Personally, I'd really like us to adopt a system of preferential voting (aka instant runoff).

Just for fun, I ran a spreadsheet against the semi-official numbers listed in the NYTimes (the table cuts-and-pastes nicely from IE into Excel). There were a total of 7.5 million votes cast. Schwarzenegger got 3.6 million of those (48%), Bustamante got 2.4 million (32%), leaving some 20% of the votes for "other" candidates. Bustamante would have needed to get virtually all of them in order to win, which would be unlikely, no matter your election system.

While I was at it, I decided to play some what-if games. If we assign all the McClintock (conservative republican) and Ueberroth (republican) votes to Schwarzenegger, and we assign all the Camejo (green) and Huffington (?) votes to Bustamante, then we've covered all the big vote getters. After that, you've got Larry Flynt and Gary Coleman. Heaven only knows how you could assign those votes, so let's leave them, and everybody else, in the "other" column. Now the totals look like this:

Schwarzenegger: 4,642,783 votes (still wins)
Bustamante: 2,651,741 votes (still nowhere close)
None-of-the-above: 214,295 votes

If you buy into my assumptions on voters for the top seven candidates, then the remaining "Cowboy Neil" voters simply aren't enough to effect the election. Pretty much no matter how you slice it, no matter what voting system you use, Arnold wins this election.

Massive caveat: they still have to count all the absentee ballots, which I read somewhere were almost 1/3 of the total cast ballots. That would mean there's another 3 million or more uncounted votes. To win the election, Bustamante would need to get upwards of 70% of those votes cast for him. That seems unlikely. On the flip side, the recall question was much closer. A disparity in the absentee ballots would be more likely to keep Davis in office than to elect Bustamante.