http://www.timberjay.com/current.php?article=3164
Tower Timberjay News
Friday, March 30, 2007 Volume 18, Issue 13

IRV shows how to put heart back into our elections
By Nancy Jo Tubbs

Do you vote with your heart or your head?

Heart voters are the ones who go with the candidate who most closely reflects their opinions, whether or not the poor sucker has a chance of winning. Those folks are often labeled “spoilers,” like those who voted for Green Party candidate Ralph Nader in 2000 and have been charged with losing the cliff-hanger election for Al Gore.

Head voters are the ones who calculate the odds and vote for the candidate who has a chance of winning, even if voter and candidate are not politically dancing cheek to cheek.

Both kinds of voting lead to that kind of surprise you’ll remember from the time you asked for a pony for your birthday, but instead, got a boa constrictor.

Vote for Nader, get Bush.

Vote for Gore, get Bush.

If I thought this might happen again in 2008, I’d just take an aspirin and go lie down. Please wake me after the election.

But no, there’s hope. The nice people at FairVote Minnesota propose a compromise designed to rejuvenate both our hearts and heads. It’s called Instant Runoff Voting (IRV), and explaining the fine print requires an advanced degree in election algebra. But it’s worth at least reading the “IRV for Dummies” version, which I—an English major—will attempt to provide.

IRV is a method of voting by which you get to pick your first, second and third choice of candidates for an office, all on one ballot. The first choices are counted, and if one candidate gets a majority, he or she wins. Hurrah, decision made! Let the governing begin!

We think of majority rule as the basis for democracy, so I digress for a moment to remind us all that in the last three presidential elections, the winner has received less than a majority of the popular vote. You may remember that Jesse The Body Ventura, was elected with 37 percent. In Minnesota, elections were decided by less than a majority in 2000 for three U.S. Representatives, and in 2002 for five statewide seats.

So if, as often has been the case, none of candidates A, B nor C get a majority, under IRV the candidate who received the fewest votes—say, B— is defeated, and the instant run-off count ensues. There’s no need for an expensive second ballot, because B’s voters’ second choice votes are distributed to the remaining two candidates to reach a result.

We are now entering the math portion of this rant, and I remind you, I was an English major, so here goes.

Candidate A gets 40 percent of the vote. Candidate B receives 15 percent. Candidate C (who was on a train going west at 10 mph) gets 45 percent of the vote. That adds up to 100 percent, right?

Candidate B, with 15 percent, drops out. Her 15 percent is divided between the other two candidates, based on who B’s voters ranked as their second choices. A gets an additional 12 percent, and C receives 3 percent. Okay, third graders, check my math: A wins the election with 40+12=52 percent. C loses with 45+3=48. We all go out drinking with our favorite candidate’s supporters and, again, let the governing begin.

The election algebraists at FairVote Minnesota have calculated solutions to all permutations of complications that might occur, but you’ll have to check their website for the those equations.

IRV allows voters to affirm the choices of both their heads and hearts. Rather than marginalizing outlanders in primaries or third party candidates in elections, this system encourages votes to consider all of the candidates on the menu for the intellectual and practical value of their ideas.

While many prominent liberal politicians, activists and celebrities campaigned for Nader and his policies for consumer rights, environmentalism, feminism, human rights, anti-imperialism and anti-corporatism, his campaign was reduced by the opposition to this: A vote for Nader is a vote for Bush. Under IRV, voters who believed in Nader in their hearts, would have voted for him in larger numbers. If he came in third, his votes wouldn’t have been thrown in the trash, they’d have been distributed, by voter preference, between Bush and Gore. We’d have a more representative government today.

A grassroots St. Paul group is collecting signatures to put instant run-off voting on the November ballot. Cities with home rule charters can adopt IRV by incorporating it in their charters, and state and federal elections can be conducted by IRV after changing state law and upgrading voting machines. In various permutations IRV is used in Ireland, Australia and Canada. It’s being implemented in U.S. jurisdictions including Minneapolis, Oakland and San Francisco, CA, Cambridge, MA, Burlington, VT, judicial seats and municipalities in North Carolina and county offices in Pierce County, WA.

Current voting practices sometimes leave us with elected officials who didn’t receive the majority vote and may not have even been the majority’s second choice. The time has come to consider IRV and re-energize the voters, our democracy and ourselves.

Don’t we want, next time, to vote with both our heads and our hearts?