The May 30 instant-runoff-voting (IRV) commentary by Andy Cilek, the executive director of the very partisan "Minnesota Voters Alliance," is littered with half-truths and outright deception.
IRV does not "share [the] fatal flaw" of the 1915 Bucklin voting method whereby there can be "more votes than voters" in a given election. Nor is it the case that IRV will result in "nobody [being able] to truly trust the outcomes of elections" as Cilek claims. IRV has been employed in elections in the United States and around the world for years with great success.
The writer uses sophistry to describe a fictitious election (and one that betrays his true colors and fears) wherein a Republican candidate is facing three Democratic opponents. The example's premise is itself misleading as Minneapolis elections are nonpartisan. Let's assume for the sake of argument that a voter faced this choice. Cilek claims that a voter ranking the Republican as her first [and only] choice could harm her candidate because "other ballots would carry more weight." No ballot in the initial primary election would carry any more weight than hers. But if no candidate received a majority of the votes and her candidate received the fewest votes, then the resulting (instant) runoff would obviously "carry more weight" for a voter who voted in that runoff than for the voter who decided she didn't like any of the remaining candidates and decided not to vote. The same thing would happen in a traditional runoff election if she didn't cast a ballot.
IRV is nothing more than a cost-effective way of conducting runoff elections. A voter casts one vote for the primary election and then one for each subsequent runoff election should it be needed. With IRV, the voter does this all at once, saving time and money. This is a natural progression of runoff voting made easier by technology that wasn't available hundreds of years ago. In effect a voter casts multiple ballots, but just one per election. (It could be set it up so that instead of ranking the candidates on one ballot, a voter would fill out multiple ballots. The first ballot would ask: "Who do you want to win the election?" The second would ask: "In the event no candidate receives a majority of the votes and your favorite candidate receives the fewest votes, for whom would you like to cast your ballot in the ensuing runoff election?" And so on. This has the same effect as IRV; it's just that the single ballot method is obviously much easier.)
IRV is not a perfect system; none is. But it is clearly a more democratic and efficient system than the one we currently employ.
BEN SEYMOUR, MINNEAPOLIS
