Spoiler Alerts

It's election season again and this one is providing more headlines and social media attention than any I have seen. It also brings the mandatory gripes about the system being rigged, the media being biased and politicians being liars, cheats and slow drivers in the passing lane.
So what better time to talk about those elements that are truly failures of the system and what the alternatives are? I plan to address just a couple that I think get little attention or the wrong kind.
These next couple of posts will be quick and lack the editing, visuals and maybe some of the humor I try for, but I want to get them out and also am trying to get back into the fast writing needed to finish my second novel, so I hope the ideas carry enough weight to make them worth reading.

First, lets look at the two party system and independent candidates:

In 2000, we had the most contentious and drawn out result in recent history due to some combination of poor ballot design, voter error, Supreme Court decision, poor campaign decisions and... Ralph Nader. This last is usually only heard in democratic circles and even then gets less blame than the SCOTUS decision. Interestingly, numerous recounts by media yield different results depending on how many counties are included and what standard is used (the "voter intent" standard, which many believe to be the truest measure yields a victory for Gore if performed across the state, but nearly any other attempt at recount, including those most likely absent the ruling leave Bush as the winner), while third party ("spoiler") candidates clearly shift the victory to Gore both in Florida and New Hampshire (either of which change the outcome of the election) whether using Nader or another of the left wing independents.
In 1992, we had another spoiler and one who garnered more attention (and is more widely accepted as the reason for Clinton defeating GHW Bush (41), even if the numbers don't back up the claim). Ross Perot was the most viable third party in ages and for a time looked like he had a real shot at winning (before he suspended his campaign and lost credibility due, he claimed later, to threats from republicans to disrupt his daughter's wedding). Still, he managed enough support that pundits and voters outside of the republican party still credit/blame him for the outcome.
And now, with the 2016 primary under way (for readers in other countries, worlds or dimensions, look it up if you must, but don't judge our country on this convoluted process; if it made sense, I would not be writing this), we have another wealthy and somewhat popular player threatening to enter the election.

Now, the first obvious question is:
Since we have a primary system designed to choose the best from opposing parties, do we need more choices?
And the answer is: Yes.
And not just yes for those who think they are two sides to the same two-headed coin. Even in a perfect world, a system where each half of the spectrum picks the perfect candidate to represent them in the election gives us two candidates halfway between the middle and extreme positions (the Median Voter Theorem says that two candidates will place themselves just slightly closer to the middle than his opponent and multiple iterations of this will yield two indistinguishable moderates, but this assumes two candidates who did not have to reach out the ends of their own parties to get there). The fact that those who vote in primaries tend to be closer to the extremes of their respective parties only makes this worse. Looking at this mathematically, a uniform distribution of voters (where we are all evenly spaced along the political spectrum with no clustering in the middle or at the ends) all voting in the primaries (half on either side of the middle) choosing the perfect "middle" candidate for their group will end up producing a president either 1/4 of the way down the spectrum or 3/4. If we use a 0-100 scale and calculate the average distance between voters and president, we find a result of 31.25 (.75*37.5 + .25*12.5). Had the Median Voter theorem worked, we would have had 25. Given a more extreme example (say, one where the more partisan half participates in the primary), we get a little over 39.
This is nowhere close to ideal, but a moderate like the MVT gives us has little to no chance in the primaries and will sabotage the more moderate of the two party candidates along with himself if he runs independent (this may be true even if a large number of voters choose their best candidate without fear of "wasting their vote" if the other two manage to not be too extreme; take primary candidates from the first case at 25 and 75 and a moderate at 50 and ideal voting gives the moderate independent the range from 37.5-62.5, 1/4 of the vote, while the other two get the quarter from their position to the extreme and the eighth from their positions to half way to the independent for 3/8 of the vote).

 The second obvious question is:
Would this blog post have been written if there were not a better way?
And the answer is, "I don't know because there is one".
This answer is often called Instant Runoff or Alternate or Ranked Choice Voting. It allows voters to cast their votes to whomever they prefer, ignoring the possibility of that vote giving the election to someone they like the least.
The way it works is ranking candidates from best to worse. If one candidate gets at least 50 percent of first place votes, he wins. If not, the one with the least first place votes gets dropped and all those who put him first have their second choices thrown in. This gets repeated until someone has a majority. This candidate will, in all likelihood, fit the Median Voter well, but even more, the winner will likely have very few voters with a strong dislike for him. Some of the other positive aspects of this system is the reduction in negative campaigning (no one wants to alienate someone whose second vote might matter; this has proven out in the real world), a reduction in the influence of money on elections (you would need enough to stay visible, but not necessarily enough to ruin every television commercial break), cut down on the cost and time of elections (no need for primaries when you allow some reasonable number of viable candidates to all be on the ballot) and proving me right.

The last question is:
Can we make this happen?
And the answer is maybe. The parties, lobbyists, partisans and big money would all be against it. But, if we all hate the current system enough to join up and get this done, it will happen.
Personally, I think it will take some level of support already existing when the absurd finally happens (as someone suggested to me, a Cruz nomination with Trump and Bloomberg as independents and either of the democrats, which leads to the House deciding; with the unpopularity of Cruz and the blame for the mess falling on Trump, we get a negotiated deal ala Rutherford B Hayes for Bloomberg with the help of some strange bedfellows and everyone insists that this should not happen for another 192 years).