Quote Originally Posted by IAmKowalski
What you are describing is called Instant Runoff Election, or Preferential voting.

The way it works, is you rank your choices in order, 1st, 2nd,3rd,... That way you vote first for the candidate whose views you most support, second for your alternative preference, and etc.

If your first vote were, for instance, for a third party that winds up with a small percentage of total votes in your state then that vote is skipped and your second choice is counted instead and etc. etc. down the line.

Here's a Wikipedia link on preferential voting:

Preferential voting - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Instituting a ranked vote system in our elections would make an enormous difference in our democratic process: it would make third parties viable by creating a complete meritocracy of ideas, and it would force the main parties to discuss and debate third party ideas.
I would definitely be in favor of preferential voting. It has been tried in different places around the world, and it worked out well. It gives you a chance to vote your preference without feeling like your vote is just going to be wasted. Right now, a person might really want to vote for say a Libertarian or a Green, but they know that the party has little chance of winning so instead of "wasting" the vote, they vote for a Republican or a Democrat instead. With preferential voting you could rank your choices as #1 Libertarian, #2 Republican, etc. When the votes were counted, if no candidate had more than 50% for a clear win, they'd throw out votes for the candidates with the fewest votes and count the second rank choices for those voters instead, so if the Libertarian candidate was at the bottom, your first choice vote would get dropped, and your vote go to the Republican, your second choice. I think it would encorage more paritcipation by third parties and give a way to register your support for them. Right now people have to choose between making a statement that doesn't count for much or making a vote that counts for a candidate that is not their first choice. It sucks.

Quote Originally Posted by theforthdrive
This day in age with electronics cant we do away with the whole electoral college thing and just go on popular vote?
I wish we could do away with the Electoral College. It is an anachronism from the days when it was technically impossible to do a direct election, and it was also a way of maintaining the independence and importance of the individual states. But it has a couple of problems. One is that a candidate can actually win the popular vote and still lose the election, which puts a stain of illegitimacy on the president. Why would we have a system that would allow that to happen? How does that serve us? I don't think Bush ever really recovered from his stain of illegitimacy.

The other problem is that it means all the campaigning happens in the "battleground" states. I live in a "safe" state, so we do not get any campaigning here. We are taken for granted. Our issues get ignored. I'd like to see the candidates travel to other states outside the battleground and talk about issues other than what appeals to those battleground voters. Unfortunately, it would require a major Constitutional ammendment, and many states would not want to give up their inflated importance in the election.