Federal
court upholds San Francisco instant runoff voting
OSCAR
WINNERS PICKED BY INSTANT RUN OFF VOTING
We've long advocated instant runoff voting and now Britain is voting on adopting it (over there it's called alternative voting or AV). This is one of the best graphics on the topic we've seen. (FPTP is "first past the post" or the way most American elections are run)
Instant runoff voting is a method of
electing a single winner. It provides an alternative to plurality and runoff
elections. In a plurality election, the highest vote getter wins even if s/he
receives less than 50% of the vote, and may even be considered the worst choice
by the majority of voters. In a runoff election, two candidates advance to a
runoff if no candidate receives more than 50% in the first round.
Voters rank candidates in order of
choice: 1, 2, 3 and so on. It takes a majority to win. If a majority of voters
rank a candidate first, that candidate is elected. If not, the last place
candidate is defeated, just as in a runoff election, and all ballots are
counted again, but this time each ballot cast for the defeated candidate counts
for the next ranked candidate listed on the ballot. The process of eliminating
the last place candidate and recounting the ballots continues until one
candidate receives a majority of the vote.
Organizations
Political status
Ireland uses IRV to elect its
president, Australia to elect its House of Representatives, and London to elect
its mayor. In the U.S., San Francisco, CA, Burlington, VT, and Cary NC are
communities that use IRV to elect their major city offices such as mayor. Many
major universities use IRV for their student government elections and the
American Political Science Association to elect its president. Hundreds of
jurisdictions, organizations and corporations use IRV to elect leaders.
As a state senator, Barack Obama
introduced legislation that would have instituted IRV at the state and
congressional level in Illinois. John McCain, Bernie Sanders, Dennis Kucinich
& Howard Dean support IRV.
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