IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 7 ENGLISH | Page 121

US has settled into a “two party system.”
Despite the fact that the current US voting system clearly privileges a ‘two party’ schemes, there is nothing to prevent a
‘third party’ candidate from running. But
here is the problem: the arrival of a third
candidate can lead to the least preferred
candidate winning the election. This can
occur when the positions of the third
party candidate drain votes away the
other party most aligned with those positions (but perhaps not as extreme). This
is called “splitting the vote.” This indeed
happened when Ralph Nader entered the

Political Party

Popular Vote

2000 US Presidential campaign as a
member of the Green Party. Suppose
some voter leans left and prefers the
Green Party most, the Democratic Party
next and the Republican candidate least.
In the table below, Al Gore would have
beaten George W. Bush but Bush won
because Nader pulled votes away from
Gore in the key state of Florida and gave
Bush the greater amount of “Electoral
Votes.” When voters selected Nader as
their first choice they wound up with
Bush (their last choice).

Electoral Vote

Republican
Party 50,462,412
(Right of Center)

47.87%

271

50.4%

Democrat
Party 51,009,810
(Left of Center)

48.38%

266

49.4%

Green Party (Left)

2.74

0

0%

2,883,443

There were certainly a number of problems with that election, including poorly
designed voter ballots in a key Florida
precinct. And the arcane model of an
Electoral College played a part in giving
Bush the victory even though he lost the
popular vote. Once political consultants
know of this phenomenon, they can
“game the system” regardless of what
parties are involved. Democrats might
implicitly support an opposition figure in
a Republican primary so that the Republican voters split their votes and select
the least likely candidate to be successful
to run against the Democrat in a state-

wide election. Too avoid vote splitting
and to overcome the outcome of the
2000 election, we could adopt an “Approval Voting” system. One way to interpret this system is to say that it allows
voters to select those candidates they
approve of and select those candidates
they don’t approve of. Imagine that a
voter rates Nader first and Gore second,
but in an Approval Voting system, this
voter can also cast a negative vote for his
least favorite, Bush. By saying ‘yes’ to
both Nader and Gore, Nader does not
draw votes away from Gore and Gore
wins the election. (There are problems
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