When it comes to the conventions in 2008, people won’t be electing their candidates. Delegates will. The delegates are representatives of political parties and their candidates, and given how delegates split, parties can easily end up supporting people who have received less than 40% of their party’s voters.
Much of this delegate system is set up in the early stages of the system, without allowing many of the states to vote, providing a system in which a select few states very early in the process get to make crucial decisions as to who the final nominee will be. This can result in nominees choosing poor early candidates which look good on the surface, but don’t result in someone who can easily make it through to the final election.
So instead, I present a simple proposal: eliminate primaries, and eliminate the power of individual parties to choose for the American public who will be nominated.
Instead, let’s go with a fairly easy solution: instant runoff voting (1-2-3) voting.
Let’s not eliminate candidates based on early mistakes and stumbles or amount of money they’ve raised at crucial points. Instead, let’s go with as many candidates who want to run, who can afford to get their names on the ballots and, come election day, do instant runoff voting.
The process is simple:
Let’s assume that you have the following slate of candidates:
Rudy Guiliani
John Edwards
John McCain
Hillary Clinton
Mitt Romney
Barack Obama
Ron Paul
Dennis Kucinich
Fred Thompson
Duncan Hunter
Cynthia McKinney
Alan Keyes
(I probably missed someone. Please, if I missed your candidate, let it go)
So when it comes to voting, we don’t do a primary system. Instead, we do our usual voting process, but instead of going with just selecting our favorite candidate (thus risking a John McCain 23% of the vote “victory”), we instead put in our choices as follows. In my case, this would probably be:
1. John Edwards
2. Barack Obama
3. Hillary Clinton
So, on election night, the results of the 1st choices come in the following order:
1. Hillary Clinton (22%)
2. John McCain (19%)
3. Barack Obama (18%)
4. Mitt Romney (15%)
5. John Edwards
6. Ron Paul
7. Dennis Kucinich
8. etc…
Now… with no one getting over 50% of the vote, we go through an elimination process: remove any candidate with less than 15% of the vote and try again, moving 2nd and/or 3rd to the top.
This has several advantages: first, it leaves us the ability to choose less popular candidates (such as Dennis Kucinich) without feeling as though we’re throwing away our votes, because our second choice candidate can get the chance when our 1st choice doesn’t make the cut.
This also has the advantage of creating consensus candidates; for any candidate to win, s/he has to appear on the top three of a lot more people than just the simple majority winner.
There are certainly problems with IRV, but they are more technical than problematic (what percentage is the cutoff, how many rounds do we do; do we eliminate one candidate at a time, or just eliminate anyone below a certain threshold, how many choices to we get to make: 3? 4? 5?).
As things stand, however, we end up in the situation where any candidate has to pass a test not just with voters, but with party elders who can have a powerful influence on the process (especially with the superdelegate system that the Democrats have worked out under the old guard).
But imagine, though, if 50% of the country was voting Democrat but had trouble deciding between the three candidates; instead of ridiculous infighting over who our nominee would be, we’d all get to choose our sequence between the top three of our favoring without having to worry about which of our candidates would more easily beat John McCain.
I don’t know that this is a perfect solution, but it’s got to be better than what I’m seeing today.