USA election system should be replaced with

Llama 4 Scout 17B

Vote: STAR voting

The current USA election system has faced criticism for its potential to lead to a candidate winning without the popular vote. RCV voting (Ranked Choice Voting) and Approval voting are alternatives but have their own drawbacks. Score voting allows voters to rate candidates on a scale, providing more nuanced preferences. STAR voting (Score Then Automatic Runoff) combines the simplicity of rating candidates with the fairness of runoff elections. It helps to mitigate the issues of voter suppression and allows for a more representative outcome.

DeepSeek V4 Pro

Vote: RCV voting

RCV (Ranked Choice Voting), also known as Instant Runoff Voting, is the best alternative to the current USA election system. Its core strength is that it eliminates the 'spoiler effect' by allowing voters to rank candidates in order of preference. If no candidate wins a majority of first-choice votes, the last-place candidate is eliminated and their votes are redistributed to voters' next choices. This process repeats until a candidate achieves a majority, ensuring the winner has broad support.

Mistral Large 3

Vote: RCV voting

The current USA election system, often characterized by first-past-the-post (FPTP) voting, has several well-documented flaws, including vote splitting, spoiler effects, and the underrepresentation of minority views. Replacing it with **"RCV voting"** (Ranked-Choice Voting) addresses many of these issues effectively while maintaining simplicity and broad political acceptability. First, RCV eliminates the "spoiler effect," where similar candidates split votes, leading to the victory of a less popular candidate. By allowing voters to rank candidates in order of preference, RCV ensures that votes are not wasted, and the winner has broader support. This encourages more candidates to run without fear of acting as spoilers, fostering greater diversity in political representation. Second, RCV promotes more positive campaigning. Because candidates seek not only first-choice support but also second- and third-choice rankings from voters who favor their opponents, they are incentivized to build coalitions and appeal to a wider electorate rather than resorting to negative attacks. This could help reduce the polarization and toxicity often seen in modern political campaigns. Third, RCV has been successfully implemented in various jurisdictions, including Maine and Alaska, and has a growing track record of improving voter satisfaction. It is also relatively easy for voters to understand—ranking candidates is intuitive and aligns with how people naturally express preferences in other contexts. While options like **"STAR voting"**, **"Approval voting"**, and **"Score voting"** have their merits—such as offering finer-grained expressions of preference—they are less proven at scale and may introduce new complexities. STAR voting, for example, requires voters to both score and rank candidates, which could be confusing for some voters. Approval and score voting, while simple, do not fully capture the nuances of voter preferences in multi-candidate races. In summary, **"RCV voting"** strikes the best balance between addressing the flaws of the current system, ensuring voter accessibility, and fostering a more representative and civil political process. It is the most viable and immediately impactful reform among the options presented.

Grok 4.3

Vote: Approval voting

Approval voting simplifies the process by letting voters select all acceptable candidates. It eliminates the spoiler effect common in plurality systems. This method is straightforward to count and understand compared to ranked systems.

Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B

Vote: Approval voting

Approval voting is simple to understand and use, lets voters support any number of candidates they approve of, eliminates the spoiler effect, and can be implemented with existing ballots without major changes.

Hermes 4 405B

Vote: STAR voting

I believe the USA election system should be replaced with STAR voting. STAR voting combines the strengths of both Score voting and Instant Runoff voting. Voters can score candidates on a scale, allowing them to express their preferences more nuancedly than simple approval/disapproval. The runoff then ensures the winner has broad support. This seems like the most promising alternative system that could lead to more representative outcomes and reduce polarization.

INTELLECT-3

Vote: STAR voting

STAR voting (Score Then Automatic Runoff) combines the strengths of score voting and ranked choice voting. It allows voters to rate candidates on a scale (e.g., 0-5 stars), ensuring the winner has broad support through its automatic runoff mechanism. This system reduces "spoiler" effects, discourages strategic voting, and promotes consensus-building – critical for polarized electorates. Unlike pure score voting (Option D), STAR guarantees majority support in final rounds. Compared to RCV (Option A), STAR better captures nuanced preferences through its scoring component. Approval voting (Option C) lacks granularity for nuanced preferences.

MiniMax M2.7

Vote: STAR voting

STAR voting offers a compelling balance of voter expression and practical protection against manipulation. First, STAR voting preserves honest expression better than other alternatives. Unlike FPTP where voters feel forced to pick the "lesser of two evils," STAR allows voters to score candidates honestly. The automatic runoff between the two highest-scored candidates then ensures the winner reflects genuine voter preference rather than strategic gaming. Second, STAR voting reduces the spoiler effect and vote splitting. Candidates can run without being punished for "splitting" similar voters, since scores allow fine-grained distinctions. This opens space for more diverse voices without punishing voters who support multiple candidates. Third, compared to RCV: STAR is simpler to understand and administer, doesn't have the ballot exhaustion problem where some votes simply disappear in later rounds, and is more resistant to strategic manipulation. Compared to Approval, STAR gives more expressive power to differentiate between candidates rather than treating all approved candidates equally. Compared to plain Score voting, the automatic runoff component provides an important safety mechanism. Finally, while no system is perfect, STAR voting has been studied extensively and shown to produce outcomes that better reflect voter preferences while maintaining practical simplicity for voters and election administrators alike.

Perplexity Sonar Pro

Vote: RCV voting

I choose "A: RCV voting" as the best replacement for the current U.S. election system among the listed options. First, several forms of "A: RCV voting" (including single-winner IRV and multi-winner STV) are already in real-world use in the United States at municipal and state levels, as the provided sources show. That means there is substantial practical experience, existing legal language, vendor support, and public education materials. This makes nationwide adoption more politically and administratively feasible than the other options, which are largely still in the advocacy or pilot stage. Second, RCV directly addresses the spoiler problem and vote-splitting while preserving a familiar ballot experience: voters rank candidates rather than change to a more abstract scoring or approval interface. The tabulation process—eliminating the lowest candidate and transferring votes based on next preferences—aims to ensure majority support for the winner, which aligns well with U.S. norms about legitimacy (a majority-backed winner) and helps reduce incentives for strategic lesser-of-two-evils voting. Third, compared with "C: Approval voting" and "D: Score voting," RCV better matches current U.S. legal and cultural expectations of one-person–one-vote in terms of how the public intuitively understands that norm. Approval and score systems are excellent from a social-choice-theory perspective, but they require a larger conceptual shift for voters and lawmakers (e.g., accepting that expressing unequal support levels or approving multiple candidates is still fair). That makes reforms harder to pass and vulnerable to repeal. Finally, "B: STAR voting" and "D: Score voting" are promising score-based methods with strong theoretical properties, but they are virtually untested at scale in governmental elections in the U.S., which makes them a riskier and less realistic recommendation for a wholesale national replacement. Given the tradeoff between theoretical optimality and real-world implementability, RCV strikes the best balance: it is significantly better than the status quo in terms of representation and campaign incentives, while also being politically and operationally viable. For these reasons, among the given options, "A: RCV voting" is the most practical and impactful reform target for replacing the U.S. election system.

Gemini 3.5 Flash

Vote: RCV voting

Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) is the most viable, practical, and politically feasible replacement for the current US electoral system. Unlike other alternatives, RCV has already been successfully implemented at scale in states like Maine and Alaska, as well as major cities like New York City. This real-world track record proves that voters can easily understand the system and that existing voting infrastructure can support it. RCV effectively eliminates the 'spoiler effect,' allowing voters to support third-party or independent candidates without fear of wasting their vote. It also incentivizes candidates to appeal to a broader coalition of voters to secure second- and third-preference votes, which helps curb extreme political polarization and encourages more civil, issue-focused campaigning. While STAR, Approval, and Score voting have merits in social choice theory, they lack the widespread public familiarity, legal precedents, and grassroots momentum that RCV has built over the last decade. RCV represents the most realistic path toward a more representative and democratic American electoral system.

Trinity Large Thinking

Vote: RCV voting

RCV voting (Ranked Choice Voting) is the most viable and effective replacement for the current USA election system. It eliminates the spoiler effect and ensures that the winning candidate has majority support, addressing a core flaw of first-past-the-post. Voters rank candidates by preference, a simple adaptation that maintains the familiar one-person-one-vote principle while giving more expressive power. RCV has been successfully implemented in states like Maine and Alaska, as well as in numerous cities, demonstrating its practicality and voter acceptance. It encourages positive campaigning because candidates benefit from being ranked highly by opponents' supporters. Moreover, RCV can be administered using existing voting infrastructure with minimal modifications, making it a cost-effective reform. For these reasons, RCV stands out as the optimal choice to replace the current system.

GPT-5.5

Vote: STAR voting

I vote for "STAR voting" because it combines the expressiveness of "Score voting" with a runoff step that helps ensure the winner has broad majority support. Voters can honestly show both how much they like each candidate and which finalist they prefer. Compared with "RCV voting", it is simpler to tabulate, avoids exhausted ballots, and does not suffer from some of RCV’s nonmonotonic outcomes. Compared with "Approval voting", it captures intensity of preference rather than forcing voters into a yes/no choice. Overall, "STAR voting" offers a strong balance: more voter expression, practical counting, and better resistance to vote-splitting than the current plurality system.

Perplexity Sonar Reasoning Pro

Vote: RCV voting

“RCV voting” is the strongest choice when you weigh democratic quality against political and practical feasibility for the United States. RCV (ranked choice voting) is already in real-world use for public elections in many U.S. jurisdictions and has been used in presidential primaries. That experience shows it is legally workable, administratively implementable with current technology, and understandable to voters at scale. By contrast, “STAR voting,” “Approval voting,” and “Score voting” are mostly limited to pilot programs, private organizations, or local experiments, which makes nationwide transition far less realistic. Substantively, RCV addresses the biggest widely recognized defects of U.S. plurality elections: the spoiler effect, vote-splitting among similar candidates, and winners lacking majority support. Letting voters rank candidates ensures that if your favorite is not viable, your ballot can still help choose between the remaining contenders. This encourages more sincere voting and opens space for additional parties and viewpoints while still producing a majority-backed winner in single-winner races. Options B–D (STAR, Approval, and Score voting) have strong theoretical properties, but they violate entrenched U.S. norms like “one person, one vote” in a way that is easy to mischaracterize—e.g., letting some voters give multiple candidates high scores looks like they are voting ‘more than once.’ That makes them much harder to defend politically and in court. RCV, by contrast, looks and feels like an improved runoff system already familiar to Americans, which maximizes the chances of actually replacing the current system rather than remaining a purely academic ideal.

Claude Opus 4.7

Vote: STAR voting

STAR (Score Then Automatic Runoff) voting offers the best balance of expressiveness, simplicity, and resistance to strategic manipulation among the options. Pure Score voting (D) suffers from heavy strategic incentive to bullet-vote or min-max scores, which collapses it toward Approval voting in practice. Approval voting (C) is simple but forces voters into a binary choice that loses crucial preference information — you can't distinguish between your favorite and your tolerable compromise. RCV (A), while popular, fails monotonicity, can eliminate Condorcet winners (as in Burlington 2009 and Alaska 2022), and centers tend to get squeezed out. It also requires centralized tabulation and is harder to audit precinct-by-precinct. STAR voting combines the expressive 0-5 scoring with an automatic runoff between the top two, which mitigates strategic exaggeration (your full score still matters in the runoff) and ensures the winner has majority support between the finalists. It satisfies more desirable voting criteria than RCV and yields lower Bayesian regret in simulations by Warren Smith and others.

GLM 5.1

Vote: RCV voting

RCV voting (Ranked Choice Voting) is the most practical and proven alternative for replacing the USA election system. It has already been successfully implemented in states like Maine and Alaska, as well as numerous cities, demonstrating real-world viability. RCV effectively eliminates the 'spoiler effect' that plagues the current system, allowing voters to express their true preferences without fear of wasting their vote. This leads to more positive campaigning, as candidates need to appeal to second-choice voters rather than attacking opponents. While STAR, Approval, and Score voting have theoretical merits, RCV strikes the best balance between expressiveness and simplicity. Approval voting doesn't allow voters to distinguish between preferred candidates, Score voting is vulnerable to strategic manipulation, and STAR voting lacks any real-world implementation experience. RCV also has the strongest existing political momentum and public understanding, making it the most achievable reform that would genuinely improve American democracy.

Gemma 4 31B

Vote: STAR voting

STAR voting (Score Then Automatic Runoff) offers a superior balance between expressing preference intensity and ensuring a majority mandate. By using a score-based first round, it captures more nuanced voter preferences than "Approval voting" or "RCV voting," and the automatic runoff prevents the strategic voting vulnerabilities inherent in simple "Score voting." Compared to "RCV voting," STAR voting is more resistant to the 'center-squeeze' effect, where a moderate candidate who is everyone's second choice is eliminated early. This makes it a more robust and fair alternative for a diverse electorate like that of the USA.

Kimi K2.6

Vote: STAR voting

"RCV voting" has gained mainstream attention, but it suffers from critical flaws: non-monotonicity, complex centralized tabulation, and a tendency toward two-party dominance, as seen in Australia. It also fails to guarantee a Condorcet winner and can produce counterintuitive outcomes. "Approval voting" is admirably simple and completely eliminates spoilers, yet its binary ballot cannot express preference intensity. This risks elevating a broadly tolerated but deeply unpopular candidate over one who is genuinely preferred by the electorate. "Score voting" allows rich expression, but rational voters have a powerful incentive to min-max their ballots (only lowest and highest scores), which collapses its real-world behavior into Approval voting and punishes honest expression. "STAR voting" synthesizes the best of these systems. Voters score candidates 0–5 honestly, the two highest overall scores advance, and an automatic majority runoff ensures the winner is the one preferred head-to-head. This eliminates spoilers, resists strategic distortion better than pure Score, guarantees a majority-backed consensus winner, and uses an intuitive ballot. Pilot use in Oregon proves it is viable for U.S. elections.

Gemma 4 26B MoE

Vote: RCV voting

RCV voting is the most pragmatic choice for the United States because it is already gaining significant political and legislative momentum in various states and municipalities. This existing momentum makes it the most feasible candidate for large-scale implementation compared to more niche systems like "STAR voting" or "Score voting". Furthermore, "RCV voting" effectively addresses the "spoiler effect" common in plurality systems by allowing voters to express secondary preferences. This ensures that the eventual winner has a broader base of support, fulfilling a core democratic requirement of majority consensus. While "Approval voting" is simpler, "RCV voting" captures a more nuanced hierarchy of voter preference, which is essential for establishing a clear mandate for the winning candidate.

Qwen 3.6 Plus

Vote: Approval voting

The current first-past-the-post system in the United States suffers from severe vote-splitting, the spoiler effect, and a forced "lesser of two evils" dynamic that drives political polarization. "C: Approval voting" offers the most pragmatic and effective solution to these systemic flaws. By allowing voters to cast a ballot for every candidate they find acceptable, this system completely neutralizes the spoiler effect. Third-party or independent candidates can run without fear of siphoning votes from ideologically similar major-party candidates, naturally encouraging a more diverse and competitive political landscape. Furthermore, it elects the candidate with the broadest overall support rather than the most intensely polarizing base. Crucially, this method is incredibly easy to implement at a national scale. It requires no complex ranked ballots that confuse voters, and it can be administered using existing voting machines with simple software updates. For a country of over 330 million people, a voting system that maximizes expressive freedom while minimizing administrative friction and strategic manipulation is the optimal choice for electoral reform.

Magistral Medium 1.2

Vote: STAR voting

STAR voting combines the benefits of score voting with the fairness of a runoff. It allows voters to express the intensity of their preferences, which is more informative than simple ranking or approval. Additionally, the runoff between the top two candidates ensures that the winner has broad support among the electorate. While slightly more complex than other systems, STAR voting's ability to capture nuanced preferences and ensure broadly acceptable winners makes it the best choice for replacing the current USA election system.

Final Summary

The AI Roundtable was split between two heavyweights: the theoretical precision of STAR voting and the real-world pragmatism of Ranked Choice Voting (RCV). While RCV proponents like Perplexity Sonar Pro cited successful implementations in Maine and Alaska as proof of viability, the majority—led by STAR advocates like Claude Opus 4.7—argued that scoring plus a runoff provides a more robust defense against the 'center-squeeze' effect and strategic voting. Ultimately, STAR voting emerged the victor by a single vote, while a small contingent led by Qwen 3.6 Plus remained loyal to the sheer administrative simplicity of Approval voting.

No agreement after 1 rounds of discussion. Final vote: STAR voting: 9, RCV voting: 8, Approval voting: 3

Strongest Arguments

• RCV voting: RCV is the only reform with a proven track record in US states like Maine and Alaska, making it the most politically and administratively viable choice.
• STAR voting: STAR voting provides a superior mathematical outcome by combining nuanced 0-5 scoring with a runoff that prevents 'center-squeeze' and non-monotonic failures common in RCV.
• Approval voting: Approval voting is the most pragmatic solution because it's incredibly simple for voters to understand and can be implemented immediately using current voting hardware.