03:07 pm
Wake Me up When November Ends
. . .with apologies to Green Day.
The Minnesota Supreme Court, in a unanimous decision, has declared Al Franken the winner in Minnesota. Unless, of course, Norm Coleman decides to move the battle to the federal courts.
It strikes me that Americans still have not come to terms with the reality of closely contested elections. Both Coleman v. Franken and Bush v. Gore demonstrate that first-past-the-post systems, where the top vote-getter wins even if s/he doesn’t have a majority, can at times create more havoc than resolution. (Of course, that said, thousands of elections work just fine).
There are two obvious solutions. The first is to require a run-off should no candidate fail to hit 50 percent plus one. This would not eliminate every contested election, but it certainly would get rid of most. The downside, of course, is that such a system not only is more expensive, but also is unlikely to sustain voter interest. Run-offs almost never produce the same level of voter engagement.
The second option is some sort of Instant Run-off Voting, where voters would have the opportunity to rank their choices, meaning that those who chose someone other than the top two candidates would get to express a preference beyond their first choice. IRV is used in a few American cities, most notably San Francisco, and so far there have been few objections. The upside is that it would not require multiple elections to decide a race, and actually could lead to the election of some third-party candidates, who otherwise would not have received the votes of citizens worried that they were “throwing away” their votes.
The downside is that. . . well, frankly, I can’t think of one. Some folks like to argue it’s undemocratic, since the person who gets the largest number of votes doesn’t win. That, of course, is true only if you define “the largest number of votes” as meaning “the largest number of votes in a multiple-candidate field.” And as is the case with conventional run-off votes, the system would come into play only were one candidate not to receive a majority in the first round.
I’m sure that IRV is a flawed system, and that it inevitably will produce challenges along the way. But it can’t by any stretch of the imagination be worse than a campaign that requires nearly more than seven months, millions of dollars, and multiple court rulings before it’s resolved.
Photo: Aaron Landry, via Flickr, using a Creative Commons 2.0 License
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