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IRV To The Rescue

© Ken Goldstein

One of the biggest road blocks to third party organizing in the United States is our system of winner-takes-all elections. While many countries have forms of proportional representation (which we'll examine in a later column), our government of single-member districts leads naturally to the dominance of only two major parties.

For many local, officially non-partisan, offices (such as city councils) the winner is required to receive 50% plus one vote; anything less leads to a costly run-off. For partisan offices, candidates who win a plurality with much less than 50% are said to lack a mandate, and have trouble claiming to represent their district. In either situation, many who voted for third party candidates are left wondering if their vote helped to elect the candidate they liked the least.

The solution to all of these problems may be available with IRV. IRV stands for Instant Run-off Voting. IRV systems allow for multiple candidates, while still guaranteeing that the winner will have at least 50% of the final vote, and that everybody's vote counts.

How IRV works is that rather than choosing a single candidate in a multiple candidate election, the voter selects their top three (or four, or whatever is allowed) and ranks them accordingly.

All the first-choice votes are tallied first. If no candidate manages to garner more than 50% of the vote, IRV eliminates the votes for the last place candidate and looks at the second choices on those ballots, adding them to the original totals. If there is still no clear winner, IRV does this again with each losing candidate, until one candidate hits the magic number for victory.

Of course, all this is done automatically on the first pass through the vote counting machines. No need for recounts, IRV guarantees a clear winner every time.

To illustrate how this might work, we'll use the following fictional example. In the race for the District 5 State Senator, Candidate A received 41% of the vote, Candidate B received 39%, and Candidate C got 20%. Today, that race would be given to Candidate A, even though more people didn't vote for him than did.

IRV, however, would look at the second choice votes for Candidate C's supporters. Maybe all of them liked Candidate B better than A, that would leave the final tally for Candidate A at 41% but make Candidate B the winner at 59%. Or, maybe they did prefer Candidate A. With IRV it will be clear that he or she should be the winner.