Letter from Richard DeLeon
Dear Council Members,
I understand that the
Berkeley City Council will soon be discussing whether it should
place Instant Runoff Voting (IRV) for city elections on the March 2004 ballot.
I
strongly urge you to put IRV on the ballot for voter debate and
decision.
I'm sure you will hear many IRV advocates give
the standard arguments favoring this pro-democracy electoral reform.
Specifically: IRV will insure that elected representatives have
majority voter support. IRV will reward positive, issue-based
campaigns, discourage negative campaigning, and promote
coalition-building. IRV will require only one election rather than
two, thus maximizing turnout (runoff elections typically draw fewer
voters) and minimizing costs. These are all good reasons for
allowing the voters to decide for themselves whether IRV
is worth
doing.
I'd now like to offer four additional arguments in
favor of IRV.
(1) IRV is as American
as apple pie. In my advocacy of IRV in San Francisco, I often heard
the objection that IRV - in particular, the use of ranked-choice
ballots and transferable votes -- seemed strange, foreign, even
vaguely (and unpleasantly) European, definitely not American. Plus
it seemed "too complicated" for the average voter to figure out. To
the contrary, over the period 1915 to 1960, voters in 22 American
cities(including big ones like Cleveland and Cincinnati) used
ranked-choice ballots and transferable votes in proportional
representation systems to elect their city councils. Voters had no
trouble figuring out how to do it - and this was before computers
and with lower average schooling - and turnout in some cities
increased. In an era still dominated by urban political machines,
these electoral reforms were a good idea far ahead of their time,
and memory of their use has since been buried under two generations
of collective political amnesia. It is still a good idea, it is 100%
American, and now is the time. (For a superb historical study, read
Kathleen Barber's Proportional Representation and Election Reform in
Ohio [Ohio State Univ. Press, 1995].)
(2) IRV will encourage
full political disclosure and discourage two-faced sequential
electoral campaigns. In my own studies of San Francisco elections
over the last four decades, I observed the recurring pattern of a
candidate showing one personality & agenda to the voters in
November (to make it into the runoff), and then an entirely
different personality & agenda in December (carefully crafted to
win the runoff against a targeted single rival). An election under
IRV, on the other hand, is truly a one-day sale. Candidates can run
only one campaign & must lay all their cards on the table at
once for all the voters to see. The old Jekyll-Hyde strategies won't
work. This is a good thing.
(3) IRV will help to expand voter
choice, activate voter interest, encourage greater (but kinder &
gentler) political competition, and restore legitimacy to a
political system (at least at the state and national levels) that
seems perversely designed by controlling elites to limit choice,
eliminate competition, and minimize citizen participation. (Two
useful books on these themes: Matthew Crenson and Benjamin Ginsberg,
Downsizing Democracy: How America Sidelined Its Citizens and
Privatized Its Public [John Hopkins Univ. Press, 2002]; Steven Hill,
Fixing Elections: The Failure of America's Winner Take All Politics
[Routledge, 2002].)
(4) After San Francisco, less grief and
lower start-up costs for Berkeley. In the wake of San Francisco's
struggles to implement IRV, the sailing for Berkeley should be
smoother, quicker & less costly. Learning from San Francisco's
early trials with IRV will minimize Berkeley's errors &
generally reduce current uncertainties about technological
feasibility, administrative procedures, legal challenges, and voter
acceptance.
For all these reasons, please vote yes to put IRV
on the Berkeley ballot. Let your voters decide this important
issue.
Sincerely,
Richard E. DeLeon,
Ph.D. Professor Department of Political Science San
Francisco State University |