Making elections better, and stopping divisiveness, too

By Jesse L. Jackson Jr. and James D. Henderson | December 25, 2004

OVER THE PAST couple of months there have been complaints and critiques of how the United States conducts elections. Fortunately, not all such news is bad, and the voters of Massachusetts should take note.

This fall, something remarkable happened during the campaign for the San Francisco board of supervisors. Instead of engaging in the mudslinging and finger-pointing that typifies national and local campaigns, some board candidates were campaigning together and holding joint fund-raisers. Instead of appealing to a narrow band of voters focused on divisive single issues, these candidates presented a broad range of ideas, which everyone could discuss and analyze. These candidates were not delirious -- they were acting strategically. How can this be? The reason is that San Francisco has adopted ranked-choice, or instant runoff, voting.

Instant runoff voting (IRV) fixes the shortcomings of elections. Currently, voters feel they have unpleasant options: Either settle for a "lesser evil" or "waste" their vote. Meanwhile, third party and independent candidates are tagged as spoilers and denied access to debates, depriving voters of their viewpoints. Likewise, major party candidates can avoid responding to the positions of alternative candidates, and a victor can take office with the support of fewer than half of constituents.

With IRV, voters simply rank the candidates in order of preference. If one candidate receives an outright majority of first choice votes, that candidate wins. If there is no majority winner, the rankings are used to conduct a series of instant runoffs until one candidate obtains that majority. In each runoff, the candidate with the lowest vote count is eliminated. If the eliminated candidate is your first choice, your vote is then allocated to your next choice. Voters mark only one ballot, and the final result is a winner supported by a majority of voters.

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