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A Vote of Confidence
Fort Collins ponders San Francisco-style election reform.

By Kate Tarasenko
Rocky Mountain Bullhorn, November 4, 2004

While Colorado last week offered its citizens Amendment 36, which sought to disable the machinery that drives the "winner-take-all" method of allocating Electoral College votes, election reformers around the nation have also had their eyes fixed on San Francisco’s municipal elections for its Board of Supervisors. This year marks the first time that a major American city has implemented ranked-choice voting, also known as instant runoff voting (or IRV), a reform that was mandated in a successful ballot initiative in 2002.

Local Green and Libertarian Party members hope to see IRV gain some traction in Fort Collins in the immediate future as a realistic antidote to legislative races that are decided less by majority will than by district boundaries that are drawn and re-drawn, according to bipartisan domination.

IRV is currently used in school board elections in some areas of New York, and in municipal races in parts of Massachusetts under the name of the "Australian ballot method." Indeed, IRV is used widely in Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Germany as a way to ensure that elected officials represent a true majority of voters. It has the added benefit of eliminating the need for runoff elections as well as the "spoiler" effect of third-party candidates who splinter votes in otherwise close contests.

IRV is a straightforward method of ranking candidates in order of preference. Only the candidate who gets a majority of votes (50 percent plus one) wins. If no candidate gets a majority of first-rank votes, the candidate who received the fewest number of first-rank votes is eliminated, and votes cast for the eliminated candidate are then transferred to the voter’s second-ranked candidate. The votes are then recounted, and the process of eliminating candidates and transferring votes is repeated until one candidate receives a majority.

San Francisco’s director of the Department of Elections, John Arntz, says he and his staff have put a lot of energy into outreach. Based on the volume of early voting, returned absentee ballots and calls to their elections phone bank, he doesn’t perceive that people have had problems understanding how IRV works.

"Elections are really always the same; it’s the same drill," Arntz says.

New ballots list the names of candidates in three repeating columns which ask for the voter to choose a different candidate in each column.

"We just have to inform the voters how to mark the cards properly," he adds.

Steven Hill is cofounder of the Center for Voting and Democracy, who helped spearhead San Francisco’s Proposition A, which resulted in the IRV electoral reform. In his book, Fixing Elections: The Failure of America’s Winner-Take-All Politics, he contends that our antiquated 18th-century voting system is failing us in the 21th century.

Speaking from his home in San Francisco, Hill says, "There is no such thing as a perfect electoral system but, as we saw under the current system that we’re using, it broke down in 2000, and it’s just going to get worse."

Hill cites numerous problems with the current system, including the issue that no firewall of bipartisan accountability separates partisan election administrators from the interests of their party’s candidates. Additionally, runoff elections are costly, both for municipalities and candidates. Since they are usually scheduled weeks after the initial election, they generally elicit poor voter turnout, owing to election burnout, winter weather and the distraction of the holidays.

On top of these factors, Hill adds, campaigns are contentious rather than truly competitive, in the best sense of the word.

He charges, "You have a country being bifurcated and Balkanized into ‘Red America’ [Republicans] and ‘Blue America’ [Democrats], where neither can win in an opponent’s district. That’s why voter turnout is plummeting so much. Most races are already decided, depending on your district.

"Candidates ignore the people who they know will vote for them, as well as the ones they know will never vote for them, and they just focus on the swing voters—the undecided voters—who decide elections for the rest of us."

But what if the results of our winner-take-all system are a true reflection of the country’s collective will? Not a chance, says Hill.

"In the state of Massachusetts, all ten U.S. House seats are held by Democrats, as if there’s not a single Republican in the state deserving of representation, let alone a Green Party or Libertarian or independent voter," Hill opines, adding that, as another example, all House seats for Nebraska belong to Republicans.

Hill says America has gone from being the world’s leading democracy to a laughingstock, with conditions that more closely resemble rigged elections in "banana republics," especially in so-called battleground states. Ranked-choice voting, IRV and other types of proportional representation are viable ways to get people involved again in "genuinely free and fair elections."

Such reforms hold further promise of bringing younger people into the political process, and not just as voters. Hill cites the examples of a 19-year-old and a 23-year-old who were recently elected to Germany’s national parliament, as well as a 24-year-old Swedish MP, and a 26-year-old Rastafarian now serving in New Zealand’s national governing body.

Nancy York, longtime community activist and former candidate for Larimer County Commissioner, advocates IRV for Fort Collins as energizing for all voters who may have shirked their civic duty out of a sense of futility. York points to the 1999 election in which Mayor Ray Martinez was elected from a field of five contenders with a mere 28 percent of the votes.

"That simply is not representative, and it wouldn’t have happened under IRV," she says.

Green Party spokesperson Eric Fried says momentum for IRV is gaining among third-party and independent voters and candidates. He acknowledges that they have a vested interest in seeing it enacted on a local level. Fried also recognizes the potential problem of inertia and resistance by the public to any kind of change to the electoral process.

But there are greater things at stake besides "having to vote for the least worst alternative, and playing electoral games, which is fundamentally unfair," he says.

"Instant runoff voting is also going to make elections more civil, since you can’t demonize your opponent as a horrible, un-American person if you want the voters’ second-choice vote. It makes a race more issues-oriented, and that’s an obvious benefit."

Fort Collins resident and city employee Brian Woodruff is another voter who is passionate about the potential of ranked-choice voting and IRV.

"Like a lot of Americans after the mess in 2000, I became obsessed with the idea of election reform. The more I learned about IRV, the more I realized that our system is troubled, but we can fix it. We can change it."

Woodruff refuses to be identified by his party affiliation.

"What’s the point?" he argues. "This isn’t a partisan issue; it’s an issue of fairness and making sure our votes really count to elect people by a true majority."

Organized voting strategies, such as vote-pairing, which was recently endorsed by filmmaker Michael Moore, still fall short for people such as Woodruff.

"People shouldn’t have to have a ‘strategy’ to vote," he says. "You should be able to vote your conscience and not be concerned that somehow you’re throwing the election to the candidate you support the least."

He echoes Hill’s assertion that America, as the world’s leading democracy, is suffering from a serious credibility gap.

"We’re more like a museum of democracy than a model of democracy," he says.

Just how likely is IRV for our future elections? Fried and Woodruff point out that the League of Women Voters is studying the issue. If a diligent grassroots public awareness campaign is launched in a community with such a forward-thinking reputation as Fort Collins’, chances for an IRV ballot initiative passing look good.

"Fort Collins has always been willing to stick its neck out and be a statewide leader on things like renewable energy and wind power," says Fried. "IRV is another example where we could be pioneers.

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