Ralph Nader's candidacy has ignited a fierce national debate among those on the political left. By now the battle lines are familiar. On the one side are those who believe that Nader is the only candidate promoting a truly progressive political agenda, and so we should vote for him to send a message to Washington. On the other side are those who fear that Nader could act as a “spoiler” candidate, taking away enough votes from Al Gore in key states to give the election to George Bush. So should progressives vote their conscience and risk disaster, or abandon their principles and support Gore? It is a real, and very frustrating, political dilemma for many voters.

The current debate over Nader is simply a replay of the discussion that takes place every time a serious third party or independent candidate runs for president. We heard the same arguments about John Anderson in 1980 and Ross Perot in 1992. And just as with Perot, some people have even criticized Nader for running in the first place and placing his supporters in such an awkward political position.

However, our anger and frustration would be better directed, not at the candidates, but at the voting system that creates this aggravating political dilemma. This problem is a product of our continued reliance on an outmoded and unfair voting system: plurality voting. We all know how plurality voting works: the candidate with the most votes (the plurality) wins the election. And if there are only two candidates running, this system works well enough. But if there are three or more, then plurality voting starts to misfire.
A classic example is a race for the House of Representatives that took place in New Mexico in 1998. The Republican candidate got 46 percent of the vote, the Democrat got 43 percent, and a Green candidate received 11 percent. In this situation, plurality voting allowed the Green candidate to act as a spoiler and the Republican was able to win what had been a traditionally Democratic seat. To make matters worse, plurality voting allowed the winner to take office without the support of the majority of voters. Most people actually voted against the Republican candidate—hardly a ringing mandate for the conservative policies he would pursue in office.

Many Americans have come to see such problems as a lamentable but inevitable part of elections. But that need not be the case. There are better voting systems that don't suffer from these problems. Some other democracies, such as Ireland and Australia, use a voting system called “instant runoff voting” or IRV. This system eliminates the spoiler problem and ensures that the winning candidate is supported by the majority of voters. IRV allows people to vote their conscience without fearing that they will help elect the candidate they hate the most.

Here's how instant runoff voting works: When you go into the voting booth, you are confronted with a ballot with all the candidate's 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 that there are four candidates for President: Gore, Bush, Nader, and Buchanan. As a progressive, you would 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 least 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 candidates now have a majority of the votes. This process of eliminating candidates and having another instant runoff continues until one candidate receives over 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 redistributed to their second choice. 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 so win the state and all of its electoral college votes.
The advantages of IRV for third party candidates and their supporters are obvious. Third parties can run candidates without fearing that they will act as spoilers. And their supporters can vote their conscience without worrying that they will help elect the worst candidate. Politically speaking, third parties could have their cake and eat it too. And 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 third party candidates. While IRV 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 only receive 10 percent to 20 percent of the vote. That system is proportional representation (PR)—the voting system used to elect legislators in most other Western democracies.

About Douglas J. Amy Douglas J. Amy, MHC professor of politics and chair of complex organizations, is a leading expert on electoral voting systems, including proportional representation, redistricting issues in the United States, and the plight of third party candidacies. Behind the Ballot Box: A Citizen's Guide to Voting Systems, his latest book, spells out the political advantages and disadvantages associated with the voting systems used in Western democracies. Published this month, Behind the Ballot Box also provides the analytical tools needed to compare and contrast the choices among these systems. Amy is also the author of Real Choices, New Voices: The Case for Proportional Representation Elections in the United States. For those interested in learning more about proportional representation, Amy has established the Proportional Representation Library at www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/polit/damy/ prlib.htm.

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 in larger multimember districts in which five, ten, 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 ten-member district and the Democrats win 50 percent of the vote, they will get five of the ten 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, third parties would finally have a good chance of winning their fair share of representation. 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.

Clearly, proportional representation is the political promised land for third parties, and so it is not surprising that an increasingnumber of them, including the Greens, have now made PR part of their agenda for reforming the election system.
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 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 IRV, and the new parliaments in Wales and Scotland were both elected using proportional representation.

The movement for voting system reform is beginning to get off the ground in the United States. 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 their local chapters to study alternative voting systems. And there is now a national organization dedicated to educating the public about alternative voting systems, the Center for Voting and Democracy in Washington, D.C.

Next to campaign finance reform, voting system reform is the most important change we can make to our dysfunctional election system. Without it, 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.

This essay originally appeared in the Valley Advocate October 12.