Tag: Instant Runoff Voting

Categories
ballot access incumbents initiative, referendum, and recall term limits

Intentionally Confounding Incumbents

Memphis, ballot, instant runoff, term limits

The three issues on the ballot in Memphis this November are “not complicated,” writes Commercial Appeal columnist David Waters, “unless you read the actual ballot questions.”

Which is all most voters will see.

All three directly affect the self-interest of members of the Memphis City Council, which placed them on the ballot and determined the language voters will attempt to decipher. 

Waters called that ballot wording “incomprehensible” and “intentionally confounding.” His newspaper colleague, Ryan Poe, accused the council of “trying to stack the deck.”

The first measure would weaken the council’s term limits, passed in 2011 with a 78 percent vote and just about to kick in. The ballot language, Mr. Poe explains, “reads like voters are being asked to place limits on council members . . . rather than extend them.” By an extra term.

The second issue would repeal Instant Runoff Voting (IRV), which was brought forth by citizen petition and enacted via a 71 percent yes vote. The confusing ballot wording brings up a 1991 federal court decision without providing voters any context or explanation.

Though IRV has not yet been used, council incumbents fear it.* This becomes especially clear when you discover that the third ballot question is actually a sneakier, second attempt to repeal IRV.

“Instant runoffs, and run-off elections in general, tend to make it easier for challengers to unseat incumbents in multi-candidate district races,” argues Waters. He adds, “Incumbents generally become stronger the longer they are in office.”

To incumbent politicians, reform is a dirty word. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* Back in February, the council was caught paying a lobbyist to convince state legislators to restrict their city’s ability to implement Instant Runoff Voting. 

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Categories
ballot access national politics & policies political challengers

Instead of Spoilers

Last night on Stossel, the show’s eponymous host reminded his panel that Ann Coulter wanted to drown folks who vote for Libertarian candidates in close races where the Republican victory could be hurt. Deroy Murdock came down on Coulter’s side, saying that Libertarian votes did sometimes harm Republican candidates, as just happened, he said, in Virginia.

Stossel wonders if that’s true; there are reasons to suspect that Libertarian “third party” candidates draw also from Democrats and mostly from independent voters — and that many of the latter wouldn’t have voted at all.

But Stossel and his panelists did not bring up a simple solution to the whole problem, something I wrote about last year in my column “In Defense of Spoilers.” The Libertarian Party seems here to stay. And if Republicans want to do something about it, they could “open up the electoral system”:

They should work with open-minded, fair-play Democrats and end first-past-the-post elections in the United States. There are several ways to go: ranked voting methods, from Instant Runoff Voting to proportional representation, ending the election of Representatives from gerrymandered districts, electing them, instead, “at large.”

Ranked Choice Voting, especially, has advantages. We vote our preferences, and our preferences are counted.

If you prefer the Libertarian over the Republican, and the Republican over the Democrat, you vote that way, and your preference for “best” doesn’t destroy your support for “the good” or the possibly “good enough.”

Democracy doesn’t need to rest on the insane rubric of “the best is the enemy of the good.”

So, Republican majority, change it. And stop complaining.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ballot access political challengers

The Logic of the Instant Runoff

Reid Wilson, at the Washington Post, regales us with seven U.S. senatorial races where Libertarian Party candidates could swing elections, and thus control of the Senate. Last weekend at Townhall, I exhorted readers to work for transpartisan reforms “like term limits . . . and other measures aimed at greater representation, [such as] establishing ranked choice voting.”

The two articles are not unrelated.

Conservatives and libertarians are often united in wanting to replace progressive Democrats with small-government contenders. But they are not united in how to do this. Many libertarians balk at voting for hardline social conservative candidates like Rick Santorum and middle-of-the-road statists like John McCain.

So the Libertarian Party runs candidates that have in recent elections gained traction with voters — enough to pull independent voters away from Republicans and sometimes enabling Democrats to win.

Republican entreaties to libertarians (“you’re killing us out here!”) appear to be no more effective than libertarian entreaties to Republicans (“want our support? try taking your limited government stances seriously!”).

What to do? Republican partisans should support Instant Runoff Voting, which would

  1. Allow people to rank their choices for office, and
  2. Instruct vote-counters to take the votes of those who selected a No. 1 pick of, say, a Libertarian who garnered the smallest number of votes,  and add those ballots’ second ranked vote (either for a D or an R) as the vote to count in the “instant runoff.”

This would allow for better expression of voter preference, solving the “wasted vote” problem and ceasing to make the “best the enemy of the good.”

Alternately, Republicans could continue their course, trying to limit ballot access, thereby alienating more of the electorate and ensuring that Libertarian votes can’t also be Republican votes.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.