Instant Run Off Voting

Hello Boys and Girls, thanks to Indie, here is my homework assignment on Instant Runoff Voting, which is largely plagiarized from

http://www.instantrunoff.com/how/instructions.php

How IRV Works – from instantrunoff.com

1. IRV uses ranked ballots to simulate a traditional runoff in a single round of voting. Voters rank candidates in order of preference. They may rank as many or as few candidates as they wish, with lower rankings never counting against higher rankings.
2. First choices are tabulated. If a candidate receives a majority of first choices, he or she is elected.
3. If no candidate receives a majority of first choices, the candidate receiving the fewest first choices is eliminated. Ballots cast for the eliminated candidate are now counted toward those voters' second choices.
4. This process continues until one candidate receives a majority and is elected.

and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting

Ok then, why change how the USA votes, and what problems does IRV solve?

First, the USA uses the single seat, winner-take-all method for all our national offices, President, US House, and US Senate. You get to choose one name, for each race. Our system leads to certain inevitabilities including tactical voting (lesser of two evils), political parties need to appeal to the largest number of voters (big tent parties) as opposed to parties that have an actual agenda and the use of 3^rd parties to act as spoilers (the Greens in 2000).

 The present day Republican Party is 5 different groups –

1.      The Low Tax Big Biz Country Club crowd, this is your father’s Republican party.

2.       The White, Anti Gay, Anti Abortion Christian Evangelicals aka Social Conservatives.

3.      The Chicken Hawks, Neocons, and Wheel Chair Rambos.

4.      The Isolationist Buchannonites.

5.      Libertarians.

If these 5 groups could have their choice of candidates for the next President of the USA, each different group would likely vote for very different people. The Social conservatives could choose between Sam Brownback and Mike Huckabee, the Chicken Hawks could have Rudi Ghouliani or John McCain, the isolationists could vote for Pat Buchannon or Ron Paul, the Libertarians have Ron Paul, and the old school conservatives who voted for Goldwater, and Nixon have Fred Thompson, or Mitt Romney.

Now imagine if one election day, the first Tuesday of Novemebr, all of these candidates, along with all 9 Democratic candidates, and the Green Party, and the Libertarian party were on the ballot, and you could rank them all or some of them that day, and your ballot was counted, and recorded as such. With IRV it is. No need for a primary, and no need for a run off election. The IRV method produces a majority winner every time.

So if we step into the way back machine, and go back to 1992, we voted for the US Presidential election, and had to choose one of Geo Bush, Ross Perot or Bill Clinton. Now, how many people voted for either Bush or Clinton, to avoid the lesser of two evils of giving the Presidency to the other guy, Clinton or Bush, instead of voting for their preferred candidate Ross Perot, or Sen. Paul Simon, or Sen. Bob Dole? Well, under the IRV system, voters could have ranked the candidates, 1-2-3, and their choices would have not been influenced by tactical voting driven by our binary winner-take-all system.

            IRV is used in Presidential elections by Australia, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Columbia, Czech Republic, Egypt, Finland, France, etc – I stopped going through the list at Gabon. But big area countries like Australia and Brazil, and pretty, lily white places like Finland, and France use this, and it works. It produces winning candidates, who have a majority of the votes, and allows for 3^rd parties, or 4^th or 5^th parties, to field candidates, and opens up the democracy.

            Then, to work on the legislature, we need to examine proportional representation, but that is another story.