Our essay proposed two improvements to US presidential elections. First, in both presidential primaries and the general election, we would replace plurality rule (in which each voter chooses a single candidate, and the candidate with the most votes wins, even if he or she falls short of 50 percent) with majority rule (in which voters rank candidates, and the candidate preferred by a majority to each opponent wins). Second, we would reform the Electoral College so that nationwide vote totals rather than statewide totals determine the winner. [...]
By contrast, majority rule avoids such vote-splitting debacles because it allows voters to rank the candidates and candidates are compared pairwise: if a majority of voters rank candidate A ahead of B, this ranking holds whether or not C runs too, and so there is no sense in which C can take votes away from A. Several readers have suggested going a step further by having voters grade candidates (say, on a scale of 1 to 5) and electing the candidate with the highest average score—much as gold medals are awarded in Olympic diving. But there is a big difference between grading in the Olympics—where standards are clear and judgments reasonably impartial—and grading in politics, where criteria are highly variable and personal. Thus we doubt that grading schemes could work successfully in political elections: grades would have no common meaning, and voters would have strong incentives to distort the grades they award candidates.
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