Unfortunately, with all the media attention on the problems with counting ballots in Florida during the 2000 presidential election, the main political lesson that is coming out of that fiasco is that we need better ballots and more reliable counting techniques. While this is certainly true, this focus on ballots only serves to obscure the larger and more important political lessons that must be learned from that election.

 The most important of those lessons is that we must finally get rid of that arcane and outmoded system, the Electoral College. Right up until election day, the defenders of the Electoral College, such as George Will, assured us that the possibility of electing the person who lost the popular vote was too remote to ever worry about. But the result of that election clearly showed that this kind of democratic disaster is all too possible. And not too surprisingly, observers from around the world were scratching their heads, wondering how the leading democracy in the world could elect a leader who came in second in the polls.

 Defenders of the Electoral College were quick to pull out the same tired arguments about how it preserves federalism, or ensures some power for small states. But none of these supposed advantages, even if true, could possibly justify the election of the losing candidate -- a violation of basic democratic principles. It is time that we joined all the other major democracies of the world and elected our president by popular vote. It's really just a matter of political common sense.

 There is another, less obvious, but equally important lesson that we must learn from this election fiasco: we can no longer put up with a voting system that creates the possibility for spoilers. These are third party candidates who take enough votes away from one major party candidate to ensure the election of the other major party candidate who wouldn't have won otherwise. Spoilers are a frequent problem in the Electoral College because most states use plurality voting systems, where the candidate with the most votes wins all the electoral votes.

In this case of the 2000 presidential election, the spoiler was Ralph Nader. It is now clear that if Nader had not run in Florida, Al Gore would have easily won that state and thus the presidency. As it is, Bush took Florida and the presidency, even though the majority of people in Florida (50.4%) actually voted against him -- either for Gore or Nader. As this case illustrates, spoilers allow the minority to rule, which goes against most people’s notions of how democracy should work.

The spoiler problem actually goes far beyond presidential elections and can affect any legislative or executive election that uses plurality voting. In fact, as interest grows in third parties in the United States, the incidence of spoilers has grown as well. For example, in New Mexico the Green party has experienced increasing support. This has had the effect of weakening the election chances of some Democratic candidates and thus working to the advantage of Republicans. A typical example of this occurred in a special election held in 1997 to fill a U.S. House seat. A popular Green candidate, Carol Miller, won 17 percent of the vote and thus threw the election to the Republican candidate, who won with only 42 percent of the vote. In the absence of the Green candidate, the Democrats would have won what had been traditionally their seat. Sometimes it is Republican candidates that are hurt by third party candidates. In the 2000 elections for the U.S. House of Representatives, it appears that at least two Republican candidates owed their defeat to the presence of Libertarian candidates on the ballot. But while the potential for spoilers has clearly grown in the United States, what has not grown is public awareness that there are other voting systems that easily eliminate this problem.

Ireland and Australia both use a system called "instant runoff voting" (or IRV) that allows people to vote for third party candidates, prevents the spoiler problem, and ensures that the winning candidate has the support of the majority of the voters. Here's how IRV works: When you go into the voting booth, you are confronted with a ballot with all the candidates' names. But instead of simply placing an "X" next to your favorite candidate (or pulling a lever), you instead rank the candidates. You put a "1" next to your most preferred candidate, a "2" next to your second preference, and so on. Let's assume there are four candidates for president: Gore, Bush, Nader and Pat Buchanan. If you on the political left, you might rank Nader first and Gore second. When the ballots are counted, if a candidate has a majority of the first-place votes, he is declared the winner. But if no one has a majority of the first-choice votes, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated. The votes that had been cast for that candidate are then redistributed to their designated second choices. A second count is then immediately held -- an instant runoff -- to see if any candidate now has a majority of the votes. This process of eliminating candidates and having another instant runoff continues until one candidate receives more than 50 percent of the vote. 

If, for example, Gore received 40 percent of the vote in a state, Bush got 42 percent, Nader 15 percent and Buchanan 3 percent, Buchanan would be eliminated and his supporters' votes would be redistributed to their second choices. But there would not be enough to give Gore or Bush a victory. So then Nader would be eliminated, and his votes redistributed. If the bulk of them -- say 11 percent -- went to Gore, he would have
the support of the majority and would win the state and all of its electoral college votes. 

The advantages of IRV are obvious. Third parties could run candidates without fearing that they will act as spoilers. And their supporters could vote their conscience without worrying that they will help elect their least favored candidate.  And we would be sure that the candidate that won actually had the support of the majority of the voters. Interestingly, there are no constitutional obstacles to using this approach for presidential elections. If a particular state wanted to, it could pass legislation mandating a change to instant runoff voting for deciding who will win their electoral college votes. 

But as good as IRV is, it isn't even the best voting system for those interested in eliminating spoilers and/or supporting third-party candidates. While instant runoff voting allows you to vote for such candidates, it usually doesn't result in their election. Third-party candidates usually just don't have enough public support to eventually garner the majority of the vote that is needed to win under this system. But there is another voting system -- one that can be used in legislative elections -- that not only allows you to vote for third-party candidates but also allows them to win most of the time, even if they receive only 10 to 20 percent of the vote. That system is proportional representation, or PR -- the voting system used to elect legislators in most other Western democracies. 

There are many kinds of proportional representation voting systems, but they all share two basic differences from our traditional winner-take-all, plurality voting system. First, instead of electing legislators one at a time in small districts, PR combines these smaller districts into larger, multi-member districts in which five, 10 or more legislators are elected. The second difference is that who wins office is determined by the proportion of the vote won by each party. So if we have a 10-member district and the Democrats win 50 percent of the vote, they will get five of the 10 seats. With 30 percent, the Republicans will get three seats. And if the Greens and the Libertarians each receive 10 percent of the vote, they will each get one seat. 

If we had PR elections, not only would we not have to worry anymore about spoilers, but third parties would finally have a good chance of winning their fair share of representation in our legislatures. These smaller parties would instantly become viable alternatives to the two major parties. Voters would have much more choice at the polls, and much fewer votes would be wasted. And we would have multiparty legislatures that actually represented the true political diversity that we find in America. 

Of course, the hard part is not finding voting systems that are better than what we have now. These superior alternatives have been around for years and have been used successfully in many other democracies. The difficult part is making Americans aware of these alternatives and building an effective movement to promote these reforms. 

As with other election reforms, like term limits and campaign finance reform, it is likely to be an uphill political battle. But reformers can take solace from the fact that history is on their side. Worldwide, for the last 100 years, the trend has clearly been away from plurality elections and toward alternatives like PR. And more recently, nearly all the emerging democracies in Eastern Europe, Africa and the former Soviet Union have rejected plurality voting for some form of proportional representation. 

Perhaps most encouraging is that there is substantial support for alternative voting systems in Great Britain, the traditional home of plurality elections. Recently, the mayor of London was elected with instant runoff voting, and the new parliaments in Wales and Scotland both were elected using proportional representation. 

The movement for voting system reform is beginning to get off the ground in the United States, too. Grassroots groups in several states, including California, Washington and Illinois, have begun to promote a change to IRV and PR voting systems. The National League of Women Voters decided this summer to encourage all its local chapters to study alternative voting systems. And there is now a national organization, the Center for Voting and Democracy in Washington, D.C., dedicated to educating the public about alternative voting systems

Next to campaign finance reform, voting system reform is the most important change we can make to our dysfunctional election system. Without it, spoilers will continue to plague our elections, third-party candidates will continue to be denied a fair chance at election, and their supporters will continue to be faced with disturbing dilemmas every time they enter the voting booths.

America needn't have to tolerate the political injustices and chaos that characterized the 2000 presidential election. It is unnecessary to put up with elections where the winner is determined not by the actual vote, but by the malfunctions of the voting system itself. We simply need to acknowledge that there are serious deficiencies with our voting systems and force our political leaders take a serious look at alternative systems that are not prone to these problems. Americans deserve to use the fairest, most reliable, and most democratic voting system; but we must demand it.