Clay’s Blog

In the 2004 presidential election I actually voted for the green party. Their candidate, David Cobb, received a whopping .096% of the popular vote! That’s less than 1 person in every 10000! Ouch.

This time around I’m going to be even bolder and boycott the vote entirely. I think I’ll probably get a lot of flack for not doing my ‘civic duty’, but I just don’t think that I have any real choice. There is NO chance that anyone outside of the two parties will win and I refuse to cast a vote for the lesser of two evils, I’m stubborn like that and I refuse to waste my time. (Obama-supporters, he’s still a politician. Until I see him actually stand by his campaign rhetoric I remain skeptical.)

Now, I’m not against the democratic process in general, I just think that the American process is broken, which is actualy why I voted for David Cobb in the first place. One thing he talked about a lot back in 2004 was something called ‘Instant Runoff Voting’ or IRV. Apparently it’s been working in Australia since 1919.

Rather than voting for a single candidate, voters rank all candidates in order of preference. All voters first choices are tallied and the last place candidate is then removed from the pool and then the process is repeated. Any voter that chose the eliminated candidate then gets their second vote counted. The process is then reiterated until one candidate has a majority. That’s it!

There’s a handful of obvious advantages of IRV. First, it’s simple. Even the dullest citizen can understand it, anyone can simply rank the candidates. Second, you don’t have to vote AGAINST a candidate, you can actually vote for whomever you truly prefer and put your safety vote down as a later choice. I think that this style of voting would strengthen third party candidates and would decrease negative campaigning. I would love to hear politicians discuss their own merits instead of slandering one another.

Does IRV sound like a good idea to you? Then spread the word and help encourage this system at the local level, maybe in the somewhat distant future we could see this system all over the country.