By Elliott Brack, editor and publisher | The requirement that winning political candidates have a majority of the votes causes problems.
The first problem is that there must be a run-off between the top two candidates if no one wins a majority in the election.
The second problem is that there are often fewer voters returning to the polls for the runoff election, meaning that the will of the overall majority is seldom served. While a candidate in the first election may have received 48 or 49 percent of those voting, he or she could win a runoff with 51 percent of the second balloting…….yet that 51 percent may represent only 10 percent of those who voted in the first round.
So in effect, a minority of the total voters can put the candidate into office.
Is there a better way?
Several governments think so. It’s the way that voters in Australia and Ireland conduct their elections. And come 2018, it’ll be the way that the state of Maine elects its state officials.
It’s called “ranked-choice voting,” or by another term, “instant runoff voting.”
Here’s how it works. Instead of voting for a single person in a race, each voter would rank all the candidates in each race. If there were four people in a race, the voter would rank them one to four in order of his or her preference.
After counting the ballots, if no candidate had a majority of the votes, the candidate with the least number of votes would be eliminated from the counting. If your candidate was eliminated, then your second choice would be your vote in the next round of counting. And if there was still no majority winner, the candidate polling the least votes in the second round would be eliminated, so that a majority would be finally achieved in the third round.
If there were only two persons in the race, a simple majority would automatically be determined when the tallying was complete.
The good part in this method is that there would not have to be a run off election, eliminating this costly second round of voting. In addition, the eventual winner would have a majority of votes when the most people voted.
Remember, in Gwinnett, we have many voting precincts, requiring a lot of poll workers, so that a run-off election can cost Gwinnett County from $500,000 to $1 million. So while “instant runoff voting” or “ranked choice voting,” brings with it additional costs, these costs should not equal the high cost of having a runoff. Call that more efficient voting.
This new type of voting which eliminates runoff is also already in place in several cities around the country. That includes Minneapolis, Cambridge, Mass., Portland, Maine, and San Francisco.
And listen to this: a similar way of voting is used to pick the winners of the Oscars! Even the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences sees validity in making sure that its winners have a majority of its 6,028 member’s votes. (See http://mentalfloss.com/article/54560/how-are-oscar-nominees-chosen/)
One reason Maine voters approved this new way to eliminate runoffs is because for nine of the last 11 elections in that state, the winning gubernatorial candidate did not have a majority of the votes. But in 2018, with “ranked choice voting,” the governor will have a majority votes of the people.
Adopting such a new voting system in the rest of the United States may be a long way off. However, if you are concerned about a candidate becoming a political winner with less than a majority of the votes, here’s another system that many cities, and two countries, are already using, and it works!
- Have a comment? Send to: elliott@brack.net
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