As in parliamentary elections, one way to avoid candidates being elected with only a small proportion of the popular vote is to hold a second ballot if no one candidate wins a majority on the first round. This can be
- between the top two candidates (majority-runoff), or
- between more than two candidates (majority-plurality), as described earlier in the Two-Round System section (see Two-Round System).
France, many Latin American countries, and a number of states in Francophone Africa like Mali and the Ivory Coast use Two-Round Systems (TRS) to elect their presidents; indeed, many more countries who elect presidents use this system than use FPTP. Elsewhere in Africa the system is used by Sierra Leone, Namibia, Mozambique, Madagascar, the Congo and the Central African Republic; in Europe it is used by Finland, Austria, Bulgaria, Portugal, Poland, Russia, and the Ukraine.
There are, however, a number of adaptations to straight majority-runoff and majority-plurality rules. In Costa Rica a candidate can win on the first round with only forty percent of the vote; conversely, in Sierra Leone a second round is only avoided if one candidate gets fifty-five percent in the first. In Argentina, a successful candidate must poll forty-five percent, or forty percent plus more than a ten percent lead over the second-placed candidate. Uruguay's presidential election formula, used until the adoption of a straight TRS system in 1996, escapes any previously-outlined categorization. Individual political parties who exist, for electoral purposes, within coalitions (or lema) with other parties can present their own candidate in the presidential election. Voters choose between individual candidates, and then all the candidate votes of a lema are added together. The highest polling lema wins the seat, and the highest polling candidate within that lema fills the seat.
TRS presidential elections are deemed to be useful for maximizing the consent given to what is often the most powerful office in government. In particular, they tend to avoid the pitfall of a president wielding vast influence on the back of a minority of the voters. A number of countries also have minimum turnout rates for their presidential elections, typically set at a minimum turnout of fifty percent, as in Russia and many of the former Soviet republics; this is an additional mechanism for ensuring majority support. The utility of such provisions is illustrated by the election in 1996 of two presidents, from very different countries, who both came to power with the support of only one-fifth of the eligible voting-age population: President Clinton of the United States was elected with only twenty-three percent support, and President Chiluba of Zambia with twenty percent. Neither of these results would have been possible under the TRS or majority-turnout requirements of other jurisdictions. However, as with all Two-Round Systems, presidential elections held under TRS rules maximize the cost and resources needed to run elections, and the turnout drop-off between the first and second rounds of voting can often be severe and damaging.
Latin America has had a particularly problematic experience with TRS. Apart from those countries where parties could create winning pre-electoral alliances, so that presidential candidates could be elected in the first round (such as Brazil in 1994 and Chile in 1989 and 1994), TRS has led in many cases to minority governments and reduced governability. The system has deepened the polarization of multi-party systems, and accentuated problems of legislative gridlock. For example, in the 1990 elections in Peru, Alberto Fujimori obtained fifty-six percent of the votes in the second round, but his party won only fourteen of sixty seats in the Senate, and thirty-three seats of 180 in the Chamber of Deputies. In Brazil in 1989, Fernando Collor de Melo was elected in the second round with just under half of the votes, but his party won, in non-concurrent parliamentary elections, only three of seventy-five Senate seats and only forty of 503 seats in the Chamber of Deputies. In Ecuador, minority governments have been a constant outcome since the TRS was introduced for presidential elections in 1978.
