is not the most democratic way of electing a candidate because it does not reflect the interests of the majority of the population and is not fair in the weight of each vote, we must find a way to reform this process. I personally believe a system like the IRV, Instant-Runoff Voting, could improve our election process. With IRV, a voter would be able to rank their preferred candidates. You could rank as many or as little as you please. Then, when the first preferences are counted whoever has majority wins. If there is no majority, the candidate with the fewest first preferences is eliminated and the voters who voted for the eliminated candidate will then have their second preferences moved to their first. This process would continue until a majority is chosen. Therefore, IRV would be an upgrade from the Electoral College because it is truly a majority win, third party and independent candidates do not need to be considered “spoilers”, and it won’t just have to be Republican vs. Democrat.
With each ballot counted as one vote and a process that eliminates the least favored candidate after each round, a majority is ensured every time. There wouldn’t be another situation similar to 2000 when Bush was elected as president even though it came down to Florida, which Bush was not voted for by the majority but won anyway. Even if IRV didn’t get to the national level but became some state’s preference for elections, it would at least give an accurate representation for that state.
Relating back to the election in 2000 between Bush and Gore ultimately came down to the vote in Florida. It also came down to the third party candidate, Nader. Receiving nearly 100,000 votes, this was enough to get Bush elected as president. That’s because of those 100,000 votes it is said that the majority would have gone to Gore if Nader wasn’t a factor. With an extremely thin margin of victory for Bush, 537 more votes than Gore in the state of Florida, he would’ve most likely lost the election if some of Nader’s votes were given to Gore. This is considered the third party spoiler that does not allow an accurate winner based on majority. Gore had the overall majority in the country but because of the unfair electoral votes, lost the election. With IRV, this wouldn’t happen. If enough people marked Gore as their second preference, which would not have to be many people, Nader would have been eliminated and those votes would have gone to Gore making him the president.
The final reason I believe an IRV process would be much better than the Electoral College is third party candidates could have a chance. This is because people who prefer a third party candidate could vote for them without considering the outcome like my previous example. They could rank their candidates in the order they’d like to see win and their vote would not take away from another because it will still be the majority that wins. So, in the previous case I just explained, Gore would have won because he had majority overall but if it was Nader that a voter preferred over Gore he could vote the way he pleased without worrying that his vote would give another candidate, who they may not support, the win.
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