Only 12% of eligible voters bothered to vote in our recent Bloomington election and voter turnout is at historical lows across the nation.
It’s no wonder that most people don’t bother to go to the polls on election day. The contests are not competitive and for all the talk about doing your duty as a citizen, voters know that their vote really doesn’t matter.
Our winner-take-all voting system is a major reason for this. The1 mathematics of this system
stifles all but two parties, making it very difficult for independent voices to be heard. Combined
with gerrymandering2, this makes most elections a lock for one party or the other.
But it doesn’t have to be like this. Although most people don’t realize it, there are other, more
equitable voting systems out there.3
Ranked choice systems, such as instant-runoff voting4 and the single transferable vote5, allow
voters to rank their choices without harming the chances of more popular candidates. It can
even eliminate the need for primary elections by letting candidates from all parties run in the
general election without the fear of splitting the vote for a particular party.
These systems are used around the world by governments, colleges and universities, as well as by non-governmental organizations and corporations.6 In fact, Indiana first used instant-runoff voting in 19127 and another famous college town, Cambridge, MA8, has been using the single transferable vote since 1941 with higher voter turnouts as a result9.
Elections should not be an us-versus-them issue, but our de facto use of the winner-take-all
system has made us a nation of reds versus blues with no room for any colors in-between. It’s
hard to move forward when your only choice is left or right.
If we really want to fix the problems of low voter turnout, uncompetitive races, and
disproportional representation, we’ll need to change the voting system itself. It can be done. It
just takes honest people willing to make a change for the better.
Notes
1 https://youtu.be/s7tWHJfhiyo
2 https://youtu.be/Mky11UJb9AY
3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_system#Compliance_of_selected_systems_.28table.29
4 https://youtu.be/3Y3jE3B8HsE
5 https://youtu.be/l8XOZJkozfI
6 https://fairvote.org/where-rcv-is-used-2
8 https://www.cambridgema.gov/election
9 https://fairvote.org/preference-voting-and-voter-turnout-the-case-of-cambridge-ma
