Word: abolitionist
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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...centuries, our elections have suffered from a flawed, plurality voting system. Our system produces outcomes in which the winning candidate often does not represent the policy preferences of the majority of voters. In the presidential election of 1844, when slave-owner James Polk defeated widely-respected abolitionist Henry Clay, Polk’s fellow abolitionist James Birney accounted for the narrow difference in many states that Clay lost, and probably cost abolitionists the presidency decades before the Civil War. In 1912, William Howard Taft, Theodore Roosevelt, and Eugene Debs created a jumbled electoral confusion and allowed Woodrow Wilson to waltz...
...variety of problems with our current electoral system. It could prevent low turnout primaries from determining the general election slate of candidates while also not allowing every candidate who files for election a place on the ballot for November elections. If America had instant-runoff, a majority of abolitionists might have elected an abolitionist president in 1844, and a majority of liberals might have elected a liberal president in 2000. The winning candidate of every election could proclaim the support of a majority of the electorate, and elections would be about policy preferences instead of gamesmanship. A strong democracy requires...