Electing a President
In principle, any of the single-member district systems can be used for the direct election of a president. When a president is to be elected as the executive head of state, there is often a strong normative and practical preference for systems which ensure a victory by an absolute majority. The majority of all countries that have direct presidential elections use a Two-Round system.
The separation of the two rounds leads to efforts by the leading candidates to attract second-round support and endorsement from those eliminated after the first round. Such agreements are sometimes driven primarily by the desire for victory. They are thus perhaps less likely to reflect compatibility of policies and programmes than are pre-poll preference-swapping agreements reached between candidates in preferential systems with a single polling day. In addition, presidential elections held under TRS increase the cost of elections and the resources needed to run them, and the drop-off in turnout between the first and second rounds of voting can often be severe and damaging. For this reason, other options such as the Alternative Vote and the Supplementary Vote are increasingly being examined.
Electing a President - First Past The Post
The most straightforward way of electing a president is to simply award the office to the candidate who wins a plurality of the votes, even if this is less than an absolute majority. This is the case for presidential elections in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cameroon, the Comoros Islands, Equatorial Guinea, Guyana, Honduras, Iceland, Kiribati, South Korea, Malawi, Mexico, Palestine, Panama, Paraguay, the Philippines, Rwanda, Singapore, Taiwan, Tunisia, Venezuela, and Zambia. Clearly, such a system is simple, cheap, and efficient, but in a strongly competitive multi-candidate contest, it leaves open the possibility that the president will be elected with so few votes that he or she is not seen as the choice of a substantial majority of the electorate—and indeed may specifically be opposed by a substantial majority: the majority voted against him or her. Examples include Venezuela in 1993, when Rafael Caldera won the presidency with 30.5 per cent of the popular vote, and the May 1992 election in the Philippines, when Fidel Ramos was elected from a seven-candidate field with only 24 per cent of the popular vote. Taiwan experienced a major political shift in 2000 when the challenger Chen Shuibian won the presidency with just 39 per cent of the vote, less than 3 per cent ahead of the next candidate.
The United States is unique in conducting its national presidential election by FPTP at federal state level. The FPTP winner in each federal state gains all the votes of that state in an electoral college, with two exceptions, Maine and Nebraska, where the votes of the state are allocated two (corresponding to the state’s two Senate seats) to the FPTP winner state-wide, and one to the FPTP winner of each individual congressional district in the state. The Electoral College then elects the president by absolute majority. This can lead to a situation in which the winning candidate polls fewer votes than the runner-up—as in 2000 when the Republican candidate George W. Bush won despite polling some half a million fewer votes than the Democrat candidate, Al Gore.
Electing a President - Two-Round Systems
As in legislative elections, one way to avoid candidates being elected with only a small proportion of the popular vote is to hold a second ballot if no one candidate wins an absolute majority on the first round. This can either be between the top two candidates (majority run-off) or between more than two candidates (majority-plurality). France, most Latin American countries, all the five post-Soviet Central Asian republics, and many countries in francophone Africa use TRS to elect their presidents. Elsewhere in Africa, the system is used by Angola, Cape Verde, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea-Bissau, Kenya, Liberia, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, São Tomé and Principe, the Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zimbabwe; in Europe, apart from France, it is used by Armenia, Azerbaijan, Austria, Belarus, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Finland, Georgia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Ukraine; and it is found in Afghanistan, Haiti, Indonesia, Iran, Timor-Leste, and Yemen.
There are a number of adaptations to straight majority run-off and majority-plurality rules. In Costa Rica, a candidate can win on the first round with only 40 per cent of the vote; conversely, in Sierra Leone, a second round is only avoided if one candidate gets 55 per cent in the first. In Argentina, a successful candidate must poll 45 per cent, or 40 per cent plus a lead of more than 10 per cent over the second-placed candidate. A similar 40 per cent threshold with a 10 per cent margin exists in Ecuador.
A number of countries also have minimum turnout rates for their presidential elections, typically 50 per cent, as is the case in Russia and many of the former Soviet republics; this is an additional mechanism for ensuring the legitimacy of the result but has substantial cost and logistical implications if the minimum turnout is not met and the election has to be re-run.
Apart from those countries where parties could create winning pre-election alliances so that presidential candidates could be elected in the first round (e.g. in Brazil in 1994 and Chile in 1989 and 1994), the experience of TRS has appeared problematic in Latin America. For example, in the 1990 elections in Peru, Alberto Fujimori obtained 56 per cent of the votes in the second round, but his party won only 14 of 60 seats in the Senate and 33 seats of 180 in the Chamber of Deputies. In Brazil in 1989, Fernando Collor de Mello was elected in the second round with just under half of the votes, but his party won, in non-concurrent legislative elections, only three of the 75 Senate seats and only 40 of 503 seats in the Chamber of Deputies.
The problems of governance which have resulted demonstrate the importance of considering interlinked institutional provisions together. Although TRS produced presidents who had the second-round support of a majority of the electorate, it existed alongside systems for election to the legislature which did not guarantee those presidents significant legislative support.
While the successful candidates gathered the support of other parties between the first and second rounds, there was little to enable them to keep that support in place after the elections.
Electing a President - Preferential Voting
One way of getting around the disadvantages of TRS is to merge the first and second round into one election. There are several ways of doing this. AV is one obvious solution; it is used to elect the president of the Republic of Ireland. A lower-placed candidate who picks up many second-preference votes can overtake higher-placed candidates. The most recent example of a president winning through the transfer of preferences in this manner was the 1990 election of Mary Robinson to the Irish presidency.
A second possibility is the preferential system used for presidential elections in Sri Lanka and for London mayoral elections, known as the Supplementary Vote. Voters are asked to mark not only their first-choice candidate but also their second (and, in Sri Lanka, their third) choices. The way in which this is done differs: in Sri Lanka, voters are asked to place the numbers ‘1’, ‘2’ and ‘3’ next to the names of the candidates, in the same manner as under AV and STV. In London, no numbers are required; the ballot paper contains two columns, for a first-choice vote and a second-choice vote, respectively. Voters are asked to mark their first-choice and second-choice candidates accordingly. This means that voters do not have to write in any numbers themselves.
Counting is the same in both cases: if a candidate gains an absolute majority of first-preference votes, he or she is immediately declared elected. However, if no candidate gains an absolute majority, all candidates other than the top two are eliminated and their second- (or, in Sri Lanka, second- and third-) choice votes are passed on to one or the other of the two leading candidates, according to the preference ordering marked. Whoever achieves the highest number of votes at the end of this process is declared elected.
The disadvantages of the Supplementary Vote system include its additional complexity and the fact that voters are effectively required to guess who the top two candidates will be in order to make full use of their vote.
Despite these differences, both AV and the Supplementary Vote have the same core aim: to make sure that whoever wins the election will have the support of an absolute majority of the electorate. The use of preference votes to express a second choice means that a second round of voting is not required, and this results in significant cost savings as well as benefits in administrative, logistics, and security terms.
Electing a President - Distribution Requirements
A few countries combine their presidential elections with a so-called distribution requirement, which requires candidates to gain a regional spread of votes, in addition to an absolute majority, before they can be declared duly elected. In Indonesia, which held its first direct presidential elections in 2004, a successful presidential and vice-presidential candidate team needed to gain an absolute majority of the national vote and at least 20 per cent of the vote in over half of all provinces to avoid a second round of voting. This requirement was inspired by Nigeria, another large and regionally diverse country, where presidential candidates need not only to win an absolute majority of the vote nationally but also to secure at least one-third of the vote in at least two-thirds of the country’s provinces.
Distribution requirements do have the benefit of encouraging presidential candidates to make appeals outside their own regional or ethnic base, and if appropriately applied can work very well. However, the specification of two requirements for victory always carries the possibility that no candidate will fulfil both. It is important that designers note this possibility and include provisions to resolve it, because a system which produces no winner and no method of finding a winner could create a vacuum of power fraught with the dangers of instability. The second round in Indonesia merely requires a simple majority for the winner to be declared elected, but Nigeria retains the distribution requirement for the second round too, which creates the possibility of a third round. If this were to take place in practice, it could have implications both for the length of the election period and for the financial and administrative resources required. Distribution requirements introduce strategic imperatives for candidates. In Kenya, to be elected president, a candidate has to receive a plurality overall and at least 25 per cent of the vote in at least five out of the eight provinces. Even so, throughout the 1990s, a divided opposition allowed Daniel Arap Moi to remain president with less than an absolute majority of the vote. Disribution requirements can also be built into nomination requirements.
