Our voting body has a lot of inertia. Somehow, the Democrats and the Republicans got established as the de facto primary parties. The notion that a third-party vote is “wasted” keeps these two parties in power; no party can get votes until there is sufficient confidence that they can win, but of course no party will get that kind of confidence if nobody votes for them. A classic catch 22. I refuse to be a part of this problem and so I vote for third parties, but the thing that gets me about this problem is that it actually does have a sort of logic to it. On some level, it does make some sense to restrict yourself to the two primary parties. And that is the fundamental problem with first-past-the-post (plurality) voting — that depending on how you look at it, it can make sense to vote for a candidate who is not your ideal choice. (I am talking mainly about the presidential election.)
There are a lot of proposed fixes to this problem, namely alternative voting methods. Condorcet, approval, and instant-runoff voting are all way better than our current system. Plurality voting is arguably the worst voting method, and how our system has worked for so long using it is beyond me. The nice thing about our electoral system is that it does not require any nation-wide initiative to implement these systems — states are free to adopt a better system and use it to determine how their electoral votes get spent. A nation-wide initiative would probably never get enough steam to be seriously considered, whereas it’s entirely conceivable that more progressive states could make the switch in the next few years.
The only problem that I see with this (and in my opinion it is a rather large problem) is that no matter how the states determine how they spend their electoral votes, the electoral vote is itself a plurality vote, and it will suffer from the same problems as the state votes. For example: Let’s say Massachusetts decides to use instant-runoff voting. During the next presidential election, people in Massachusetts feel safe in voting for their favorite third party candidate knowing that if he doesn’t take the state, their vote will default to the Democratic candidate. With this new voter confidence, that third party candidate gets enough votes and takes Massachusetts — hooray! In the electoral vote however, the Republican candidate wins barely enough votes and becomes president. Everyone in Massachusetts bitterly suffers under four years of Republican rule, knowing in the back of their minds that if they had voted Democrat, their electoral votes would have swung the election and they would have a Democratic president instead of a Republican one. They will not make this mistake in the next election. Essentially, while changing the state-wide voting system is definitely a step in the right direction, it is only a piece of the ideal solution.
One fix to the previous situation is to use fusion voting, where multiple parties can support the same candidate. In this system, third parties can gain popular confidence without “hurting” the primary parties until hopefully they gain enough confidence that they could win an election. Another benefit to this system is that it provides additional information to your vote — you can vote for the same candidate in multiple ways, and the party that you choose to go through lets the candidate know what you care about.
Another potential fix to the electoral problem that I thought of in a sleepless stupor last night, which as far as I know isn’t being considered at all, is to change the voting method for electoral votes. If plurality voting is a bad system, why use it anywhere? A seemingly quick fix would be to change the electoral college to use an approval voting system. If the Democrats take Massachusetts, let them cast their full 12 electoral votes toward the Democratic candidate. But if 10% of the state voted for the Green party, why not let them cast another 1 vote for the Green candidate? One consideration is whether a state would want to cast votes for both primary parties. Certainly, if swing states did this, they would no longer be as important in the election, and these states would have no incentive to do so, as they would receive less attention during campaigns. The elimination of “swing states” would be arguably good for the country as a whole, but even if each state only cast votes for one primary party and then as many third parties as they wanted, that would be much better than the current system.
Alternatively, states could use a ranking system such as condorcet voting. Whichever party gets the most votes, the state ranks that candidate first. The party with the second most votes gets ranked second, etc. This method would perhaps require less judgement on behalf of the electoral body, and would likely eliminate the question of how to vote for both of the primary parties.
If we enacted all these three changes: state voting method, electoral voting method, and fusion voting, I think our system would be pretty damn good. Luckily, these changes all together are only really necessary for the presidential election, since the electoral college problem isn’t present for the senate/house elections, for example — and simply implementing a state-wide condorcet vote would likely be an acceptable fix for that. As always, feedback/criticism is encouraged.