The standard system of statewide elections for governor and U.S. senator, among other offices, deserves a thorough overhaul. The collection of signatures by candidates to qualify for the ballot, currently confined to antiquated pen-and-paper technology, can be modernized and put online so that it can function as a kind of “approval voting” system that yields a reasonable number of candidates (five, for example) for a primary election ballot. Likewise, online party conventions can enable parties to endorse candidates before the primary occurs and to have their endorsed nominees qualify for the government’s “All Qualified Candidates Primary” ballot. Moreover, innovative forms of Ranked Choice Voting—like “Optimal Tournament Voting”—can be used to identify the two candidates on the primary ballot most suitable to advance to the general election, with suitability for this purpose determined by which candidates are most representative of the whole electorate.
Alternatively, even without ranked-choice ballots, the mathematical principles and procedures of Optimal Tournament Voting can be used to create a “top three” general election, in which voters directly express their preferences between each pair of the three candidates who advance to the general election—from an All Qualified Candidates Primary in which voters select the single candidate they most prefer, and the three candidates with the most votes in the primary qualify for the general election ballot. Moreover, whether the general election has two or three finalists on the ballot, “fusion voting” can be employed in the general election to permit parties whose nominees are not one of the finalists to renominate whichever finalist they prefer. States should experiment with these innovative alternatives and other variations along the same lines so that elections for statewide offices, like governor or U.S. senator, will produce winners who are the candidates most preferred by a majority of the electorate’s voters.
* Ebersold Chair in Constitutional Law, The Ohio State University, and director, Election Law at Ohio State. Earlier drafts of this paper were presented in law school faculty workshops at University of Arizona, University of Tennessee, and Ohio State University, as well as at the University of Illinois Law Review symposium of which this piece is a part. The ideas and proposals set forth in this article benefit greatly from conversations with Nate Atkinson, Scott Ganz, John Mantus, Steve Huefner, Lee Drutman, Eric Maskin, Rob Boatright, Charles Stewart, Mike Pitts, and Wes Holliday, among many others.
The full text of this Symposium is available to download as a PDF.