We Can Do Better than Instant Runoff Voting

We Can Do Better than Instant Runoff Voting  8/19/08

Some well motivated progressives have fallen into a trap while pursuing a solution to the problem of how to support a third-party candidate without being called a "spoiler". They advocate "Instant Runoff Voting" (IRV), which does accomplish the desired purpose in cases where the third-party has no chance to win. But it is fundamentally defective in a number of important ways, including failure to eliminate the spoiler dilemma once the third-party becomes stronger. Fortunately another system, "Approval Voting" (AV), does the job without the problems associated with IRV.

We are all accustomed to "Plurality Voting" (PV), where we cast a vote for a single candidate and the one receiving the most votes wins.  A serious problem with PV is that it effectively pressures many people into NOT voting for the candidate they think best represents their views. Suppose, for example, that polls show that the percentages of voters favoring candidates R, D, and G (you might consider these as representing Republican, Democrat, and Green) are 40, 35, and 25, respectively. Assuming that the great majority of G supporters would favor D over R, a large portion of them might conclude that, since G can't win, the best that can be done is to abandon G and vote for D. In our example, this reasoning would lead to a large number of G supporters voting for D instead of G. This, of course, is what happened in 2000, as the great majority of people who thought Ralph Nader was the best candidate voted instead for Al Gore. (As it turned out, it was not enough to elect Gore as half the registered Democrats in Florida did not vote, and over 200,000 of them voted for Bush. Nevertheless, many people blame the 90,000 Florida Nader voters for Gore's defeat, calling Nader a "spoiler".)  A parallel situation exists elsewhere in the political spectrum between Republicans and Libertarians. IRV is an attempt to solve this problem.

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