E. J. Dionne Jr. - Bypassing the Electoral College - washingtonpost.com

This is yet another article using the 2000 election results to rationalize abandoning the electoral college system. While I agree that there are problems with the electoral college system, we should be realistic and remember that it is very, very unusual for a candidate to win the popular vote and lose the election. Is it right that it should ever happen? Maybe not, but it is not the biggest problem with our electoral system.

Look again at the 2000 election:
http://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/national.php?year=2000

Ralph Nader got nearly 3 million votes. It's pretty safe to assume that most of the people that voted for Ralph Nader would have preferred Gore to Bush, and that if Nader was not in the election is it likely that Gore would have won the electoral college. Is Nader to blame? No! The problem is that there is no way for someone to vote for a 3rd party candidate while also registering their preference between the major candidates. In fact, there are probably millions more people who would have voted for Nader had they not been forced by our electoral system to forget their first choice and instead choose one of the major candidates. That is an anti-democratic system, and it is a problem in all elections, not just the really close ones.

Before we worry about the electoral college, we need a system that allows people to vote for a 3rd party candidate while still registering their preference between the major candidates. The best way to do that, in my opionion, is to use a preferential voting system:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preferential_voting

Without getting into the muck of run-off elections, that don't really solve the problem anyway, preferential voting systems allow voters to rank candidates in order of preference. So a Nader voter might have ranked Nader #1 and Gore #2. When the votes are counted it is plain to see that the voter prefers Gore to Bush and yet it has also allowed them to select Nader as their first choice.

Instituting preferential voting would not only result in more fair electoral outcomes, but would give 3rd party candidates more of a voice in politics. It is time that we break the stranglehold that the major parties have on politics in this country, and I say that as a member of the Democratic party.