Much controversy stewed last week after the Iowa caucus due to the closest tie between two candidates in caucus history: Democratic candidates Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. The night of the caucus, while counting was going on, the Des Moines Registerreported that some of the delegates were ties broken by a coin flip, which all went to Clinton. Later, it was reported that there were six of which Clinton won all.
Now, it is reported that there were at least a dozen coin flips and Sanders won some as well, but that who won would not have mattered either way with how close the tie was overall. No matter how you spin it, it is ridiculous: an election was decided by something as mundane as a coin toss in the country which supposedly revolutionized democracy. This is not a new practice for Iowa, -- President Barack Obama won a coin flip against Clinton in 2008. In fact, Iowa is not the only state to do this.
Although the United States may have revolutionized democracy after ancient Greece, many other countries have democracies today. Moreover, these voting systems vary wildly among each other and seem alien to the American voter.
In France, their presidential, departmental, and legislative elections have a two-round system. This means that if the "winner" of the election does not win by a certain margin (usually 5%-15% over the runner-up), all other candidates except for the top two are eliminated and voters must do a revote between the top two. This system is used to elect presidents in almost forty countries.
In the United Kingdom, you do not vote for a single person to take a single seat and supposedly represent your state or district like in the United States. There, you vote for a political party, and the results determine how many seats are taken by that party proportionally. (If a party wins 30% of the vote, 30% of the seats will be held by that party.) Whichever party won the majority gets their representative prime minister, who is appointed by the Queen. If the majority does not win by a big enough margin, the majority party may have to form a coalition with another party (ie. the Conservative and Liberal-Democrat coalition). This keeps a divided bipartisan political culture.
Because other systems have proportional party votes, there are more parties to choose from (unlike in the United States, where voting third party is seen as throwing away one's vote). In Mexico, there are three major parties. In Denmark, there are ten.
Fourteen countries do not have term limits for either the head of government or head of state (with Uganda not having one for either). In Mexico, the president serves for six years and their legislators only serve one three-year term. In the United States, there are senators who have been serving for decades consecutively. The current Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnel (R-KY) has been a senator since 1985.
Instant-runoff voting refers to the practice of ranking candidates in order of preference when voting. This is seen in ten different countries at different levels. In the United States, four different cities use this system. In India, the electoral college uses it to vote for the president. In Australia, it is used at the national level for electing members to the Australian House of Representatives.
Most other democratic countries do not use electoral colleges like the United States presidential elections and caucuses do, where the inner of an election is decided by a group of people instead of the public. Usually, there are direct elections, so when the popular vote says one candidates wins, that means they win. In the United States, there have been four presidents who won the electoral college vote, but not the popular vote, most infamously George W. Bush against Al Gore.
There are many different voting systems that seem foreign to the United States. Should the United States completely change its system, or should it just modify it? Either way, something as simple as a coin flip should not be breaking ties in the United States.
