I still think from watching the shitstorm that is the US election from another country has been somewhat perplexing.
He won the election and most people who use social media are wondering why, Yet very few people on popular social media sites (namely, Facebook and Twitter) have thought to realize that maybe, just maybe, not every voter is on social media, and does not constantly rant on about the election, sharing photos and stories with no source, sharing articles from sites such as Buzzfeed and Huffington post which aren't known for telling the truth, and biased left-wing agenda bullcrap. They haven't stopped to think for a second that the baby boomer generation are still voters, and they don't let the whole world know about their daily lives on social media. Whether or not they make a lot of noise online, they're still Americans, and they're still voters.
I mean I'm not an American. But everything from either left wing or right wing supporters, anything shared about Trump, not one reliable source was him lying about anything.
Still, I find him the lesser of two evils. I wish that the democratic system has a third vote option to select 'neither candidate, bring in a third'
This. A true democracy needs safeguards; the election results should be void if too many people chose not to vote, and it should never be wrong to vote for a third candidate C even though it seems obvious that he won't be the president. With the current US voting algorithm if one thinks C is the best candidate and A is the very worst, one has to vote for B to prevent A from becoming the president. That's pretty sad.
One way to do it is to require that the winning candidate should have more than 50% of the votes - for example, if there are three candidates A, B and C getting 40%, 30% and 20% (and perhaps a long tail of other candidates getting 10%), then there will be a new round of voting with only candidates A and B - thus, a vote for C is not lost, the voters for C will get a second chance to voice their opinion. A cheaper way to solve it would be that C is allowed to divert his votes to B if C doesn't want A to become the president; then people believing A would be the worst president can still vote for C. Yet another variant, that people list up candidates in a prioritized order on the voting slip.
I believe the theory is sound, but obviously there also needs to be more safeguards in place. Russia is a good example, theoretically they have a very good voting algorithm, with reelection between A and B if A didn't get past the 50%-threshold in the first attempt, and also the election result will be void and the process has to start all over again if there is too few voters showing up - though in practice something has gone horribly wrong over there ...
Another thing, a good constitution should have some workarounds against the winner-takes-all-problem. If A won the election with a 50.01% margin, it means that the opinion of 49.99% of the population is deemed worthless - in reality such an election result probably means a compromise between A and B is the Right path forward.
I could go on ... democracy is no simple thing, obviously ...
Sounds like you are over-complicating it... People vote for A and B mostly because the media hypes them up. Changing the voting system wouldn't change much, just make it more complicated (and probably easier to manipulate for that matter). One vote or everyone is fair. If every vote was equal, that would be more fair, but it's not going to change anytime soon. The problem that really needs to be addressed is how the media only hypes two candidates, then leaves the rest to fend for themselves. The news can pretty much choose who everyone votes for. If people would actually do their research, they could find a better candidate than the one they hate the least...
I think you're quite wrong about that; in a vote where the president can get elected with less than 50% of the votes there is a big pressure towards a de-facto two-candidate election. If you really don't want A to become president, then it's madness not to vote for B. That you actually like candidate C doesn't matter anymore, what matters is your dislike for A.
I'm generally not paying much attention to the US elections, but I think there has been real incidents in the US where a third candidate C actually paved the road for A to become president - if those who voted for C would have voted for B, B would have become president. I think it sounds pretty bad.
The thing is, people shouldn't change their vote just because they don't think their candidate has a chance. With this mindset, any third candidate never has a chance. This is ridiculous because people are then voting on who they hate the least instead of who they like the best. That's why only the hyped up candidates win. People just need to change their state of mind and vote for who they want. If everyone thought this way, we might get a better president...
And on the priority list of candidates you suggested... That would just be a more complicated way of recalculating the vote over and over again... It doesn't really make sense... Maybe a better way would to be to have several rounds, and eliminate the candidate with the least amount of votes every round... That still though sounds like a more complicated way to get just about the same results...
For me, as an outsider, the US president election is a quite much of a farce. The entertainment level is certainly bigger than for the Russian election, where it's blatantly obvious that the election is rigged, but anyway ... those claiming the US is the worlds biggest democracy they haven't read up what "democracy" actually means.
I believe tactical voting is a problem that can't be solved merely by insisting that people should vote for the candidate they believe is the best. I heard it before and just checked it up again at Wikipedia - it actually says that "(...) Arrow's impossibility theorem and Gibbard–Satterthwaite theorem prove that any useful single-winner voting system based on preference ranking is prone to some kind of manipulation", meaning all voting systems are prone to tactical voting - but some is worse than others, and I strongly believe the US system in itself excludes the possibility of a third candidate getting significant amount of votes. People being in favor of the third candidate pretty much has to vote tactically, or their vote for sure will be worthless.
I mentioned two alternatives - two-round systems are used in quite many presidental elections world-wide (including Russia - theoretically), as well as more local elections. Instant run-off is also popular, used in Australia and many other places.
Condorcet methods can also be either instant, with the voters ranking the candidates on one voting slip, or done as several voting rounds - the algorithms are supposedly better at finding a "compromise candidate" than the runoff-voting, but still there is room for tactical voting.
Voting in "rounds" would be so much better, but the US government doesn't really care too much about being fair... Moral of the story: US elections suck. Trump is our president...