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17 October 2011

Livingstone-Zinke-Bus

Montana needs instant runoff voting

I used to think that Neil Livingstone’s odds of winning the Republican primary for governor were in the neighborhood of winning the lottery. Now, I’m not so sure. Thursday, Jim Lynch, the deposed head of the Montana Department of Transportation, and once a Democratic candidate for the legislature, became the ninth Republican candidate. With every entry into the race, the percentage of votes that a candidate needs for a plurality shrinks. In theory, all Livingstone, or Lynch, or anyone else needs is one-ninth plus one of the votes cast.

That’s the extreme case, of course. It’s likely that some will drop out, while only a few will mount credible campaigns, so the winning plurality could be in the 20–35 percent range. Compared to what could happen, that doesn’t sound so bad — until one remembers that a candidate with a 30 percent plurality is a candidate that was not the first choice of 70 percent of the voters. A plurality wins election and a large field provides the best opportunity for a zealot — a teabagger, for example — who would lose 80–20 percent in a two-man race, but might win 20–18 percent in a nine-man race, to steal an election.

There are a number of ways to deal with this, none perfect, but some better than others. One is a runoff between the candidates with the most and second most votes if no one receives a majority. Unfortunately, this does not preclude a contest between the two most popular crackpots, each of whom would lose in a landslide to any of the other candidates who split the non-crackpot vote. And it requires a second campaign, a second election, and ensures that the set of voters casting ballots in the first election will not be identical to the set of voters casting ballots in the runoff election. It’s probably better than nominating or electing someone with 19 percent of the vote, but it has serious defects.

At a nominating convention, where successive votes by the same set of voters can be taken easily and quickly, a different sort of runoff is possible. Instead of having voters chose between the top two vote getters, the candidate receiving the fewest votes is left off the next ballot, forcing his supporters to opt for their second choice (or not vote). After each round of voting, the candidate with the fewest votes is struck from the ballot. The process stops when someone secures a majority of the votes.

A similar process for primary and general elections is possible by using instant runoff voting, a system invented in the nineteenth century. Here’s how it works, as described by www.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.
  4. Ballots cast for the eliminated candidate are now counted toward those voters’ second choices.

IRV, which can be implemented in various ways, was adopted by San Francisco in 2004, and is used in a number of cities around the country.

Instant runoffs can negate the spoiler effect in many, but not all, circumstances. In 2006, for example, Democrat Jon Tester won a seat in the U.S. Senate by receiving a plurality of the votes cast in the three-way contest between himself, incumbent Republican Conrad Burns, and Libertarian Stan Jones who was a true blue conservative in more ways than one. Jones received more votes than separated Tester and Burns. Had that been an instant runoff election, it’s probable that Burns would have been the second choice on virtually all of the ballots cast for Jones. In the runoff, those votes would have been allocated to Burns, thereby giving him a majority and the victory. (That thought will cause more than a few Democrats to re-pledge their allegiance to the winner takes all plurality system.)

Some years earlier, in Minnesota, usually a progressive state, former professional wrestler Jesse Ventura was elected governor with around 37 percent of the vote. It is not likely, although not impossible, that he would have won a runoff.

With a nine-candidate Republican field for governor, nothing is impossible. The candidate who would make the best candidate for the general election might receive the most second place rankings, but the fewest first, and thus never get to the second round. As William Poundstone noted in Gaming the Vote, no system of voting is perfect or free from the potential to produce weird results. But IRV is better than plurality voting, and Montana should adopt it for all elections for executive office.