For many voters in the United States, the term
“third-party candidate” conjures up images of Ralph
Nader in the 2000 presidential election. For some Democrats, this
phrase might provoke a mild bout of cursing about Florida swamps,
spoilers and the U.S. Supreme Court. Republicans might get one of
those George Dubya smirks and thank God that no one in their own
party would ever vote for someone whose vocabulary includes
“climate change” and “organic farming.”
Personally, I think this is unfortunate. No, not just because
President Bush’s vocabulary is so small, but because no
third-party candidate has a chance of being elected in the United
States. The reason why we have only two major political parties
running in the presidential election is because of our
“first-past-the-post” plurality system. In this type of
electoral system, the candidate who receives the most votes wins
the state, and whoever wins the most electoral votes wins the
election.
It is therefore helpful to form as big and broad a party as
possible in order to get into office. As a result, third parties
run candidates but remain on the periphery of U.S. politics.
They’re like the chubby kid on the track team ““
they’re not going to get very far, but you let them run
anyway.
Our system not only essentially restricts voters’ choice
to two parties, it has also made the parties more ideologically
similar. To get as many votes as possible, the Democrats and
Republicans must appeal to the same set of moderate voters in the
center. That’s why both Bush and Kerry spout similar
unilateral rhetoric about the role of the United States in
international politics.
Granted, there are significant differences between the
candidates in some areas, such as the environment and the
justification of the war in Iraq.
But still, many people who will vote for Kerry in November,
including myself, aren’t that enthusiastic about the guy. How
many times have you heard people say “anyone but Bush”
to explain why they are voting for Kerry?
Our election system needs to change in a fundamental way. The
United States is one of the most diverse countries in the world by
any standard, and yet this diversity is hardly represented in our
politics. Our current two-party system binds us to choose between
one candidate and the “anyone but” candidate.
Short of switching to some form of parliamentary government, the
United States should switch to the alternative vote formula. Voters
would list their first preference, second preference and so on for
a presidential candidate. A pure majority (over 50 percent) of the
vote would be required to win the election. If no party received a
majority vote in the first round of the election, the candidate
with the lowest number of first-preference votes would be dropped,
and on those ballots, the votes would be transferred to the
second-preference candidate. This would happen until one of the
candidates has a majority of the vote.
Instituting such a voting system today would take a long time to
produce any competitive third or fourth parties in the United
States. In the meantime, the alternative vote would give voters an
opportunity to vote for whoever they really want without worrying
that their candidate will be a “spoiler.”
Putting a small third-party candidate down as your first
preference would mean that your vote would probably end up going
toward one of the two major parties. But if more and more people
started putting down third- and fourth-party candidates as their
first preference, they would become larger and more
competitive.
I’m not advocating whether or not to support a third-party
candidate in the upcoming election. What I am advocating is a
fundamental change in our electoral system.
A diverse electorate such as ours needs more choices for their
presidential candidates. Like many other left-leaning Americans, I
will be going to the polls on November mainly to take votes away
from one candidate rather than give them to the other.
Third-party candidates are thought of as the spoilers of U.S.
elections, but the true spoiler is the system itself.
Breen is a third-year political science student.