Instant Runoff Voting

The Burlington Free Press is carrying an editorial which caught my eye:

Instant runoff voting is a solution looking for a problem, an idea that goes against the time-honored tradition of our electoral system. The governor should waste no time in vetoing the bill passed last week by the Legislature that would put in place instant runoff voting for the House race this fall.[...]

Backers have argued that instant runoff voting gives candidates from smaller parties a better chance at the poll because people would worry less about throwing away their vote on someone unlikely to win and giving an advantage to a candidate they do not like.

It seems odd to change the way we elect our representatives simply to better the chances of candidates from some parties.[...]

Supporters have failed to present a compelling case for adopting an alternative electoral system. How we choose our elected representatives is too important to have anyone tinker with the procedure for vague reasons that has little to do with strengthening the hand of voters.

I’ll admit that IRV is not my favorite alternative voting scheme (see my earlier ruminations on superdistricts), there are a couple of rebuttable points in the editorial.

First, consider the comment,

It seems odd to change the way we elect our representatives simply to better the chances of candidates from some parties.

That would be a great argument to make but for the fact that we have a political duopoly in this country. The duopoly is at least in part the result of steps the major parties have taken to preserve their duopoly. Single-representative legislative districts gerrymandered to grant competitive advantages to incumbents, combined with ballot access laws that grant preference to the two major parties over independents and minor parties both work to maintain the two-party status quo.

While it is likely that a predominantly two-party system would result even if gerrymandering didn’t exist, or if ballot-access laws were party-blind, eliminating such inequities would at least give independents and minor party candidates a more level playing field to work off of.

It would be a lot easier to stomach the criticism of “[i]t seems odd to change the way we elect our representatives simply to better the chances of candidates from some parties” if the status quo didn’t exist in no small part to better the chances of candidates from other parties.

Also, consider the comment:

Supporters have failed to present a compelling case for adopting an alternative electoral system. How we choose our elected representatives is too important to have anyone tinker with the procedure for vague reasons that has little to do with strengthening the hand of voters.

While I can’t comment on what IRV supporters have or have not done in making their case in Vermont, I can offer two real-world examples that support the notion of IRV:

• 2000 Presidential Election in Florida: Regardless of your beliefs on what the outcome of Gore v. Bush would have been had a recount been undertaken, I think most reasonable people would believe that a majority of Floridians voted for a candidate other than George W. Bush. Had Florida had IRV in place…and if they had the ability to reasonably accurately count votes…it is likely that Gore would have won.
   
  Also, I wonder, if IRV had been in place countrywide in 2000, how many votes Nader would have received. Presumably his potential vote was diluted by folks wanting to meaningfully vote against Bush. If Nader and the Greens had been able to show a strong minority of support in polling numbers…well, I wonder how the country’s political picture would be different today.
   
• 2008 GOP Caucus in West Virginia: Although West Virginia’s caucus rules weren’t true IRV, the deal-making that took place certainly had IRV-like strategy behind them. No one candidate had a majority of support at the West Virginia caucus, but there was a definite majority of support for “not Romney”. Because of the cyclical nature of the balloting, the will of West Virginia caucus-voters was reflected in the final results.

There are plenty of reasons to oppose a transition to IRV—the complexity and cost of changes needed to retrofit a voting system, and the need for voter education chief among them. However, I think the BFP’s editorialist is off-the-mark on the reasoning provided in the editorial.

A couple more thoughts while they’re percolating in my brain:

On putting a fork in the Romney and Huckabee campaigns

According to the tally at CNN, Romney has 268 delegates to date, while Huckabee has 169.  The number of delegates required to win at convention is 1,191.  I believe there are still 1,035 delegates up for grabs.  Do a little math, and you see that unless either Romney or Huckabee  start sweeping the remaining states, they’re on the verge of being eliminated unless other deal(s) are made.

CNN shows McCain at 615 delegates.  He needs 56% of the remaining delegates…and it’s worth noting that several of the remaining states are not winner-take-all.

On the Impact of Early Voting

I noticed something interesting in the California results (with 92% of precincts reporting):

• Dems — Clinton 52%, Obama 42%, Edwards 4%
• GOP — McCain 42%, Romney 34%, Huckabee 12%, Giuliani 5%, Paul 4%, Thompson 2%

California is one of the states that has early voting, and there were expectations that the fact that folks could cast ballots before some of the recent drop-outs dropped out, and before some of the recent changes in perceived momentum occurred could mess with the accuracy of pre-primary polls.

When I went to bed last night, Edwards and Giuliani were showing double-digit results in the early returns, and Thompson had a total in the high single-digits, admittedly with admittedly a relatively small portion of the vote in.

While I haven’t heard that the apparent early strength of dropped-out candidates may have been a manifestation of the early votes… I do wonder about that.

So, a thought — perhaps a supporter of “preference voting” or “instant run-off voting” ought to investigate that phenomenon, and use it as a basis to argue that the fast pace and tumultuousness of the primary campaign this cycle provides strong evidence that early voting needs to be linked to preference or instant-runoff voting.

On the Compressed, Early Timeline of the Primary Campaign

The experience of the past six weeks has me more convinced than ever that the Presidential primary game needs to be reformed.

While I don’t mind a couple of non-representitive small states serving the role of weeding out nonviable candidates, I do worry that the whirlwind campaign means that money could be playing too big a role (e.g. what if Edwards or Dodd had had more money to get their messages out; or what if Obama and McCain hadn’t had their recent fundraising successes?), and that Joe Average voter isn’t getting a great opportunity to make informed choices.

I stand even more strongly behind my idea of a rotating system of regional primaries, to allow more time for voters to learn about the candidates, to permit candidates to have a bit of geographic focus when campaigning (hopefully reducing expense and wasteful travel), and in order to make everyone’s primary vote potentially relevant (by having about half the delegates decided in the final wave).