instant runoff voting : seattle weekly says “stop the insanity!”
In this week’s Seattle Weekly, Jason McBride uses the occasion of councilmember’s birthday party to alert us to the horrifying possibility that King County might follow in the path of Pierce County and adopt a method of voting. Imagine, voters being able to rank their candidates in order of preference [irv-wa], not feeling the need to compromise in a winner-take-all plurality election. Someone needs to stop the insanity before it starts, right?
… if elected officials in both major parties don’t deal with Instant Runoff Voting before their constituents become aware of it, it could be too late. … Imagine a mayoral race with eight candidates where the bottom four candidates’ votes have to be harvested to create a majority. What if the candidate in third tends to be the second choice of those who voted for the bottom four? He gets all those votes. That would mean the person who got the highest number of first-choice rankings could lose, while the guy who initially came in third takes the election. [weekly]
Er, that’s exactly the point of this (invented in the late nineteenth century [wiki]) “newfangled” voting system? Other than raising this spectre of an election in which a generally agreeable candidate wins an election, he never gets around to telling us exactly why IRV would be such a scary option for King County. Is it because it fails the Condorcet criterion [wiki] or just because it seems kind of weird?
Maybe this is one of their less-than-transparent parody news pieces? Perhaps some of our amateur (or professional) electoral theorist readers can weigh in “before it’s too late”?
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From what I understand, it’s a method of distributing votes until someone has a majority of votes. If there are more than 2 candidates, most likely no one has 51% or more of the votes. By taking the votes from the person with the least number of votes and distributing them based on the voters other preferences (and re-doing this as necessary), you keep going until someone has a majority of votes.
That way, if the person you voted for doesn’t win, at least your second choice counts! (or third, or whatever…)