I have been following this year’s presidential election with interest and took the opportunity to learn a little bit about the American election process. Many international students such as I admire the way the U.S., such a large country, is run. However, I found two improvements which could be made to the election process.

The first flaw to the system I see is the Electoral College. The votes of those electors can invalidate the popular vote. That makes the U.S. not as democratic as it appears to be. It looks to me like this is a system which should have disappeared a long time ago. It is a trace left over from times when governments did not trust the average population. People had to demonstrate a certain level of education and wealth in order to be able to vote. Today most people in the U.S. are literate and able to make decisions for themselves. They don’t need some minority to ultimately decide for them.

The second improvement which could be made would solve the problem of minor parties. The small party candidates are perceived rightly so as being just a useless aside since most people vote Democrat or Republican anyway.

I was amazed to see how many people reluctantly chose either Bush or Gore just so that the “most evil” of the two would not get elected. There is an easy solution: Have two rounds in the elections. In the first round, all candidates run. The top two then run for the second round and the winner becomes president. The preliminary elections in the United States could serve that purpose if only all candidates were required to go through the preliminaries before they run for the real thing.

This system is actually in place in at least one country I know: France. In France, a dozen candidates run for president every seven years. There are not many things for which France can set an example but the presidential election is one thing it does well.

Granted, it is extremely rare that a minority candidate gets elected. The last time a small party candidate was elected president of France was in the 1930s. So you might think, well, what does that change? A lot.

First, it gives voters the satisfaction to be able to choose the candidate they really like in the first round, without worrying about who is going to get elected.

Second and most importantly, it shows the government what people care about. The small party candidates usually have a well-defined agenda, sometimes extreme on specific matters such as the environment. As an example, in France, there is a downright fascist party, which is getting more and more popular. That tells the government that people are getting more and more upset with rising crime due to North African immigrants, and it gives the government a chance to do something about it in a non-fascist way before things get out of hand.

Agnes Kim

Graduate student

Astrophysics