Letter in response to M. Marchio's article entitled:

Lawmakers hear pros and cons of Instant Runoff Voting Nov. 21, 2007.

Mr. Marchio,

As a co-founder of the Minnesota Voters Alliance, a group currently opposing IRV, I would like to respond to your article re. the recent Senate hearing on IRV – specifically what Sandy Pappas said.

Her first comment you quoted was “If people choose to vote for a third party and a fourth party, in effect their vote is not counted.” This is utterly ridiculous and puts to question her qualifications as a senator. Just because the candidate a voter selected did not win does not mean the vote was not counted, effectively or otherwise! The counting of ALL the votes is what determines the winner!

One of the problems with IRV is that when voters rank multiple choices, this is not only effectively, but actually casting more than one vote. The effect is that some of the voters’ votes have more influence on the outcome of the election than others, and that there is no way a voter can know how his or her rankings are going to work once the runoff phase is entered.

Senator Pappas also said, “We are consistently electing plurality governors. … I think it's less democratic because you don't really have majority rule.” This is a common misconception on the part of those who favor IRV. There are at least two problems with this ill-conceived attitude:

1) America , and Minnesota are NOT majority-rule democracies, they are constitutional representative republics. This was done on purpose by our Founders who saw the danger of what they called “the tyranny of the majority.”

2) IRV doesn’t produce true majorities anyway! If no candidate gets more than 50% of “first choices” a runoff is employed, so the winner could not be considered a majority winner no matter how you slice it. IRV is even worse than a traditional run-off because the voters are in the dark as to who the run-off candidates will turn out to be.

It is very discouraging when some of our top politicians seem to have so little understanding of how our “government of the people” is supposed to work. Maybe they do know, but see in IRV a chance to guarantee their own positions of power for the future. It’s hard to know which it is, but the fact is, voters should be able to go to the polls knowing that their vote counts as one, not as 1.5 or .675 or whatever, but as ONE. Anything else is disenfranchisement.

- Matt Marchetti