A better electoral system for the US presidency

Instant-Runoff Voting is the way to go

Harris versus Trump

Americans go to the polls on Tuesday November 5th to elect their president (along with other posts). As I write, there's a 52% probability that Donald Trump will win, according to Manifold:

This means there's a 48% probability that Kamala Harris will win.

But there's a 100% probability that the winner will act more in the interests of the ruling class than of ordinary people. How can that be? Surely if America's a democracy, that ensures the winners of elections will do what the people want? The answer of course, is that America isn't a democracy.

There are lots of reasons why America isn't a democracy -- the legacy media being biased, candidates needing large amounts of money to win elections and are thus beholden to donors, social media platforms being biased and giving posts greater or lesser visibility depending on whether they tend to help one candidate or the other. But probably the greatest reason is the voting systems themselves.

The Electoral College

The US President is elected by an electoral college. To explain why this is bad, first we have to explain what it does.

To simplify slightly, the USA is split up into 50 states. Each state has a number of votes in the electoral college, roughly proportional to its population, but with small-population states being over-represented. There are a total of 538 electoral college votes, with each state getting an integer between 3 (for the smallest states) and 54 for the largest (California).

Voters vote by state. For each state all the electoral college votes for that state go to the one candidate that got the most votes.

Then the electoral college meets and votes. if one candidate gets more than half of the total votes (i.e. 270) they win and become president. If not, it goes to a the House of Representatives, who must choose the president out of the 3 candidates getting the most electoral college votes.

The electoral college system is bad for two reasons.

Firstly each state's electoral college votes all go to the same candidate, so that's First past the Post (FPTP) within the state. Then the electoral college votes by FPTP to elect the president. FPTP is a very bad voting system for reasons I have explained. Bu5t this system is worse because it's FPTP squared.

National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC)

Because the electoral college means the candidate who got the most votes might not win, some people have proposed a National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.

The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact seeks to change how the US President is elected. Specifically, it aims to replace the electoral college with a nationwide FPTP election.

This is both very stupid and very smart. It's stupid because it seeks to replace the electoral college (an extremely shitty voting system) with FPTP (which is merely a very shitty voting system). But it's smart because it's a clever hack on the US constitution: it seeks to replace the voting system for president, without getting a constitutional amendment (which would be very hard to do).

A better system

So if NPVIC is a bad idea, what would be a better system to replace the electoral college with? There are lots of ways to elect one winner in an election that're better than FPTP, but one of the most popular in the USA is Instant-Runoff Voting (IRV) which is used e.g. in Alaska.

Because the USA already uses it, and it's a fairly decent system, fixing the spoiler problem, I suggest IRV be used for US presidential elections, and the mechanism for getting IRV to be used could be the National Instant-Runoff Voting Interstate Compact (NIRVIC), which also has the advantage that unlike "NPVIC" it is pronouncable.

How it would work

There are 2 phases, a primary phase and a secondary phase.

The Primary Phase

The purpose of the primary phase is to select candidates who go forward to the secondary phase. If there is a sitting 1st-term president who wants to run for re-election, they automatically go through to the secondary phase.

The primary phase would be run on a per-state basis. Over the summer before the November election, each state would hold a primary election. About four states hold the their primary on a Sunday, so over 13 consecutive Sundays, all states will have held theirs. The order should be chosen randomly so states take turns to go first.

Each state runs a single primary for candidates of all parties. In all states the criteria for participating in that state's primary is the same: the candidate must pay $1000. This ensures that states cannot impose onerous restrictions on participating in elections.

One potential drawback of making it easy for potential candidates to get on the ballot is that doing so means that you don't deter frivolous joke candidates, similar to the UK's Lord Buckethead and Count Binface.

Lord Buckethead stood against then Prime Minister Theresa May in her Maidenhead constituency in 2017:

Count Binface stood against then Prime Minister Boris Johnson in 2019:

But getting back to NIRVIC, each voter gets one vote. The candidate with the most votes is the winner of that state's primary.

The total votes for each candidate over all the primaries is counted, the N candidates with the most votes overall go on to the secondary, as do all candidates that won at least 2 state primaries. A good value for N would be 6, to ensure there are a decent number of candidates, but it should be at least 4.

The Secondary Phase

The Secondary Phase is the general election in November, for all states that're part of the NIRVIC. This would contain all the candidates who come through from the primary phase (at least 6), plus possibly the sitting president.

Every voter gets one vote, And their vote allows them to make as many of the candidates they like in order of preference. The vote is then counted as an IRV election, where the candidate with the least votes is eliminated, and their votes redirected, until one candidate has over half the vote.

If any candidate gets more than half the votes, they win. They then become the NIRVIC states' winner of the presidential election, and all electoral collage votes in all NIRVIC states go to that candidate. This means that once a large number of states support NIRVIC it is likely that the NIRVIC-states' winner will win overall, making it in the other states' interest for them to join NIRVIC too.

How to get this

One way to get this would be a constitutional amendment. But that would be hard to achieve. So it's better to use a solution like NPVIC. Looking at the NPVIC, it is triggered when states with over half the electoral votes support it.

I think NIRVIC could be done differently -- it could be triggered when at least 3 states support it. Once it is in use, people will see it being used, and how it gives voters more choice and this will increase demand for it to be taken up in the other states.

As well as NIRVIC having a provision for IRV in presidential elections, it could also mandate that all states supporting it use it for all their other elections electing one winner (as Alaska does). It is likely that people who support IRV for presidential elections would also support it for other elections, and once IRV is widely used, then for elections that elect more than one winner it is likely that many people will want to use STV since it is the natural way to extend IRV for more than one winner, and already used in many English-speaking countries.

How will the USA benefit from this?

In two ways. Firstly by presidential elections being more democratic, that is they are more likely to choose a candidate liked by more of the electorate.

Secondly, by elections being less divisive. In the present US system, with party primaries a candidate has to appeal to extremist voters who vote in primary elections. This means the winners of primary elections are often divisive and extremist, whereas all-party primaries will elect candidates for the next stage that between them reflect what a large part of the electorate wants.

Glossary

I'll explain some terms here:

First Past the Post or FPTP is a voting system were every voter gets one vote and the candidate with the most votes wins. Afficionados of voting systems universally consider it bad. I've written about it here.

Instant-Runoff Voting (IRV) is like FPTP in that each voter gets one vote. The difference is that in IRV the voter's vote is transferrable between candidates, so if the voter's first choice is eliminated, their vote counts for their 2nd choice, etc. I've written about it here.

Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) is a name Americans use for IRV. I don't like the name because there are lots of voting systems that allow voters to rank candidates (such as Condorcet systems or Borda Count), but these systems aren't IRV.

Proportional Ranked Choice Voting (P-RCV) is an extension of RCV/IRV to elect more than one candidate. Outside the USA it is more widely known as Single Transferable Vote (STV), because each voter gets one vote, which is transferable between candidates. STV is commonly used in the English speaking world, for example in the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Australia, Malta, New Zealand and parts of the USA.