By Leif Utne
April 29, 2003
Imagine an electoral system that lets you
vote your hopes rather than your fears, yet guarantees that the
winning candidate always has the support of a majority of voters. A
system that encourages third parties but ensures that no minor
candidate will ever spoil an election for a popular major party
candidate. Sound too good to be true? Not only is such a system
possible, it's already in use in many places around the world,
including a number of cities and towns across the United States.
It's called instant runoff voting (IRV), and it's rapidly becoming a
part of American elections from Massachusetts to
California.
Here's how IRV works: In any race where three or more candidates
are competing for the same office, voters rank the candidates in
order of preference. When the ballots are tabulated, if one candidate
doesn't win an outright majority, the candidate with the least votes is
eliminated. Then the second-choice votes of that candidates supporters are added
to the remaining candidates totals, and the ballots are tabulated
again. The process repeats until one candidate wins a majority.
Australia has used a form of IRV called preference voting in
state and federal elections for more than a century. In this country,
Cambridge, Massachusetts, has used a variant of IRV in city council races
since the 1950s. And many college campuses have used the system in
student elections for decades. During the past three years, IRV has been adopted
for local elections in Vancouver, Washington, Santa Clara County,
California, and the cities of Oakland and San Francisco. The Utah Republican Party
used IRV for the first time last year to nominate its congressional
candidates.
According to the Center for Voting and Democracy (
www.fairvote.org), a nonpartisan advocacy group that promotes reforms like IRV, proportional
representation, and other innovations to make elections more fair
and democratic, several factors have propelled recent interest in
IRV. The first is the growing incidence of multiple-candidate elections, where
third-party spoilers split the vote of the majority, potentially handing
victory to a candidate disliked by as much as 60 percent of voters.
Democrats in New Mexico, who blame the Greens for handing a congressional seat
in a heavily Democratic district to the Republicans, have made IRV a
priority. And so have Alaska Republicans, sore that former Democratic governor
Tony Knowles was elected with only 41 percent of the vote after an
independent candidate split the conservative electorate in that solidly Republican
state. The last three presidential elections have all been influenced by
third-party candidacies: Ross Perot in 1992 and 1996; Ralph Nader and Pat
Buchanan in 2000. In fact, if the 0.4 percent of Florida voters who picked
Nader had been able to rank Gore as their second choice under an IRV
system, Gore would have won with 50.5 percent of the vote.
The other watershed for IRV advocates was a 1999 report
commissioned by the Vermont legislature that strongly endorsed IRV for statewide
and legislative races. The report points out that, ironically, the
public campaign financing laws that many states have adopted recently
have drawn more candidates into the field, increasing the likelihood of
split votes with nonmajority winners. While fixing that problem is the
primary reason for the commissions endorsement of IRV, the report lists
numerous other IRV benefits, including a decline in tactical (as opposed to
sincere) voting, fewer wasted votes, and less negative campaigning.
Vermont is expected to adopt IRV by the end of its 2003-04
legislative session. Meanwhile, IRV advocates in Massachusetts are gearing
up for a ballot initiative campaign, and San Franciscos upcoming
municipal election will be the first big-city election in decades to use IRV. If
it goes well, IRV soon may be coming to a polling place near you.
