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A voter shows off his 'I Voted!' sticker after voting in the Florida primary on Tuesday.

(Getty Images)

By Matt West

The Oregonian/OregonLive ran an article titled "New voting method could be on way for Benton County" (Aug. 9), describing how the county is looking to institute ranked-choice voting for its elections.

Currently, a majority of United States elections are run with what is known as a "first-past-the-post" system, wherein the candidate with the most votes wins. While this system may seem logical and reasonable, it creates problems. For example, if there are more than two candidates in any given election, a candidate can win with less than 50 percent of the vote; President Bill Clinton won the 1992 election with 43 percent.

This system invariably leads to a two-party system in which people vote strategically instead of passionately to avoid what is known as the "spoiler effect." One only has to look to the 2000 election between George W. Bush, then-Vice President Al Gore and Ralph Nader to see the contention third-party candidates can elicit.

Ranked-choice voting works differently. Instead of a simple plurality, a candidate needs to have a true majority -- over 50 percent -- to win. Ranked-choice voting allows this by letting voters rank their candidates in order of preference. If no candidate wins an outright majority after the first tally, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated from the election, and the tally occurs again. If this eliminated candidate was a voter's first choice, in the second round the voter's second-choice candidate would get their vote instead. This cycle continues until one candidate reaches 50 percent or more, ensuring that the victor has the support of a majority of voters.

The current election cycle calls out for a consideration of ranked-choice voting. The nominees for president of both major parties face significant disapproval ratings, and it seems that voters are driven mostly by choosing against candidates instead of for them.

Even during the primary elections, we saw issues arise from our "first-past-the-post," winner-take-all election system. During the Republican primaries, owing in part to the large number of candidates, there were multiple instances of candidates winning the full number of states' delegates with a vote-getting percentage below 50 percent. Consider the early contest in South Carolina, where Trump won with 32 percent of the vote, yet received all, or 100 percent, of the delegates. Gov. John Kasich and Sen. Ted Cruz would strategically drop out of certain states, attempting to create a brokered convention.

Owing in part to the hefty disapproval ratings of both Trump and Hillary Clinton, there is significant interest in third-party candidates in the current election cycle, and Libertarians may well gather the 15 percent support required to participate in the presidential debates. But if this happens, we may see another presidential election decided by less than 50 percent of the voting public.

It is time we update our election process. Luckily, this change does not need to take place at the federal level. The management of elections is generally left to the state and local governments, so this is something that Oregonians can do on their own.

The bipartisan group FairVote provides information on this topic, and it is worth visiting their website. Currently, FairVote is backing the ranked-choice voting measure in Benton County and is supporting a statewide ranked-choice voting ballot initiative in Maine.

While it's too late to get ranked-choice voting on the Oregonian ballot for 2016, now is the perfect time to start working towards future elections.

Let's start voting for whom we really want.

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Matt West lives in Portland.