Instant runoff voting: interesting website

[sandyd921]

In thinking about the situation with the Senate race in Minnesota it seems to me that if Instant Runoff Voting (IRV) had been in place the whole mess might have been avoided (not that I don't believe that all votes should be counted). It has the huge advantage of preventing small candidates from becoming spoilers and allows these votes to not simply be throwaways. Also IRV is one way to move beyond a Democratic (or for that matter a Republican) party in which only the murky center seems to count for anything or has any influence. With IRV progressives (and other groups) have the ability to form meaningful alliances and to influence the outcome of elections. I suspect that today the vast majority of the population would prefer real progressive policies and that the result of an IRV election would be to swing the outcome much more clearly in that direction.

Here's a website that shows how IRV would work by using the 2000 presidential election and the 2004 Washington senate race: http://www.chrisgates.net/irv/index.html

[stahbrett]

1. Instant Runoff Voting is fatally flawed - Range Voting is much better!

Range voting avoids many problems that Instant Runoff Voting has.

Most people are familiar with voting in the Olympics sports such as ice skating. Each judge (voter) ranks each contestant (candidate) on some sort of range of values. So if our range for voting was 1-100, then each voter could rank each candidate from 1 to 100. Each candidate's scores are averaged, and the candidate with the highest average ranking is the winner.