The 2016 presidential election will be held on the Tuesday after the first Monday in November and until then most attention will focus on the two nominees. But there are more enduring issues. The electoral system's poor designs compromise the results. One problem is a lack of uniformity. There are literally 100 sets of rules for the conduct of primaries. The primary system tends to empower extreme wings of both parties. There are 13,000 electoral management bodies to run the election, a recipe for incompetence as demonstrated by Bush v Gore(2000).There are also problems of universal suffrage. Apart from Republican efforts to place difficulties on voting, the Electoral College system does not necessarily coincide with the will of the majority and in effect disenfranchises the majority of voters. And, needless to say, there are problems with political finance rules. While some of the problems can be traced to path dependency and political culture, institutional redesign holds the best prospects of making the system fairer and more productive.

Dr. Roland Rich teaches political science at Rutgers University. He was Executive Head of the United Nations Democracy Fund from 2007 to 2014. From 2010 to 2014 he was concurrently Officer-in-Charge of the United Nations Office for Partnerships. Between 1998 and 2005, he was the Director of the Centre for Democratic Institutions at the Australian National University. He joined the Australian Foreign Service in 1975 and had postings in Paris, Rangoon and Manila and, from 1994 to 1997 he was Australian Ambassador to Laos. At headquarters, he also served as Legal Advisor and Assistant Secretary for International Organisations.