By Leif Utne
Published April 29th 2003 in Utne Reader
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.