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.
