How To Give Third Parties A Chance

When electing the president of our country, we have two choices: democrat or republican. Technically, we could vote for a third party, but most people won't. People are afraid to vote for third parties because they know it's a wasted vote. It's completely unrealistic that a third party candidate could actually win. However, even with the system like it is now, a third party candidate can still get enough votes to cause problems. Since the 2000 election, lots of democrats have complained about Ralph Nader. Because people preferred his platforms to that of Al Gore, they voted for Nader, but most of those who voted for Nader would have strongly preferred Gore over Bush. If our party system wasn't so two sided, we might actually have a surplus, and more polar bears too. The way it is, third parties create the possibility that the most popular of the two "real" candidates can still lose an election while standing no chance of getting elected.

There's a simple solution. Americans should be able to have a tiered vote. By that, I mean that we could rank potential candidates in the order that we would prefer them. After the votes were in, we could rank the candidates by the number of Americans that had marked them as their first choice. Then, whoever was at the bottom of that ranking would be dropped. Then, the votes for the dropped candidate would be reassigned to the second choice of those voters and the vote would be recalculated. The process would repeat itself until we find a victor.

For example, in the 2000 election, someone who would normally have voted Democrat, but would have still supported Nader, could make their vote : Nader-1, Gore-2, Bush-3. That way, the people who supported Nader could have voted for him without wasting their votes, and he would have had a better chance. Also, if Nader recieved the lowest amount of votes, his votes would move to the candidate that Nader's supporters preferred of the remaining two, resulting in the election of the president that most people approved of.

This system would make Naders of the future viable candidates and would ensure that the candidate with the most support would win the election.