Your presidential candidate: Hot or not? looks at various voting schemes, because the scheme we use in the U.S. is not the only way to vote:
Voting experts — academics who study what’s known as “social choice theory” — have long complained that the counting system the United States uses for most state and federal elections, called plurality voting, is probably the worst electoral system one can design. Arrow’s theorem shows that no method is perfect, but ours is particularly susceptible to the “spoiler effect.” The plurality vote awards the election to the candidate who gets the largest share of the vote, regardless of whether that share suggests any meaningful support in the population. If there are more than three people on the ballot, the candidates who share the most popular positions will split the vote, increasing the electability of the candidate whom the majority finds most objectionable.Poundstone writes that in at least five of the 45 presidential elections that the United States has held since 1828 (the first year that presidents were picked through a popular vote), the plurality vote caused the second most popular candidate to win. The most recent such race, of course, was in 2000, when Nader siphoned off enough votes from Al Gore in Florida to hand the state, and thus the nation, to Bush (Nader won 97,000 votes there; Bush won by 537). Other spoiled elections occurred in 1844, 1848, 1884 and 1912. The 1992 race, starring Ross Perot, was also probably spoiled for George H.W. Bush, in Bill Clinton’s favor. With New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg considering a run this year, we might see another billionaire spoil the chances of a front-runner; Bloomberg, unlike Perot, would probably split votes with a Democrat, improving a Republican candidate’s prospects.
Considering this history of spoiled elections, Poundstone calculates at least “an 11 percent rate of catastrophic failure” for the plurality vote. “Were the plurality vote a car or an airliner, it would be recognized for what it is — a defective consumer product, unsafe at any speed,” he writes.
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The spoiler effect is just the most pernicious of the many shortcomings of our current voting system. Another problem is strategic voting: Because we’re all hyper-aware of the power of spoilers, plurality voting pushes us to vote not the way we feel, but the way we expect others will vote. There were many voters in 2000 who ranked Nader first, Gore second and Bush third. But according to polls, a huge percentage of these people didn’t vote for their first choice — Nader — but, instead, for their second, Gore, because Nader had no chance of winning, and thus a vote for him was actually a vote for Bush. So Nader, like other third-party candidates, got short-changed. Though he may have appealed to a large slice of the electorate, his results underreported his popularity.
As the article title implies, one of the many alternate voting schemes is the one used on Hot or Not:
The method is called “range voting,” and it works in the same way you rate movies on Netflix, books on Amazon, or people on Hot or Not. When you go to vote, you give each candidate on the ballot a rating on a 10- or 100-point scale. Maybe you say Bush is 1 out of 10, Nader is 8, Gore is 5. The winner is the candidate who has the highest average score. Range voting has a number of advantages over how we vote today: Like IRV, it prevents spoilers, but it also obeys monotonocity (a winner can’t lose by getting more votes), it’s quite impervious to strategic voting (it’s hard to game the system by giving false ratings to your candidate or his opponents), and it’s “expressive” — you get to say not only that you like one candidate more than another, but by how much you like him.Range voting is the pet project of Warren Smith, a mathematician who runs a very informative Web site on the subject. Unfortunately, it hasn’t progressed much beyond the Web. No major public institution uses range voting to elect officials.