How Voting System Comparison?

In a nutshell, the simple majority rule is a channel by which a selection is decided from alternative choices, where one of the selections gain more than half of the submitted votes. This type of voting system has frequently been upheld as a practice which best supports the minorities within our society but is also criticized by its opponents as a prerequisite to a system of tyranny for the majority. In its simplest form each voter is permitted to vote for only one candidate and at the conclusion of the election the winner is determined by the candidate who has received the most votes.

On the other hand, the "Two Thirds Majority rule" is often used at the various levels of government in an effort to prevent the small majority from overtaking the large minority. We often find two-thirds vote necessary in many of our constitutionally supported elections. A typical example is during federal impeachment proceedings. In the course of President Clinton's impeachment procedures it was a constitutional requirement that a two-thirds majority senate vote be achieved for the removal from office process to take place.

Many uninformed people believe that President Clinton was successfully impeached by the senate and simply refused to leave the office. This is not so, for that February the senate arrived in session with anticipation of the final roll call in the presidential impeachment proceedings. After failing to achieve the necessary two-thirds majority vote, Clinton was permitted to serve out his term of office until January 2001. Granted, he was "impeached" by congress but all that did was forward the case to the Senate for final determination which in this case failed.

Between simple majority rule and the two-thirds rule I feel that the later is a more just method of voting. I support this premise in view of the understanding that it is often a mistaken notion that the winner of a campaign is the individual who has the most votes whether these votes have reached the fifty percent threshold or not. Naturally, this can be conceived as majority rule if only two alternatives are at stake. However, in the event there are additional alternatives in the selection process it is completely feasible that the winner could have far less than fifty percent of the votes. This happens frequently when you have splinter parties which have broken off from the major parties. A typical example was the defeat of Al Gore, Jr. in his 2000 bid for the presidential election. As he accepted his party's nomination in June of 1999, little did he realize that his democratic voters would be split during the upcoming election campaign. On election night the count was simply so close to call in Florida and resulted in several recounts being conducted. The problem would not have been so intense had Ralph Nader not taken appropriately 2,882,955 democratic votes from Al Gore. Unfortunately, with 50,456,002 votes for Bush and 50,999,897 votes for Gore the outcome was simply too close.

Most books on rules of order propose using a single majority rule rather than a two-thirds rule. Each method has its own advantages as well as it disadvantages. When using the single majority rule each voter is treated equal and the voter's identity need not be known.