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Vote Instant Runoff Voting

In addition to my entry about the coming U.S. elections, I wanted to post some awareness about Instant Runoff Voting (IRV) and write-in candidates. After the 2000 election mess, bill HR 57 (IRV) was proposed as a much more logical way of voting (Ireland, Australia, and parts of Great Britain, Vermont, and San Francisco already use it for specific elections). The Center For Voting and Democracy advocates ways to push this bill, as well as other voting reform.

You can read the details on the IRV website. (Alternatively, fling93, Sam, and Chris offer perspectives on IRV; or look at the Muppets example thanks to Jennifer.) I see one main difference between most U.S. ballots and IRV voting. IRV requires that you simply order ALL the candidates in preferential order. This makes much more sense to me in several ways: (1) Since voters are essentially submitting a vote for every candidate, if ballots are lost, then it's a lot harder to argue that there was a conspiracy to hide all of X person's votes. (2) Voters would probably be more prepared going in to the ballot box because they have to weigh a lot of candidates' pros and cons before having their final list. (3) Minority parties have a much better idea of their popularity. I hope I'm understanding the process correctly. Maybe I'll go live in San Francisco and vote their to see how it works.

I'll admit that this is my first time voting. In college, I never got my act together since I was out of state and generally apathetic. Project Vote Smart has been a great online resource to track down all the presidential nominees as well as to learn about local candidates and elections. I realized there were absentee ballots, but you can also vote early (3-4 weeks depending on your state), which I'm doing today since I'll be in Arizona on election day.

According to the Cobb/LaMarche website, I'll have to request a write-in ballot when I walk in to vote for them. Every state has different write-in instructions and candidates! Apparently, most minority party candidates aren't even on 75% of states' ballots.

By rockofvictory | Fri 2004Oct22 14:21 CST | Links | Last edited Mon 2005Mar07 23:07 CST
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