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BY Brandon Wiarda
PUBLISHED: 11/09/2008
The recent gridlock between Al Franken and Norm Coleman illustrates a fundamental flaw in our voting system: The inability to cast a vote for your “second choice” through Instant Runoff Voting. We are blessed in Minnesota to have a prominent third party that offers an alternative and often forces our political debates away from black and white, right and left politics. But when Independence candidates take a significant 5 to 15 percent of the vote, it arguably leaves Minnesotans with elected representation that does not accurately represent the peoples’ political leanings.
Many who voted for Barkley have a stance on whether they would prefer Coleman or Franken in office. And some of us who voted for Coleman or Franken would have put our support behind Barkley had we not been afraid of losing our ability to voice which major-party candidate represented us the least.
Instant Runoff Voting is a system that continues our striving to be a more perfect democracy, allowing people to articulate their varying preferences in the voting booth and move us beyond the binary political system that so many of us want out of.
Brandon Wiarda
University student
3 Comments
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IRV is a poor choice
IRV is essentially the worst of the five major alternative voting methods. Score voting is simpler and vastly superior.
http://scorevoting.net/CFERlet.html
IRV
IRV is a very important pro-democracy reform to deal with the "spoiler" problem. IRV isn't perfect, as NO method can be. However, it is the best single-winner method in use anywhere in the world today. Score (or "range") voting advocated by Clay Shentrup has its own flaws. In fact, one of the top election method experts in the world, Prof. Nicolaus Tideman, wrote in his latest book that score (range) voting is one of the methods that "have defects that are so serious as to disqualify them from consideration."
Readers can learn much more about IRV and other election reforms by visiting FairVote's web site (the national clearinghouse for such election reform ideas) at http://www.fairvote.org
Tideman flaws
Here is a rigorous rebuttal to Nicolaus Tideman, who made sever mistakes in his "strategy resistance" analysis.
http://scorevoting.net/TidemanRev.html
Here is some more extensive analysis about the performance of various voting methods with respect to strategic behavior by voters:
http://scorevoting.net/StratHonMix.html
Of course no voting method is perfect, but IRV is very very poor, and score voting is extremely good, according to the one and only real objective way to measure that - Bayesian regret:
http://scorevoting.net/UniqBest.html
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