1. At first I wondered how there could be 3% spoiled ballots when there were only two choices. Then I remembered this is a form of “Top Two” and these voters likely wrote in someone else since they didn’t like either of the two choices offered, joining the 8 1/2 % (!) who cast blank ballots, for a total of 11 1/2 % “Neither of the Only Two Offered On This Ballot.”

   I guess that shows the popularity of “Top Two.” A decent single-winner voting system would simultaneously and rationally allow for more than two strong candidates, without any of the mathematical problems of all Ranked Choice Voting Systems.

2. I wouldn’t use “top two” to describe French presidential elections. In France, the first round is an actual election, because someone can be elected in the first round. The second round is only held if no one gets 50% in the first round. So the 2nd round is best called a “runoff.”

   By contrast, in California and Washington, the first round can never elect anyone, even if someone gets 100% of the vote. That person must still run in November.

   Also in France, parties have nominees, and only the party nominee can have the party label on the ballot.

3. My bad. I had heard that this was a “runoff” election but had not checked first. Thank you for the additional information on parties and nominees.

   From a brief search, the system that France uses for their presidential election is called a “two-round system.” So the first round is conducted using Plurality Voting (“tell us only the candidate you rank first”), with its usual problems (vote splitting etc.), and this time it was characterized as a four way race, each of those getting around 20-24% in the first round, well short of a majority.

   The record number of blank ballots in the runoff election was highlighted on my local overnight radio news (network feed); many French voters were unhappy with the available choices for the runoff election.

   I still think that any system that would limit voters’ choices so poorly in a “runoff” election would ultimately not be very popular, including “two round” and “top two.”

4. 2-round is a far better system than what we have now though. It didn’t really limit choice either. The first round had only 10% more engagement than the second round. And they managed to toss out both major parties after the first round because of this system.

   And they still managed to obtain 10% higher voter turn out in the second round than we normally do in FPTP elections.

   It’s likely if we used two-round Johnson would have been on the second ballot. People are far more friendly to the idea of vote splitting if they know they get another vote for an alternate later.

   BTW, Macron in is a moderate libertarian.

5. Under the 5th Republic, the leader in the first round has never had a majority in the first round of a popular election (the first election in 1958 was an indirect election). Only in the first three did the leader receive so much as 40%. In five of the seven other elections, the leader has been under 30%.

   In the 2012 parliamentary elections, only 36 of 577 seats were decided in the first round.

   Under such conditions ‘Favoriser contre l’amour’ might have been decided differently.

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