By Bill McKibbon
Published December 13th 2004 in Vermont Public Radio
After an election is over - especially a traumatic
election like the one we just went through - the last thing that most
of us want to think about is voting and ballots and the like. In fact,
however, the new alignment in the state legislature offers a real
possibility for fundamental change: if they wanted to, the Democrats in
the Vermont House and Senate might be able to start us down the road
toward Instant Runoff Voting.
Instant Runoff Voting is the
system used in countries like Australia, and cities like San Francisco
and Cambridge. Instead of simply choosing the candidate for, say,
governor, you get to rank the contenders. Imagine a three-way
governor's race that featured, say, Tom, Dick and Harriet. You would
list them in your order of preference, and all the #1 votes would be
tallied. But if no one had a clear majority, then you'd eliminate the
lowest vote-getter: Dick, say. And then you'd go through his ballots to
see who his supporters had ranked second and add them to the
appropriate piles. When you were finished, someone would have the
biggest stack, and they'd be the new governor.
The system's
attributes are obvious. You can vote for a third party candidate
without worrying that you're acting as a spoiler, since your vote would
eventually be counted for your second choice candidate; that is,
everyone can vote their conscience, and no one is simply voting their
conscience. And whoever eventually wins will be the choice of a
majority of the electorate: the specter of the legislature picking a
winner from among three minority candidates will disappear.
But
there's another, subtler benefit as well: there's suddenly a strong
incentive for candidates to avoid really nasty negative campaigning.
You don't want to completely alienate the supporters of your opponent,
because you hope that some of them will list you second on their
ballots. The kind of nasty radio ads that suddenly started appearing at
the end of the last campaign might well backfire on their sponsors;
instead of building divisions, you'd want to build coalitions. As a
young newspaper reporter, I covered several Instant Runoff Voter
elections in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and they were spirited and
hard-fought without a trace of pettiness.
Politicians are
reluctant to change the system that got them elected. But Vermont's
leaders have a well-deserved reputation for statesmanship, and now is
the time to exercise it.
I'm Bill McKibben from Ripton.
Environmentalist
Bill McKibben is a scholar in residence at Middlebury College. His most
recent book is "Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age."