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November 20, 2008
Alaskan Bird strikes wrong target
The American election is getting that bit closer to having every vote finally tallied and every result known. Missouri has eventually officially been called as a McCain win, the Alaskan Senate race has been decided and the Minnesota Senate race has entered the recount phase. In each of these three cases, a third candidate has had more votes than the winning margin, and the winner has got less than 50%. Electoral-vote.com has beaten me this morning to posting about the benefits if elections were decided not by a winner-takes-all system but by some form of ranking / preferential system instead.
Yesterday's posting mentioned that Bob Bird got 12,000 votes in Alaska that would undoubtedly otherwise have gone to Ted Stevens. As a consequence of his presence on the ballot, Mark Begich was elected, something Bird voters probably did not want. Several readers mentioned that the problem lies in the voting system. There are other voting systems, such as instant runoff voting that handle this kind of situation much better. In IRV, as it is called, the voter is asked to mark his or her first choice, second choice, etc. on the ballot. Conceptually, when the votes are counted, they are sorted into piles based on everyone's first choice (which in the case of the Alaska Senate race would have contained a pile for Bird with 12,000 votes). If some candidate gets 50% of the votes, he or she wins and the election is over.
If no one gets 50%, the people who voted for the least popular candidate are told: "Your candidate didn't win. Who is your second choice?" Since they have already marked their second choice, nobody has to actually ask them. Instead, all the votes in the smallest pile are now redistributed based on their second choice. The other votes stay where they were. If somebody now has over 50%, he or she wins. Otherwise, the process is repeated by again taking the smallest pile and redistributing the votes to the highest ranked choice still in contention. Eventually you get down to two candidates in which case either someone wins or it is an exact tie (in which case other procedures are needed). The beauty of IRV is then the Bird voters could have marked Stevens as their second choice and once Bird had been eliminated in round 1, the Bird votes would have counted for the second choice (probably Stevens) and Stevens would have won. In Florida in 2000, if the Nader voters had been able to make a second choice, probably most would have chosen Al Gore, and then he would have won Florida. The value of IRV is that the voter gets to express a true preference without throwing the election to a totally unacceptable candidate. In Florida, the current system benefited the Republicans; in Alaska this year it benefited the Democrats. But IRV eliminates this kind of effect altogether.
Posted by malcolmclark on November 20, 2008
