Instant Runoff Voting -- It's not just for SF anymore

As I stated in my first-ever post on this site, voting reform is one of my pet issues. Specifically the need to both abolish the electoral college and institute some type of instant-runoff voting. I'm happy to say that both of these efforts got a boost this month.

Abolishing the electoral college is an idea that gained a lot of support after Al Gore won the popular vote in the 2000 election, but lost in the electoral college. The other day, another blow was struck when a George Bush elector in West Virginia said he would refuse to cast his vote for Bush if Bush took West Virginia. Certainly good news for Democrats. He says he probably won't give his vote to Kerry, but likely would cast a protest vote for Dick Cheney. This is the 10th time that this has happened since the establishment of the electoral college.

The more of these types of situations that arise, the more people that will back the abolition of the electoral college. No electoral college would mean that everyone's vote would count toward the final tally, unlike now, where millions of people who live in solidly Blue (or Red) States feel their votes are meaningless.

This system disenfranchises millions of voters every election, and needs to go. A step in the right direction is having more states decide to split their electoral votes -- a measure which is on the ballot this year in Colorado. But the real carrot is banishing the crusty, old electoral college system to the annals of American political history.

On to Instant Runoff Voting. This month is an historic one for proponents of IRV. Not only is San Francisco becoming the first major municipality in America to employ instant-runoff voting, but Jesse Jackson, Jr. has introduced a (likely DOA) bill into the House that would require all states to use instant-runoff voting for federal elections by 2008. It is more of a symbolic effort than a realistic one, but it is encouraging nonetheless.

But many of you are still wondering: What is Instant Runoff Voting, anyway? Well, allow me to explain to the best of my ability. The basic definition of instant-runoff voting is a voting method where the voter ranks the candidates in order of preference, rather than voting for only one candidate.

Let's say there are four candidates for mayor of San Francisco: Gavin Newsom, Matt Gonzalez, Angela Alioto and Tom Ammiano.) Our voter ranks them this way:

1. Matt Gonzalez
2. Tom Ammiano
3. Gavin Newsom
4. Angela Alioto

From there, it becomes a little more complex. In the system now in use in San Francisco, the votes would be tallied like this:

First, the first-place votes are tallied. As you see above, our sample voter ranked Gonzalez first. When all votes were counted, so did 199,999 other people, giving Matt Gonzalez 200,000 first place votes. Tom Ammiano had 50,000 people rank him first on their ballots. Gavin Newsom had 250,000 people rank him first on their ballot. And Angela Alioto got 40,000 first-place votes. So after the first-place votes have been tallied, the preliminary results look like this:

1. Gavin Newsom -- 250,000 votes
2. Matt Gonzalez -- 200,000 votes
3. Tom Ammiano -- 50,000 votes
4. Angela Alioto -- 40,000 votes

No candidate has a majority of the votes (more than 50%), so the next step is to knock off the last place candidate. In this case, Angela Alioto, and redistribute her votes. This done by taking the ballots that ranked her first (40,000 of them) and now ingoring their first place votes, since Alioto is now out of the race. The former Alioto ballots are now redistributed according to who these people ranked second. Let's say, it splits like this: 10,000 for Newsom, 20,000 for Gonzalez and 10,000 for Ammiano. When these votes are redistributed, now the race looks like this:

1. Newsom -- 260,000
2. Gonzalez -- 220,000
3. Ammiano -- 60,000

But still, no candidate has carried more than 50% of the 540,000 total votes. So now we knock off the last place candidate again -- this time Ammiano and redistribute his votes. On the Ammiano ballots (60,000 of them), we now ignore both Ammiano and Alioto's names. So whoever is ranked higher between Newsom and Gonzalez on each of those ballots gets that vote. Let's say it goes like this: 55,000 for Gonzalez and 5,000 for Newsom. Now the race has gotten interesting, because when we redistribute, Gonzalez has now taken the lead.

1. Gonzalez -- 275,000
2. Newsom -- 265,000

And now, Gonzalez has a majority of the votes and becomes mayor.

Instant Runoff voting is designed to allow people to vote on all of the candidates, rather than just choosing one. It also eliminates many of the situations where it would benefit a voter to choose someone who they believe has a chance to win, rather than voting for who they want the most. There are still scenarios where this type of strategic voting would be necessary (especially if a third party beame strong enough to knock off one of the Big Two), but it is a step in the right direction.

There is another type of instant-runoff voting called the Condorcet method (named after a French mathematician), that retains the voter ranking aspect of IRV, but tabulates the votes differently by dividing each ranking into all of the possible one-on-one matchups between candidates. This method would completely eliminate strategic voting -- but has a couple of problems of its own. For example, it doesn't measure the strength of a voter's support for a candidate (other than in relative terms). And because of this, there are scenarios where a candidate can win by just being ranked in the middle of the pack by most voters. The problem here being that if voters are ranking several candidates they may throw the candidates they know nothing about (and thus don't feel strongly about) in the middle. In this way, they might mistakenly help a Libertarian or American Independent or a complete wackjob like Alan Keyes get into office. It is the best system only when voters know enough about the candidates and use it properly. In other words, you'd hope that most voters would rank Kerry AND Bush ahead of Alan Keyes. So I think that the media would have to carry more responsibility for educating the voters on all candidates and how their ranking could affect the outcome.