Voting the American Way

There’s a reason our system of elections has endured for so long.

Every few years, somebody notices that America’s voting system is almost crudely ancient: the person with the most votes wins. This is typically called “first past the post” voting, and it means that candidates can win a crowded primary with a simple plurality. This simplicity strikes reformers as barbaric, and they blame it for the ills of polarization and gridlock. Reformers and modernizers instead want more parties that are more ideologically sorted, more candidates per district, and more choices of political identity. The mechanism they typically propose is a system where everyone’s second- or third-choice preference counts.

But the American system is good precisely because everyone’s first-choice counts, and electoral losers know exactly why they lost.

Most Americans aren’t familiar with the jargon of voting reform, and I beg your patience with an exposition of the terms and acronyms. In the argot of political science, the American system is a “winner take all” model with single-member districts, or SMDs. That is, when I go to vote in my Congressional district’s election this year, I cast one vote for one candidate, and the candidate with the most votes wins. Two Southern states, Georgia and Louisiana, use a two-round or runoff system. If no single candidate gets an overall majority in the first round, the top two candidates move to a second round and the winner of that contest wins the seat.

Vote reformers are often attracted to “ranked-choice voting” (RCV) systems in which voters rank their preferences among the candidates. RCV can be done a number of ways. There is the “instant-runoff voting” or single-winner RCV, in which the last-place candidate is eliminated and the ballots where that candidate was the top choice are then redistributed to other candidates who were ranked second on the ballot. This process continues until one candidate is deemed to have a majority.

Alaska, Maine, and New York City’s party primaries use this system. However, Alaska’s is a two-round system. The first round is a nonpartisan primary in which the top four vote-getters move on to the second round, which is determined by RCV. California and Washington use “jungle primaries” wherein all candidates regardless of party run in one primary election and the top two advance to the general.

Then there is STV, or single transferable vote. Advocates of this system celebrate that once adopted, your vote continues to move until it helps elect someone. These systems are usually done in electoral districts that select multiple candidates. How does it work? Hold your breath (or don’t): A voter ranks each candidate 1, 2, 3, 4 and often 5, 6, 7, 8. There is usually a minimum quota for the district, roughly the total number of votes divided by the number of seats plus one. So if 40,000 people vote in a four-seat constituency, the quota is roughly 8,001. Anyone who reaches that number of votes is elected. So, if a candidate reaches well over the quota, the votes beyond what they needed to win a seat are deemed surplus and transferred to each voter’s second choice at a reduced fractional value.

If nobody clears the new quota (stick with me), the last-place candidate is eliminated and their ballots move to the next preference. The counting goes round after round sorting surpluses and eliminating last-place candidates. So, if you backed a winner who didn’t need your vote, your vote moves to your second choice. If you backed someone who had no chance with your first choice, your second gets your vote. This can continue down to your fourth, fifth, or twenty-fourth choice. In this system, a strong party might run multiple candidates in a single district and propagandize the voters in that district on a “correct” ranking of them. This is the system used in Ireland to elect members to Dáil Éireann, their lower house, and to the European Parliament. I will henceforth refer to it as “the Irish system.”

There are other systems—cumulative voting, limited voting, a closed system known as Sainte-Laguë whereby parties propose a list of candidates and then voters vote for the party list—but RCV and STV carry by far the most support among American vote reformers.

American reformers typically fall into one of three camps. The first are the ranked-choicers, including groups like FairVote, which was founded in 1992 and is led by CEO Meredith Sumpter, with Harvard philosopher Danielle Allen sitting on its board. A looser ecosystem of state-level groups like Rank the Vote are joined to this movement. Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin has introduced the Ranked Choice Voting Act, which would require RCV for all Congressional elections by 2030. There is also Rep. Don Beyer’s Fair Representation Act, which proposes the Irish system—STV and multi-member districts for the House of Representatives.

The second camp includes groups looking to reform the primary system rather than general elections. There is Open Primaries, led by Reform Party activist John Opdyke. There is United America, which is backed by Katheryn Murdoch and funds state ballot initiatives that would institute nonpartisan primaries with ranked-choice general elections. Their proof of concept is Alaska’s “top-four” system, which may get revoked by voters this year. Katherine Gehl, former president and CEO of her family-owned company, Gehl Foods, supports a system similar to Alaska’s but with five candidates in the general election.

A third group could be called “the proportionalists.” These include political scientist Lee Drutman, author of Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop, who wants a multiparty democracy and is associated with the group Fix Our House. There are groups like the Sightline Institute, which laid the intellectual case for Portland, Oregon’s experiment with the Irish STV system. Then there is More Equitable Democracy, led by George Cheung, which argues for proportional representation on the grounds of racial representation. Proportionalists are usually the most enthusiastic about multimember districts.

The argument against the American voting system is usually a negative case against the two-party system that our first past the post (FPTP) elections tend to produce, which explains why veterans of the Reform and Green parties rank among the leaders of electoral reform activist groups. Their critique is grounded in some history. For example, Founding Father John Adams, in a 1789 letter, said he dreaded a division of the republic into two great parties.

The FPTP critique holds that voting for a third party can end up helping the party you hate the most. Think of a Florida-based Green Party member who voted for Ralph Nader in the 2000 presidential election. That voter, aiming to support a Left-wing party focused on environmental regulation, was widely believed to have preferred Democrat Al Gore to Republican George W. Bush if the choice were a binary. At best, reformers argue that FPTP “throws that vote away.” At worst, they argue that in a winner-take-all system, Nader voters wound up helping Bush, the candidate they presumably disliked the most.

Reform advocates also argue that in an FPTP system, a third party that commands roughly 15% of the vote across the country could win almost no seats in the legislature. Thus, those voters wouldn’t have their preferences represented.

Regarding the primary system, reformers argue that the most ideologically extreme voters will back extreme candidates in primaries, and that gerrymandering then protects those candidates in the general. These voters change the behavior of even moderate incumbents because, fearing a primary challenge, they will sort toward their party’s ideological hard edge, refuse to compromise, and play up to cable news.

But vote reformers have been losing the argument for some time. Nineteen states have banned ranked-choice voting, including six who banned it in 2025 alone. Since 2020, voters in seven states have rejected RCV ballot measures. An effort to repeal ranked-choice voting in Alaska in 2024 (just four years after its adoption) lost by only 737 votes statewide. Another attempt at repeal is happening this year, with President Donald Trump’s backing.

Careful readers will have already detected that the case against America’s voting system runs in two different, and contrary, directions. On the one hand, vote reformers complain that the current American system creates too much homogenization and moderation, arguing that in another system it would be safer to vote for less mainstream parties outside the narrow confines of the two-party duopoly. On the other hand, they abhor the primary system because it allows kooks and exotic political ideas to influence the major parties and pull them apart. Not enough diversity and representation of the fringes, too much consolidation. And then, too much diversity, too powerful on the fringes.

This contradiction showcases that the American voting system actually performs all the functions that reformers seek. If insurgent factions can win primaries, then a Green Party member or Democratic Socialist doesn’t need a third or fourth party. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez can beat Joe Crowley. Bernie Sanders can move Hillary Clinton to the Left on several issues, doing exactly what would be done by a smaller socialist party nipping at the heels of a center-Left formation in the Dutch system.

Vote reformers tend to promote systems that create their own set of problems. The first hazard is churn and instability, as a system with several parties can create unstable or deadlocked governments. Israel has had five in four years. Italy used to be notorious for its unstable governments. The Netherlands has held four national elections since 2017. It took 224 days to form a government following the 2017 elections, and 299 after the election in 2021. Reform advocates hold that this is a function of the parliamentary system, and that America’s fixed terms in Congress would prevent it. But the variable that seems to matter is FPTP.

Britain has a parliamentary system too, and FPTP usually hands one party a working majority. Its parties have churned through leaders, but the governments have held. In 2010 a hung Parliament was elected, but the resulting coalition served its full term. Only when the 2017 election failed to produce a majority did Britain get something like Israeli churn: a minority government propped up by Northern Ireland’s DUP, a Commons deadlocked over Brexit, and another election within two and a half years. The combination of America’s FPTP and fixed terms prevents even that.

The other problem is cartelization and over-homogenization. This is a particularly acute problem with the Irish system that the Fair Representation Act would impose on our Congress. The two largest parties, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, were born out of Ireland’s civil war. Their original divisions over constitutional issues and patronage networks were passionate, but the ideological battles that birthed them have largely faded. Ireland also has Labour, which is the oldest party but has spent the last century as a junior partner at best, and modern Sinn Féin, which began its life as the political arm of the Provisional IRA, a host of independent candidacies or even notable local families. Strangely, this menagerie of party options and the many independent candidates that run in Ireland produces less ideological choice.

The duopoly charge laid against America is far more accurate in Ireland’s STV system, where Fianna Fail and Fine Gael began as fierce rivals but have become grand coalition partners. Voters who chose one to avoid the other now get both, and they trade the premier office of Taoiseach like a timeshare, splitting up the term between different party leaders. Although it is arguable that Ireland’s slightly marginal geopolitical position and European Union membership takes many contentious issues out of the realm of national politics, the STV system and multi-candidate system ends up producing conformism. Even Sinn Féin, a party born of violent revolutionary terror campaigns in Northern Ireland, has converged with the FF-FG duopoly on all the consensus issues: Ireland’s status in the EU, immigration, liberalizing referendums on social issues.

Popular referendums in Ireland provide an incredible piece of evidence that STV systems can ward off rather than invite popular input into politics. In 2024, the Irish government proposed a double-barrelled question about removing “woman in the home” language from the constitutional definition of the family. Every single major party backed a Yes-Yes vote. But voters rejected the proposed amendments, and delivered two No votes on the question, 67.7% to 32.3%, and 73.9% to 26.1%. The socially conservative and constitutionally traditionalist section of the Irish electorate has routinely revealed itself in these referenda, sometimes achieving a third or more of the raw votes. But not a single major party provides significant socially conservative representation.

Proportional vote systems often mean that parties and candidates winning the most votes can be entirely excluded from power by a coalition of the less-popular. Instant runoff and transfer systems can actually move your vote in such a way that it helps elect a candidate you truly deplored—the very problem American reformers aim to fix.

There are some utterly strange outcomes. In 2019, Ireland South’s European Parliament election in Ireland produced ballot papers two feet long, with 23 candidates vying for five seats. Eighteen rounds of counting were needed for transfers and eliminations. The Irish mostly love the counting drama, but that lightness about the result is related to the ideological conformity the system produces, along with Ireland’s lower-stakes geopolitics, in which many policies are effectively outsourced to the EU.

The common thread behind American vote reformers is that they privilege a system that allows clearer political identity expression, while undervaluing the function of negotiation before elections and legibility and legitimacy for the results afterward.

The American system includes negotiation between the smaller factions and the mainstream in the primaries, before the decisive general election, whereas parliamentary systems and proportional representation schemes defer negotiation until afterward—leaving it to people who already have a guaranteed seat and income from achieving office.

Because third parties rarely win, every faction in America has to fight its way into one or both of the two big parties. Much of that bargaining happens in public. The 2016 primary fight allowed Donald Trump to represent Republican voters who no longer agreed with their leaders on the Iraq war, immigration, or trade. He made the contest into a debate, and he won. In Germany, that kind of dissent is walled off with “electoral firewalls,” grand coalitions and other forms of cartelization whereby political incumbents wall themselves off from the input a democracy wants to give them.

The American system tells us who won on election night, or close to it. The candidate with the most votes wins. There’s no need to interpret the mandate of second-, third-, or fourth-place ranks, no need to wait while someone’s fifth preference is transferred elsewhere at fractional values, and no need for parties to try to communicate a ranking strategy to voters.

In short, the American system of voting produces legitimacy. Legitimacy is good not just for the winners but also for the losers who can navigate the results and adjust. It’s that legitimacy and legibility that explains why the American system is old; it is because it is enduring. We don’t need to re-found our government every few generations like France or Italy. If Alaskans vote next month against retaining their ranked-choice experiment, they will be returning to an American system that has outlasted all the alternatives for good reason.