Instant Runoff Voting
One alternative to the closed-choice two-candidate limit general elections envisioned by California Proposition 62 is instant runoff voting, supported by the Libertarians and others.
From the Center for Voting and Democracy:
Instant runoff voting is a winner-take-all, constitutionally protected, voting system that ensures a winning candidate will receive an absolute majority of votes rather than a simple plurality. IRV eliminates the need for runoff elections by allowing voters to rank their candidates in order of preference. IRV is not a form of full representation or proportional representation....
Additional information from their FAQ:
What is instant runoff voting? Instant runoff voting is a method of electing a single winner. It provides an alternative to plurality and runoff elections. In a plurality election, the highest vote getter wins even if s/he receives less than 50% of the vote. In a runoff election, two candidates advance to a runoff if no candidate receives more than 50% in the first round.
How does it work? Voters rank candidates in order of choice: 1, 2, 3 and so on. It takes a majority to win. If anyone receives a majority of the first choice votes, that candidate is elected. If not, the last place candidate is defeated, just as in a runoff election, and all ballots are counted again, but this time each ballot cast for the defeated candidate counts for the next choice candidate listed on the ballot. The process of eliminating the last place candidate and recounting the ballots continues until one candidate receives a majority of the vote. With modern voting equipment, all of the counting and recounting takes place rapidly and automatically.
IRV acts like a series of runoff elections in which one candidate is eliminated each election. Each time a candidate is eliminated, all voters get to choose among the remaining candidates. This continues until one candidate receives a majority of the vote....
Does IRV eliminate "spoilers" and vote-splitting? Yes....In partisan races, IRV prevents the possibility of a third party candidate "spoiling" the race by taking enough votes from one major candidate to elect the other.
Does IRV save money? Yes. Traditional two-round, "delayed" runoffs are common around the country. IRV halves the cost of those elections because it determines a majority winner in a single election. Before adopting IRV, for example, San Francisco spent as much as $2 million on each election in its delayed runoff....In such situations IRV also reduces the reliance of candidates on special interest donors because they only have to campaign and raise money for one election rather than two.
Does IRV affect voter turnout? Yes. Turnout generally increases. IRV gives every voter incentive to participate because your vote still counts even if your first choice candidate is defeated. Also, since IRV only requires one election, the decisive election takes place when turnout is highest, typically November.
Does IRV affect campaign debate? Yes. Because IRV may require second and third choice votes to win, candidates have incentive to focus on the issues, to attract voters to their positions and to form coalitions. Negative campaigning and personal attacks are much less effective in an IRV election.
Where is IRV used? Many places. Ireland uses IRV to elects its president, Australia to elect its House of Representatives, London to elect its mayor, San Francisco to elect its major city offices such as mayor, Utah Republicans to nominate congressional nominees at its state convention, many major universities for their student government elections and the American Political Science Association to elect its president. Literally hundreds of jurisdictions, organizations and corporations use IRV to elect leaders.
Note: back on January 21, I examined proportional representation here and here. The two proposals have been contrasted by Douglas J. Amy:
Clearly the newest and “hottest” electoral reform idea in the United States right now is instant runoff voting or IRV. Many electoral reformers have jumped on the IRV bandwagon and there are now several efforts to promote the adoption of this alternative voting system on the city and state level. But while this voting system does has some advantages, it also has some serious limitations and drawbacks. And whereas IRV is appropriate for single-office elections like mayor and governor, it is clearly not the best system for legislative elections. The best system for those elections is proportional representation (PR), and an overenthusiastic effort to promote IRV may only make it more difficult to adopt PR....
[I]nstant runoff voting is a very poor substitute for proportional representation. It offers very few political benefits compared to using PR for legislative elections. Although it has a few advantages over plurality voting, IRV is still a winner-take-all system and so is prone to all the other serious drawbacks of these systems. And as one veteran electoral scholar, professor Wilma Rule, has observed, there are several important things that IRV does not do – but PR does. “[IRV] is a majority system which leaves out the political minority especially women and ethnic minorities, and third and other small parties.” Thus IRV does nothing to help solve our voting rights problems, or aid in the election of more women. Nor does it ensure fair and accurate representation for all parties, including minor parties, as PR would. IRV slightly reduces but does not eliminate most of the enormous numbers of wasted votes in plurality elections. It also does not produce multiparty legislatures that truly reflect the variety of political views in the electorate. Finally, unlike PR, IRV eliminates none of the problems associated with redistricting, such as uncompetitive districts and partisan gerrymandering. In short, in legislative elections, IRV is not much better than plurality elections; and as a winner-take-all system, it remains grossly inferior to PR. Adopting proportional representation elections would bring a number of badly needed changes to American elections and American politics – adopting IRV would not.
ghgcorp.com contrasts the two proposals:
I want to clarify the difference between Instant Runoff Voting...(aka the Australian ballot, aka the Alternative Vote, aka Hare's Method) and Proportional Representation....They are being advocated by a lot of the same people (ie. John Anderson's Center for Voting and Democracy (CVD), and several minor political parties), and some of the ballots look similar, but the arguments pro and con are different.
PR implies diversity in the legislature, with the representatives representing factions that don't necessarily have to cooperate to get their candidates elected. I have seen economists (Buchanan and Tullock, 1962) write about this in terms of "explicit bargaining," and the idea is that legislative deals are made between the various representatives after the election.
IRV produces results more like the Westminster system, aka Single Member Plurality (SMP), aka First Past The Post (FPTP). SMP is the most familiar system in the US, the one used to elect Congress....Here you get "implicit bargaining," where the trade-offs are made in the candidates' platforms, and the voters presumably pick the candidates who make more attractive compromises. If you envision people's views as laid out along a left-right spectrum, the candidates closest to the median voter are supposed to get elected (centrists). The deals are supposed to be made before the election, with the resulting legislature being more or less a rubber stamp for the median voter.
I have two main arguments for IRV. The first is that IRV does a better job than SMP of electing centrist candidates....In Britain, they have large non-centrist Labour and Conservative parties each supported by about 40% of the voters, and a centrist Liberal Alliance supported by about 20%....The British Parliament, elected by SMP...tends to bounce back and forth between the extremes rather than staying in the center....The worst thing about SMP from my perspective is that it severely undermines any attempt to have more than two viable parties, and so politics under SMP tends to be very oligarchic.
Maurice Duverger said that the tendency for SMP to produce two-party elections is so strong that it comes as close as anything does in the field of sociology to being a natural law. The "mechanical" effect of underrepresenting minor parties in Parliament is reinforced by the "psychological" effect that people don't like giving their support to a party that consistently gets screwed. Another quasi-natural law is that political parties are oligarchal. It is normal for there to be a lot of conflict between party leaders and political candidates, but one thing that makes the US weird is the use of primary elections, which tends to severely undermine party discipline. In Britain, the party leaders usually win these fights. In the US, the candidates usually do....
Former Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich supported both ideas:
Our election system is in need of serious reform to expand and enrich democracy. I support measures such as:
- Instant Runoff Voting (IRV)
- Comprehensive campaign finance reform and Clean Money public financing of the public's elections
- Ample free television time for candidates, coupled with the break-up of the media monopolies that restrict political debate
- Election Day as a holiday
- Election Day voter registration
- Enhanced voting rights enforcement
- An end to the racially-biased disenfranchisement of felons who have served their time
- Full Congressional representation for residents of the District of Columbia
- Cross-party endorsement or "fusion"
- An inclusive debate process that does not exclude credible third-party candidates
- Expansion of elections, using full (proportional) representation, which assures more accurate and broader representation than winner-take-all elections
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