The United States Election System

In A Nutshell

The Defect: Plurality voting
The Consequence: A two-party political system (Republicans vs. Democrats)
The Fix: Proportional representation (systems such as IRV or the Schulze method)
Deliberate?: Probably not at first...

In Depth

The major symptom of the flaws with plurality voting is so familiar to most voters, we simply take it for granted: the two-party system.

Voters often complain about being forced to vote for the lesser of two evils (ie. either a Republican or Democratic candidate). Many voters would like to support a third-party candidate, but know that doing so would be "wasting" their vote. This popular perception reinforces and possibly even creates the two-party system we have today, a principle known as Duverger's law.

Related to the above, another common voter complaint is regarding "spoiler" candidates. So-called spoilers are third-party candidates who draw more voters away from one of their opposing candidates than the other. Ralph Nader's campaign in the 2000 Presidential election proved controversial for likely tipping the election in Bush's favor. A Republican group attempted to capitalize on the spoiler effect when it paid for TV ads supporting Nader, in that election.

The consequences of these flaws are far reaching: a two-party system is extremely vulnerable to private influence and entrenched corruption. With only two viable candidates, private interests can effectively focus their efforts on supporting (and perhaps influencing) candidates who would return the favor, once elected. With only two parties, if either or both of the parties is corrupted by private interests, it is very likely that the government created from those parties will also be corrupted by those interests. If both parties are compromised, a compromised government is virtually guaranteed.

It is also worth noting that a two-party system may contribute to polarized, divisive elections. With only two viable parties, neither party can risk taking a neutral or "middle of the road" position on polarizing issues, since the opposing party may earn a significant advantage by pandering to certain demographics. In order to succeed in a two-party system, both parties must take strong, often opposing stances on hotly debated topics like abortion, gay marriage, gun control, etc.

Remediation

There is no flawless voting system, because there is no perfect process that satisfies all reasonable evaluation criteria for voting systems. Every known electoral method can be influenced by sufficiently organized efforts, except for Sortition, based on randomly selecting a winner from a pool of eligible candidates. Sortition might be the only ideal "democratic" alternative, but it is not likely a viable alternative in America, since it would effectively eliminate the intense vetting process that is currently so popular here.

Though a perfect voting system doesn't exist, there are systems which can improve on plurality voting and effectively address its major flaws. For example, approval voting allows voters to select multiple candidates. Voting systems known as "preferential" systems allow voters to prioritize candidates, to vote for their favorite candidates in order of their preference for them. For more about these alternative systems, check out proportional representation.

Deliberate? (aka. the tin-foil hat section)

In the case of plurality voting, I think the original intention was to implement the best, most democratic voting system available at the time. These days, more robust alternatives are available and just as feasible to implement. However, the two parties that control our government could lose their duopoly if an alternative system of voting is implemented. It stands to reason that anyone connected to or benefitting from the Republican or Democratic parties would have significant motivation to maintain the status quo. In other words, our current government has a vested interest in keeping plurality voting around. While it's questionable whether the government or political parties are actively fighting election reform (general ignorance is probably sufficient alone), the apparent conflict of interest makes it seem very feasible that plurality voting is a deliberate defect.