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Electing the Executive Branch

Democracy

The executive branch of government is often referred to as ‘the government’.

The roles of the executive branch of government include:

Implementing and enforcing the laws made by the legislative branch
Managing various government departments and state entities
Determining foreign and military policy
Being responsible for taxation and government spending

There are two main categories of voting system to elect the executive branch: parliamentary systems and presidential systems.

Parliamentary Systems

With parliamentary voting systems, the executive branch is determined by the outcome of legislative branch elections. Usually this means, the party or a block of cooperating parties (a coalition) with at least half of the seats in parliament determining the executive branch.

For info about different voting methods for legislative branch elections, see:
Electing the Legislative Branch

Presidential Systems

With presidential voting systems, the executive branch is elected independently of the legislative branch in separate elections. There are different voting methods for presidential systems, with some being more democratic than others.

College Vote

The college vote is a relatively undemocratic way of electing the executive branch. It is currently used in USA.

Under a college vote system, each region (or state, province, electorate etc) gets a fixed number of ‘college votes’. The number of college votes could be based on the population of the region, or it could be that each region has an equal number of college votes. The candidate with the most votes in a region, gets all of that region’s college votes. The candidate with the most college votes wins the election. The winning candidate isn’t necessarily the candidate with the most votes.

Under the college vote system in the US:

If you live in a red state and vote for the blue candidate, your vote won’t count.
If you live in a blue state and vote for the red candidate, your vote won’t count.
If you vote for a third party candidate, your vote won’t count.
Presidential candidates focus their efforts (time and money) on swing states (rather than the nation as a whole) during their election campaigns.

The exception to the first two bullet points are the states of Nebraska and Maine, where the college votes are based partly on the state as a whole and partly on the congressional districts.

The college votes of the

USA

2008 presidential elections:

Electoral College Vote Map USA 2008 presidential elections

**(The so called) Popular Vote**

The so called popular vote is more democratic than the college vote. The winner is simply the candidate with the most votes.

Although everyone’s vote is counted, the so called popular vote isn’t really a true popular vote because it can suffer from vote splitting.

Multi-Round Elections

To partially overcome the problem of vote splitting, some countries use multi-round elections (usually a two-round election).

In a two-round election, the first round involves voting for one of the candidates. At the end of the first round, the two candidates with the most votes make it into the second round. In the second round, people vote again, but this time they may only vote for one of those two candidates. For some two-round elections, the second round wouldn’t happen if the winning candidate of the first round gets over 50% of the votes.

Ranked Preference Voting

Ranked preference voting goes even further than multi-round elections to overcome the vote splitting problem, and only requires voters to vote once.

Instead of giving a single tick on their ballot, voters would rank the candidates in order of preference e.g. a voter would give a 1 for their first choice, 2 for their second, 3 for their third etc.

Ranked preference voting methods can allow people to safely make a principled vote. It gives candidates a greater incentive to keep their election promises and act in the interests of the majority of voters. The better ranked preference methods make it so the truly most popular candidate will almost certainly win the election.

There are several different ranked preference voting methods. One of those methods is instant runoff. Instant runoff has the following steps:

Count the number of first choice votes each candidate gets.
If no candidate has more than half of the first choice votes, eliminate the candidate with the lowest number of first choice votes.
The voters who ranked that candidate first, have their ranked preferences brought forward i.e. their second choice becomes their first; their third choice becomes their second etc.
If no candidate has more than half of the first choice votes, return to step 1, but consider only the remaining candidates.

Assuming there isn’t a tie, eventually there would be one remaining candidate with more than half of the first choice votes. That candidate is the winner.