2024 Marks a Historic Year for Voters as Mexico and the U.S. Face Landmark Elections with Different Electoral Systems

~ By Leo Brown, Amelia Perrin, Jocelyn Serlin, Sebastian Snover-Pattie

In June, Mexico elected its first woman president. In November, the United States may follow suit. The elections, six months apart, shine a light on different electoral systems, with Mexicans voting directly for their leaders in a plurality system while Americans use the Electoral College. 

On June 2, 2024, Mexicans cast their votes for over 20,000 federal and local offices, as well as for their president, as Kylie Madry and Valentine Hilaire reported for Reuters. 

 In Mexico, the presidential election is won by the candidate with the most popular votes. The winner doesn’t need a majority, just more votes than any other candidate.

Sixty million people voted and elected the first female president in Mexico’s history. Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo, the former mayor of Mexico City, secured the most votes out of the three candidates running. Pardo is backed by the Morena party, which is the current ruling party and swings towards left-wing populism, according to Carmen Morán Breña in a 2024 article with El País. 

This system of voting is not without controversy. A national 2017 public opinion survey reported that 77 percent of Mexican citizens favored a runoff election over the plurality system, according to Cynthia McClintock, professor of political science at George Washington University, speaking at a 2018 Latin America studies conference. 

In a runoff system, if no candidate wins more than 50% of the vote in the first round, the top two vote-getters face off in a second round of voting. This is in direct contrast to the single-round, plurality system, in which the candidate with the most votes in one round of voting is the winner.

“Under plurality, most citizens vote strategically for the candidate who has a chance to win that they prefer, and a new party is a ‘spoiler’ party. But with a runoff system, citizens can vote sincerely in the first round for the candidate in the entire field whom they prefer,” said McClintock.

Like Mexico, the United States is facing a historic race, with the potential to elect its first woman leader. Except it will use the Electoral College. 

The system awards each state a number of electors based on the state’s congressional delegation. When voters cast their ballots, they are choosing electors, not the candidate. Whichever party wins the popular vote in the state wins the electors for that state. Those electors then officially vote for the next president.

Supporters of the Electoral College say that it streamlines the voting process, especially when facing the possibility of a recount. This occurred in the 2000 election, when votes in Florida were recounted because of a razor-thin margin. 

“It confines vote-counting disputes to just one, or maybe a few, states. Imagine a Florida-style recount in every precinct in America,” said Matthew W. McConell, a former judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, in a 2016 interview with Stanford magazine.

Others like Doug McAdam, a professor of sociology who studies American politics at Stanford University, argue that “the Electoral College is responsible for disenfranchising, in effect, huge swaths of American voters.” 

A Pew Research Center study in 2024 showed that more than 63 percent of Americans prefer the popular vote to the Electoral College.

Despite differences in voting processes, one thing is the same—over 50 percent of citizens in both countries expressed dissatisfaction with their respective systems.