Time Travel

Hold on, folks, we are going for a short ride through recent American history, to the presidential elections of 2000 and 1992, years when third party candidates nearly sunk our electoral system.

Let’s travel back to the year 2000 AD, when George W Bush won the presidency from Al Gore, by an Electoral College margin of 5 votes, 271 to 266, where the election was decided in Florida not by a measly 534 votes out of nearly 6 million, but by the Supreme Court’s five Republican justices. Many remember that Ralph Nader, running as a Green Party candidate, won 97,000 votes in Florida, a wee bit more than the margin of Bush’s victory there; and Democrats everywhere have faulted him ever since for spoiling the election for Al Gore, whom they supposed would have received Nader’s votes had he not run. What is less known is that Nader won more votes in eight states (with 72 Electoral College votes) than what separated Bush and Gore. Another way to say this is that 72 Electoral College votes went to a candidate who had not won 50% of those states’ votes.

Ranked Choice Voting

While the biggest problem in our democracy is the undue influence of big money in elections and in legislation, the second biggest problem is the two-party system.  This electoral reality is nowhere forced upon us, it is not mentioned in the Constitution; it is just there.

“I don’t like my choices; I like neither the Republican nor the Democrat, but I do like the Libertarian / Green party candidate.  But if I vote for him, I will be wasting my vote as he has no chance to win.”

When we go to choose a candidate for a particular elected office, we are often faced with three or four or even five choices.  But we know that we are “wasting our vote” if we vote for a candidate of a minor party, not a Republican or a Democrat.  Even worse than that is our sense that our third-party vote may contribute to the loss of the major party candidate whom we dislike less than the other major party candidate.  So, we reluctantly vote for the major party candidate (“the lesser of two evils”) who is not our first choice, as we dare not help elect the other major party candidate.