Ralph Nader's latest presidential bid may be a nightmare for Democrats, but it's the opportunity of a lifetime for high school civics teachers (presuming some representatives of that endangered species still walk the Earth).

Possible questions for classroom discussion:

1. Does our venerable Electoral College system -- essentially a series of winner-take-all contests in which a candidate who wins as little as 2 percent of the vote in one or two key states can determine the national outcome -- still make sense in 2004?

2. Does a commitment to "work within the system" effectively bar voters from casting their ballots for any third-party candidate?

3. Has the tiny City of Ferndale discovered a way for disgruntled citizens to register a protest without squandering their votes on a lost cause?

Spoil-free possibilities

In a multi-candidate race, instant runoff voting eliminates the spoiler phenomenon in which two candidates whose combined totals represent a majority of the votes deliver victory to a third.

Assuming that most Florida voters who cast their presidential ballots for Nader in 2000 would have listed Al Gore as their second choice, it's easy to see how instant runoff voting might have kept the White House's current tenant in Texas.

(But the use of instant runoff voting would likely have delivered the 1992 presidential election to the first President Bush rather than Bill Clinton -- raising the possibility that Gore wouldn't have been in a position to win the Democratic nomination eight years later.)

New push on old idea

Ferndale didn't conceive instant runoff voting -- the credit goes to a 19th Century professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology -- but it could become one of the first Michigan cities to adopt the method for municipal elections.

A group of would-be reformers led by Ferndale Mayor Robert Porter and City Councilman Craig Covey hopes to place a ballot proposal before city voters this November. If they succeed, the vote in subsequent mayoral elections would be tabulated using the instant runoff methodology.

But even if Ferndale's example catches on -- the instant runoff concept has already been embraced by political entities as distinct as the City of San Francisco and the Utah Republican Party -- it may be a while before it can be adapted to presidential politics.

The bipartisan committee that recommended optical-scan voting machines as the Michigan standard after the Florida presidential debacle heard testimony in support of instant runoff voting, Secretary of State Terri Lynn Land's spokeswoman Kelly Chesney said Tuesday, "but the election machine vendors have not developed solutions for it." She said the cost of adopting the methodology in Michigan hasn't been explored, "since no one in our state uses it."

Still, it isn't hard to see how a significant showing by Nader in a closely contested state like Florida -- or Michigan -- could put instant runoff voting on the front burner.