Primary 2020: A Voting System Experiment

Our election system is broken! Plurality-Take-All voting Does Not Work when you have more than one candidate on the ballot. Remember when Ralph Nader “stole” enough votes from Al Gore so that we ended up with George W. Bush? Remember when H. Ross Perot gave us Bill Clinton?

“Fine,” some of you might say. “Just stick to our Two-Party System.”

Even that doesn’t work. Both parties have more than two candidates to choose between during the primaries. As I write this, the Democrats are considering over 20.

There is a better way. Scratch that. There are several better ways: several different voting systems that allow voters to better express their preferences when there are more than two candidates to consider. Better options include: Approval Voting, Instant Runoff, Condorcet Voting, Range Voting, and Star Voting.

But which of these are the best?

To help answer this question, I have created a new poll: a simulation of the primary phase of the 2020 U.S. Presidential election. In it, you get to experience voting using all of the above systems, and we will get to see how the voting system affects the results after enough people participate.

I have made primary simulations for the Democratic, Libertarian, and Republican primaries. To make the Republican primary simulation interesting, I have added candidates from the 2016 contest. (Otherwise, we would only have Donald Trump and Bill Weld. With two contestants, Plurality Voting works just fine.)

Please participate, and then tell your friends, acquaintances, students, teachers, etc. Our current system produces winners who make half the country extremely unhappy every four years. A better system would give us uniters instead of dividers.

A better system would also let us safely choose between more than two parties. We might see some reasonable third parties arise: greenish conservatism, pro life welfare statism, budget realism, etc.

After taking the poll, feel free to comment below. Which system do you prefer? What features should I add? Are there any bugs?