what is the summary of this Due to the laws and mechanics of the American presidential election system, the plurality winner of a state's popular vote generally gains that state's entire electoral vote. Thus, the winner of the national election is not necessarily the most popular candidate. In the 30 presidential elections from 1880 to 2000, there were two occasions in which the winner of the presidential election did not win a plurality of the popular votes and ten occasions in which the president chosen by this system did not receive the majority of votes cast. Some critics believe that the electoral process should be replaced by a system that might better choose a president who is the most popular candidate among voters. Proposed alternatives include multiple rounds of elections, "approval voting," and "rank voting."

In the approval voting system, each voter can cast votes for as many candidates as he or she wishes. A voter can select one candidate whom he or she favors, or a voter who disapproves of certain candidates can vote for every candidate except the ones whom he or she opposes. The Secretary General of the United Nations is elected using approval voting, and, in a 1990 statewide referendum using the approval voting system, Oregon voters chose from five options for school financing. The approval voting system, however, can be confusing, and it can, theoretically, work against candidates who take strong stands on the issues and therefore attract disapproval.

Rank voting is known more formally as "Borda voting" after its first known proponent, Jean Charles Borda. In this scheme, each voter can rank candidates from first to last. Depending on the number of candidates, each position would represent a number of points. For instance, if there were five candidates, the candidate ranked first would get five points, the candidate ranked second would get four points, and so on. The candidate with the most points in the end would be the winner.

Rank voting is used in the United States by the Associated Press to choose the best college sports teams, and a variant is used in most Australian elections. The rank system is advocated by a number of noted scholars, but it is criticized by some because the candidate ranked first by a majority of voters can still lose. For example, a' candidate who is ranked second by 80 percent of the voters could end up with more 30 points than one who is ranked first by 52 percent of the voters. Although alternative voting systems offer noteworthy alternatives to the current process, there is not enough support for an alternative system in the United States to make its adoption likely in the near future on a national scale.