chrysostom

At this stage, as the GOP convenes its circular firing squad composed of party leaders, operatives, hacks, flacks, politicos — if you’ll pardon the redundancy — and, yes, certain media, they might better expend their energies considering alternative voting methods that might have prevented Trump’s ascendancy and likely would prevent future demagogues.

One of these methods, already used by a variety of professional organizations to elect officers, as well as by the United Nations to elect the secretary general, uses an “approval” ballot by which voters rank all the candidates of whom they approve rather than selecting just one. Far from new, this idea was suggested in 1770 by French mathematician and astronomer Jean-Charles de Borda, who expressed concern that several similar candidates would split the majority vote and allow a non-consensus candidate to win.

Voila.

Through election by order of merit, now known as the “Borda count,” each candidate was awarded a number of votes equal to the number of candidates below him on each voter’s ballot. The candidate with the most votes won.
Fast-forward a couple of centuries to 1977, when New York University politics professor Steven J. Brams and decision theorist Peter C. Fishburn devised “approval voting,” which is similar but even simpler. By their method, voters would cast a vote for each candidate of whom they approve, in no particular order. The candidate with the most votes would win.

Another ranking method, advanced recently in the New York Times by economists Eric Maskin and Amartya Sen, was developed by 18th-century mathematician and political theorist Marquis de Condorcet. This process called for ranking candidates in order of approval — or not ranking them at all, as an indication of disapproval. The candidate with the highest approval ranking would win.

Longtime voters might find such suggestions jarring, but a Trump nomination could be a rule-changer. He can brag that he has won a couple dozen contests, but the reality is that another of the other primary candidates might have beaten him if not for voters scattering their ballots among so many. This is to say, the majority of Republican voters rejected Trump.
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Had an approval system been in place, it’s conceivable that John Kasich could be accepting the nomination in July. And Trump would be piling up approval ratings where he belongs — on reality TV.
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