Presidential election highlights flaws in U.S. voting system
November 15, 2000
[NORTON, Mass.]-The controversy over how to fairly count Floridians' votes for president misses the main flaws in how the U.S. conducts elections, according to mathematician Tommy Ratliff, who studies voting systems used in politics, sports rankings, science and other endeavors.
"What hasn't really been talked about is that no matter who is declared the winner of the presidential contest, a majority of the nation's citizens will have voted for someone else," says Ratliff, who teaches at Wheaton College in Norton, Mass. "People are talking about chads in paper ballots and about getting rid of our Electoral College system, but none of that addresses the fundamental problem of fairness in voting.
"If voters are only allowed to select their top choice -- as they are under our system -- and can't indicate a ranking of other preferences then you lose a lot of important information," says Ratliff. "It's actually a horrible way to vote."
"When there are more than two candidates, you really should allow every voter to rank every candidate. Even under that kind of system it is still not clear what is the best way to proceed," Ratliff explains. "Right now, neither Bush nor Gore have 50 percent of the vote. Electing a candidate by a plurality is a bad way to run things since the winner can be the candidate who is the last-place choice of a majority of the electorate."
One well-known variation on ranking all candidates for a particular office is known as the "instant run-off" system. Under this method, says Ratliff, all voters indicate their first and second choice candidates for each office. In cases where no candidate wins a majority, the candidate with the fewest first-place votes is eliminated and the top choice on each ballot among the remaining candidates is counted.
Ratliff, who earned his Ph.D. in mathematics from Northwestern University (also home at that time to well-known voting theorist Don Saari) has published scholarly articles on voting theory and is active in the national scholarly society devoted to the field, The Public Choice Society. He admits that the search for complete fairness in elections may be somewhat quixotic.
"The most famous theorem in this field, Arrow's Impossibility theorem, states that there is exactly only one completely fair voting system and that's a dictatorship. Every other system, no matter what it is, fails at least one completely reasonable test for fairness."