(NewsNation) — Polling often shows Americans want a third choice in the electoral process, but third party candidates have rarely found success on the ballot. Election reformers say it’s because of the way voters vote.
In a May NewsNation poll, 49% of respondents said they would consider a third party candidate if President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump were the two nominees again in 2024.
A third party choice may be emerging. The political organization No Labels — which bills itself as rejecting the “extremes on the left and the right” is hosting Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., will serve as the keynote speaker at a town hall Monday, fueling suspicion that they may be trying to draft a big name to run against the Democrats and Republicans.
Third-party success is limited. In the U.S. Congress, there are just three independents and a third party candidate has never won the U.S. presidential election.
Election reformists say there are other ways to run an electoral system that could help grow the presence of third parties. One alternative is what’s called ranked choice voting.
In this system, Americans rank their candidates in order of their own preference. If a majority of voters pick a certain candidate as their first choice, that candidate wins the election. But if no candidate gets a majority, then the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated. Then voters’ second choices are taken into account and the process repeats itself until someone wins a majority.
Compare that to most American elections, where only one candidate can win. That means if Candidate A gets 46% of the vote, Candidate B gets 45% of the vote, and Candidate C gets 9% of the vote, only A gets any power. Candidate C’s voters in particular often left feeling like their voters are simply wasted as their candidate is simply considered a “spoiler” who prevented a major party candidate from winning.
“When you have single-winner elections which we have up and down the ballot, the two parties tend to dominate so all of the energy and resources and affiliation goes into those two major parties and third parties become spoilers or protest votes,” said Lee Drutman, who works on electoral reform issues as a senior fellow in the Political Reform program at New America.
Across the United States, a growing number of cities and states are using ranked-choice voting. New York City started using the system in its local elections in 2021; the state of Maine now uses them for federal elections, like congressional races.
Rachel Hutchinson, who serves as a senior policy analyst at the electoral reform group FairVote, argued that these reforms eliminate the spoiler effect.
“(There’s) no need for strategic voting from voters who are now free to rank an honest preference even if that’s an independent or third-party presidential ticket while still allowing them to indicate their preference among the two major party nominees,” she said, adding that both Alaska and Maine will be using ranked choice voting for the presidential race in 2024.
But while Drutman agreed that ranked-choice voting may eliminate the spoiler effect — meaning third parties could run races without fearing that they are throwing the race to either the Democrat or Republican — he argued it hasn’t done much to help third parties actually win races.
In San Francisco, for instance, municipal elections are officially nonpartisan and they have been using ranked choice voting for two decades. But every member of the Board of Supervisors, which acts as the city council, is affiliated with the Democratic Party.
“I like a lot of people was sort of excited about the promise of ranked-choice voting… for me it really hasn’t delivered on the promises of really expanding the space of political representation,” Drutman said.
He advocates for a bolder reform: eliminating single-winner elections. Countries like Germany, Israel or Sweden use a form of what’s called proportional representation.
While the details of proportional systems differ by country, voters generally vote for a party instead of a candidate. So if Party A wins 46% of the vote, Party B wins 45% of the vote and Party C wins 9% of the vote, they will each get that percentage of seats in the legislature. This makes it easy for new parties to grow because even getting a smaller of number votes will still win them some power.
Transitioning the whole federal government to such a system would be a gargantuan task. But with so many elections across the country, a movement for proportional representation could start by changing elections at the state or local level and working their way up.
“States should start experimenting,” Drutman said.