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Take Back America Conference
June, 2003
The Center attended the Take Back America
Conference by the Institute for America's Future. Our staff
spent three days educating attendees about instant runoff voting and
ran a straw poll election involving the Democratic nominees for
president. The election resulted in a victory for former
Vermont governor Howard Dean, but a number of interesting aspects
deserve further analysis.
Results data for TBA IRV Straw
Poll (MS Excel)
With 129 ballots and
9 candidates, it's no surprise that votes were spread among the
candidates such that no candidate won a majority of first choices.
We can expect that in next year's early primaries and caucuses,
where candidates winning less than 15% of the vote will not elect
any delegates to the national convention from that state.
The big winner in our
straw poll - admitted unscientific – was former Vermont governor
Howard Dean. He won the IRV election, and also showed strength in
our analysis of second choices of all candidates. Once the field was
reduced to two candidates through instant runoff voting, Dean won
with 79 votes, or 65%. Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich was the
runner-up with 43 votes (35%). In addition, Dean was the first
choice of 54 voters (42%) and the second choice of 35 additional
voters, meaning that 89 voters (69%) ranked him first or second. In
contrast, the frontrunner in national polls, Joseph Lieberman was
the first or second choice of 2.3% of voters in our straw poll.
Here are a few notes
about the chart that describes the instant runoff voting election
(called "election results"), which documents the round-by-round
tallies as the instant runoff vote count progressed and last-place
finishers were eliminated. As you'll recall, IRV works by
eliminating the last place candidate and then having ballots in the
next round count for that ballot's top-ranked candidate still in the
race. Through this process one candidate will win a majority of
votes. For example, because no majority was achieved in the first
round, Bob Graham, who received 1 vote, was eliminated. The person
who voted for Graham ranked John Edwards as a #2 choice, meaning
Edwards
picked up one vote in the second round of counting. This process was repeated
for several rounds until Howard Dean achieved the majority of the
vote. You'll notice some interesting patterns of support - for
instance, when John Kerry was eliminated, Dean picked up three times
more votes from his supporters than Kucinich, but Kucinich picked up
more votes from Gephardt supporters than Dean.
Note
that at the bottom of the data table are two rows labeled "exhausted
ballots" and "threshold." A ballot is "exhausted" when it does not
list a candidate still in the race. This means that by not ranking
remaining candidates, voters effectively choose not to vote in the
simulated runoffs. The "threshold" is the number of votes needed to
win an election - which is a majority of the votes, defined as one
more than half the votes.
In our straw poll, 129 ballots were returned, which
established a victory threshold of 65. As exhausted ballots
increased, the threshold can be lowered to reflect the number of
votes still active. The threshold was lowered to 62 in the 9th round
because the pool of votes at that point was 122.
In tabulating this
election, we broke three ties. In a real election, the chance of a
tie among the candidates is highly unlikely and can be broken by
referring back to the previous round counting to determine who
should be eliminated first.
This method resolved the tie between John Edwards and Al
Sharpton in the 7th round. However, two ties could not be broken by
any other means than a coin toss (these were candidates who had no
chance of winning this straw poll, regardless).
We
have also included information about 2nd choice of all of the first
round selections- this is not related to instant runoff voting, but
can show patterns of support among the nominees. Candidates are listed
vertically with their votes distributed horizontally. As an example
of how to read this chart, of the 18 people whose first choice was
John Kerry, five favored Dean second, five favored Edwards second,
four favored Gephardt second and so on. With IRV, candidates stand
to benefit without negative campaigns against their rivals because
they risk not gaining votes when their rivals are eliminated. As an
example, a large group of Kucinich voters chose Howard Dean as their
second choice. Rather than resorting to negative campaigning to try
to sway voters-and risk alienating potential supporters- IRV instead
gives Dean and Kucinich motivation to reach out and campaign for
each other's 2nd choice, thereby building coalitions of voters and
candidates and eliminating the "spoiler problem" when two similar
candidates split a voting bloc and elect someone with more support
than either similar candidate alone, but not combined.
IRV
is a well-established voting system that makes sense for a range of
elections. It is already used in Australia and Ireland to elect
their most powerful offices. IRV elects the mayor of London, and San
Francisco is getting ready to use IRV in their citywide races in
November. IRV is a sensible alternative to the current plurality
voting system. IRV eliminates the spoiler problem, ensures that the
winner of the election has a majority of the votes and inspires
candidates to campaign to be the second choice of other candidates,
resulting in less negative campaigns that demonstrate that politics
can be a civil sport.
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