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How do different voting systems impact the results of elections?

Tristin Pittham

Hey there fellow social networker! Are you curious about how the different voting systems can actually change the results of an election? Well, keep on reading because I’m about to break it down for you in a fun and exciting way.

Firstly, let’s talk about the old school ‘Winner Takes All’ system. This means that whichever candidate gets the most votes in a particular area or state, they win the whole thing. Seems simple enough, right? But wait, what if we have 5 candidates running and one of them gets 49% of the vote, but the other 4 candidates each get 10%? Well, that’s not fair at all! That means that 51% of the voters didn’t even pick the winner. Yikes!

So, let’s move on to the ‘Ranked Choice’ system. This system is all about ranking your candidate choices from 1 to however many there are. When the votes come in, the candidate with the least amount of votes is eliminated and their votes get redistributed to whoever was their voter's second choice. This keeps happening until one candidate has over 50% of the votes. This system sounds pretty fair, right? Well, there’s a little catch. Some people might only rank a few candidates and then stop, or they might not understand how to do it altogether. This means that some votes might not even be counted because they didn't follow the rules properly.

Now let's look at ‘Proportional Representation’. This sounds like a big and complicated system but I assure you, it's not so bad. Here, the amount of votes that go to each party is added up and then candidates are elected into government proportionally. Sound fair, right? Well, the problem with this system is that there's a chance that smaller parties with less overall votes still get representation, which can make it difficult to get anything done.

Lastly, we have the ‘Single Transferable Vote’ system. This system is quite complicated but bear with me. In this system, voters rank their preferred candidates just like in the ‘Ranked Choice’ system but instead of just selecting one winner, seats are allocated by creating a quota. If a candidate has enough votes to meet the quota, they're elected, and any excess votes over the quota are redistributed. This process keeps going until all the seats are filled. Seems fair, right? Well, the downside is that this system can be confusing and hard for people to understand. They can also be less predictable because so much depends on the order in which votes are counted.

So, there you have it folks! There are pros and cons to each voting system and it's up to us to decide which one we believe is best. It's important to remember that every vote counts and leaves an impact on the election results.

Now, let's go and vote like our lives depended on it, because really, they do!