Put aside the details of the candidates for a moment; the primary elections have a serious structural problem that needs to be fixed before 2020. If the Republican convention were held today, the leading candidate would have received only 34% of the votes. Put another way, two thirds of Republican voters would have voted for someone other than the winner. How can this result possibly unite any party?
This comes from a basic flaw in the most common voting
system we use: there are three or five or ten candidates, and the voter picks exactly
one. Essentially, the voter says “yes” to one candidate, and “no” to every
other. This system only works if there are exactly two candidates. Otherwise
you get vote splitting and division, exactly like the Republican party is
seeing now. This is fundamentally why we have two parties and primaries to
start with. But now the primaries themselves are seeing vote splitting.
It would be vastly better for the party to use approval
voting: there are three or five or ten candidates, and the voter marks as many
as they find acceptable. Put another way, your vote is a “yes” or a “no” on each
candidate. It’s easy to understand, all voting machines already support this process,
and few if any laws need to be changed. The party could have had a much more
unifying and successful primary season with this approach. I hope that by 2020
the Tennessee Republican Party will adopt approval voting.
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