One of the most common sentiments you hear every election is that most people don’t get to vote for someone they like, but rather are forced to pick between the lesser of two evils.

Why do we accept a system that leads us to feel that we’re voting for the person who is going to do the least bad instead of the most good? Our current plurality voting system, where everyone selects a single preference and then the person with the most votes wins, is viewed negatively by election scientists, for several reasons:



It’s vulnerable to a spoiler effect, where a third-party candidate can take just enough votes away from a candidate to cause them to lose, even if that candidate would be preferred to the eventual winner. It can cause strategic voting, where voters don’t vote for their favorite but rather the person they like who is most likely to win. Especially with a party-based primary system, it leads to partisanship, as centrist candidates, despite having wider support, lose out to candidates who appeal to the fringes of each party.



There are many alternative voting systems that are superior to plurality voting. We should move to a ranked-choice/single transferable vote voting system, a system that has recently been implemented in Maine and is being explored by many other localities.

In ranked-choice voting, each voter ranks their top three candidates, from 1 to 3. After this is complete, every voter’s first choice is tallied. If one candidate received over 50% of the vote, they win the election. If no candidate hit the majority threshold, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated. Then, everyone who listed that eliminated candidate as their first choice has their second choice considered, a process which continues until someone breaks 50%.

The benefits of this type of system include: