Recent voter preference polls in the Democratic primary for the 8th Congressional District make at least one thing obvious: The winner won't come close to winning a majority.

Based on the latest polling, it is possible that the nominee will win with barely 20 percent of the vote, with little assurance that the winner could have defeated any of the losing candidates in a one-on-one race.

Clearly, we have come a long way from the truism that a simple majority vote is the best way to satisfy most people - a rough shot at finding ``the greatest good for the greatest number.'' The result also doesn't square well with the concept of representative government. If you factor in the typical voter turnout (usually under 50 percent), and those in the 8th who may prefer a Republican (16 percent, if we use the percent voting Republican in 1996), the number of voters who could determine the outcome is minuscule.

Yet the Democratic nominee will likely represent the district for the foreseeable future, especially given how heavily Democratic the district has voted coupled with the fact that more congressional incumbents die in office rather than lose a primary election.

It is possible that support will eventually coalesce behind a majority candidate. Ideally this would be the result of the candidate's positions and persuasiveness, but if it happens, it is usually a bow to the inevitable - the consequence of an electoral system that leaves the voter an all-or-nothing choice. And, in fact, it rarely happens - the amount of coordination and communication that would be required among the participants leaves the electorate stuck with the plurality winner.

Fortunately, there is a better way. It's called instant runoff voting - IRV - and it would enable the electorate to rank the candidates in order of each voter's preference. State legislative bills to enact IRV have gained the support of Common Cause chapters in Vermont and New Mexico, while voters in Santa Clara County in California and Multnomah County in Oregon will decide in November whether to make IRV an option for county elections.

IRV uses the idea of holding runoff elections to eliminate, in turn, the candidate with the fewest votes, until one candidate receives a majority. Voters whose candidates are defeated thus get the chance to pick among those remaining, and, significantly, winning candidates need to have sufficient support among all the voters to be the choice of those whose candidates were defeated.

The Irish presidential elections are run by IRV, and in 1990, the three candidates running for the office - Brian Lenihan, Mary Robinson, and Austin Currie - received 44 percent, 38 percent, and 17 percent of the first votes, respectively. Robinson was the second choice of most of Currie's supporters, resulting in her becoming Ireland's first woman president with a comfortable 53 percent majority, which, in turn, indicated her more broad-based support among the electorate.

Essentially, instant runoff voting is equivalent to the formation of
coalitions among voters. IRV conducts the runoffs by allowing the voter to rank the candidates in order of preference. If a candidate receives the fewest number of first choices from the voters, that candidate is eliminated and all of his or her ballots are redistributed to the second choice marked on each of them. There are then successive runoffs, eliminating the lowest polling candidate in each round and transferring his or her ballots, until one candidate achieves a majority.

The "instant'' in IRV refers to the fact that all the runoff elections are run at once, on one ballot, rather than in district rounds, but the technology exists to make the results virtually instant, too.

Cambridge's recent success with computerizing its preference elections has shown that once the ballots are loaded into a central computer, the process of redistributing ballots and determining a winner can take a matter of seconds.

There is no way a winner of an election by plurality can achieve the legitimacy of majority support when the numbers just aren't there, any more than we can make over 50 percent of the population above average.

But a plurality candidate can show he or she is the most representative of all the voters if we have instant runoff voting. It's a timely refinement to our system worth implementing - instantly, you might say.

(George Goverman is auditor of Cambridge's municipal elections. David R. Leslie is a board member of the Center for Voting and Democracy in Washington, D.C.)