Let's rank presidential candidates

No, this is not a way too early post on the 2012 race.

With the government program including an electronic voting pilot project to be implemented in the 2008 municipal elections, it's time to consider going to ballots that allow the voter to rank the candidates in presidential elections. Such voting methods are more time-consuming to count by hand, but if we move to electronic voting, that ceases to be an important issue. A hand count can still be done to verify the result - just make a paper trail a required feature in the voting machines - but the preliminary machine-counted results would be available immediately. There are two big advantages to this: Firstly, we'd need only one round of voting since people can express their full range of preferences in one ballot. Secondly, it would eliminate the need for tactical voting, which is a common feature in two-round elections. Why organize two votes when you can get to an accurate result in one?

The French presidential election, which uses the same two-round method as the Finnish one, illustrates the incentives for tactical voting that often arise in that system. A voter who prefers the environmentalist candidate Voynet but above all is opposed to conservative candidate Sarkozy should vote for centrist candidate Bayrou, because according to polls Bayrou has the best chance of beating Sarkozy in the second round. On the other hand, a supporter of communist candidate Besancenot should consider voting for the socialist Royal to ensure that there'll be a left-wing candidate in the second round. The common thread is that neither can vote for the candidate they feel is the best. If France used an election method based on ranking the options, they could.

If you want to get fancy about it, you could use some Condorcet method. If you want to keep it simple, go for the tested Single Transferable Vote.