If you will excuse a mere foreigner from commenting on US politics, this election outcome seems to highlight several fundamental failures of the voting system used in US Presidential elections.
1. Voters for third-party candidates are effectively disenfranchised. In many European countries, the top two candidates stage a run-off election a week or two after the initial election. That allows voters for candidates who could not win to make a choice between the two most popular
candidates. But that's slow, inconvenient and expensive. A better system used in Ireland and Australia and elsewhere is the single transferable voting system. That allows voters to specify their order of preference for candidates; if their first preference can't win and is eliminated, their vote is transferred to their second preference, and so on. This is widely recognised as a much fairer system. Details of the system as practiced in Australia are described at .
2. The fact that the winner of a state gets all the college votes for that state can lead to extreme unfairness. Suppose there are just two
candidates and two states. If one candidate wins a state with 40 college votes by 100,000 votes, and the other candidate wins a state with 4 college
votes by 100,000 votes, they have the same number of popular votes, but one has 40 college votes and the other has 4 college votes. That's ridiculous. College votes should be allocated approximately in proportion to popular votes in that state. And that ignores the fact that college votes can actually be case independently of the popular vote!
3. I heard a US commentator on the radio state that convicted felons in Florida were ineligible to vote even after release from prison. That's very unjust. Apparently this includes enough potential voters to have easily changed the outcome.
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1. Voters for third-party candidates are effectively disenfranchised. In many European countries, the top two candidates stage a run-off election a week or two after the initial election. That allows voters for candidates who could not win to make a choice between the two most popular candidates. But that's slow, inconvenient and expensive. A better system used in Ireland and Australia and elsewhere is the single transferable voting system. That allows voters to specify their order of preference for candidates; if their first preference can't win and is eliminated, their vote is transferred to their second preference, and so on. This is widely recognised as a much fairer system. Details of the system as practiced in Australia are described at .
2. The fact that the winner of a state gets all the college votes for that state can lead to extreme unfairness. Suppose there are just two candidates and two states. If one candidate wins a state with 40 college votes by 100,000 votes, and the other candidate wins a state with 4 college votes by 100,000 votes, they have the same number of popular votes, but one has 40 college votes and the other has 4 college votes. That's ridiculous. College votes should be allocated approximately in proportion to popular votes in that state. And that ignores the fact that college votes can actually be case independently of the popular vote!
3. I heard a US commentator on the radio state that convicted felons in Florida were ineligible to vote even after release from prison. That's very unjust. Apparently this includes enough potential voters to have easily changed the outcome.