The architect of the instant runoff voting revival talks about why it's good for democracy and why Connecticut Dermocrats will never allow it.
By Andy Bromage
Published January 18th 2007 in The New Haven Advocate
You could if you lived in San Francisco. Or Burlington, or Minneapolis or a half-dozen other places. Instant runoff voting, a sort of electoral musical chairs that keeps eliminating candidates until someone gets a majority, is gaining momentum across the country as cities seek a more progressive way to elect leaders. Four more voting jurisdictions approved instant runoff systems this past November, and one more, in Maryland, will join them this month.
Caleb Kleppner, a Yale alumnus and New Haven resident, engineered the revival of instant runoff voting in San Francisco in 2002 while working for Fair Vote, and in doing so brought back a dormant American voting system devised in the Civil War era.
The concept is simple: In elections with three or more candidates, voters rank order their choices. If no candidate gets 50 percent or more, the one with the fewest votes is eliminated and the ballots are counted again. And so it goes until a candidate with a majority, not just a plurality, emerges.
We caught up with Kleppner at Koffee? on Audubon last week and to talk about instant runoff voting, why it�s good for democracy and why it�s doomed never to become law in Connecticut.
What�s the idea behind instant runoff voting?
Majority rule. Instead of having someone elected with 45 percent of the vote, or 40 percent of the vote, you want to make sure that the person getting elected is actually supported by a majority of the voters.
In Connecticut, all the elections are plurality elections, which means that the person with the most votes gets elected even if that person isn�t supported by the majority. Now in the past statewide election, every candidate did get a majority, but that�s not always the case. There have been lots of governors elected in Connecticut who had significantly less than 50 percent of the vote, which means you don�t know if that�s the person preferred by the majority.
What�s the advantage?
You give voters more choice. They can say, �I really like this candidate, I can tolerate this candidate, I can�t stand these other candidates. I�m not going to rank them at all.� You give the candidates incentive to reach out to constituents they might have ignored, you give the media incentive to scrutinize more candidates, and you get a more robust debate.
It seems like this just allows you to vote twice. Say you vote for a fringe candidate, or third party candidate who has no chance of winning, and then if they get knocked off, your vote counts toward the Democrat or the Republican. Is that right?
If someone gets elected with 40 percent, it could be that the other 60 percent can�t stand them. Academics are still debating whether Clinton would have won a head-to-head against Bush (in 1992) in an instant runoff and some people are convinced Clinton only got into office because of Perot. But the fact that Clinton didn�t have a mandate, a majority mandate, meant that Congress behaved differently. And I would say in a way that may well not have been democratic. So it�s certainly better to go into office knowing you were supported by a majority.
How old is instant runoff voting?
It started being used in public elections in the 1890s in Tasmania, Australia. The system was really developed in the 1860s by an American professor at MIT. It was first tried here in the 1900s, or 1910s. It was repealed for various reasons.
How does instant runoff voting apply to the spoiler effect?
It basically eliminates the spoiler effect. Think back to the 2000 election, when there was huge dissatisfaction with the Democrats and you have this guy Ralph Nader, who says Democrats aren�t good enough. Maybe I prefer Nader to Gore, but I know Nader isn�t going to win so I voted for Gore. Essentially they voted for their second choice. And they weren�t happy about it.
So would you make the case that had instant runoff voting been in place in 2000, Gore would be president?
Yeah, I would.
Has anybody tried to turn Connecticut on to this?
There have been some efforts and there hasn�t been a lot of traction. Right now the state legislature isn�t feeling like there�s any problem. It�s hard to convince the legislature to improve democracy if they are not feeling the pain. After the 2000 election, the Democrats in some places felt the pain. Connecticut wasn�t one of them. But ironically, Connecticut has a more vibrant third party past, including the election of Joe Lieberman.
Maybe when public financing goes into effect on a local level, or at the state level, and we�ve got more candidates running and candidates with money to take their case to the voters, maybe we�ll start worrying about this.
Is New Haven ripe for instant runoff voting?
As much as it pains me to say the town I live in isn�t ripe for it, I don�t think it is. You talk to the Board of Aldermen and see if any of them think there is a problem with the spoiler, or with non-majority winners. Most aldermen are not even contested. And when you have a three-way race, most of the time one of those candidates wins pretty big.●
