IRV: Con: Not new, not easy, not good for democracy

St. Paul Pioneer Press, 03/21/2008

Instant runoff voting has been called a new and easier way to vote. But it is neither new nor easy. Preferential voting has been around for 100 years, but it hasn't caught on because it's a confusing and undemocratic system. Here are some of the problems:

-- IRV gives voters what amounts to more than one vote. Ranking multiple candidates equates to what the Minnesota Supreme Court, in the 1915 Brown v. Smallwood case, called "more than a single expression of choice," which the court deemed unconstitutional.

-- IRV ballots are not counted equally. IRV tallies the second-choice votes only on the ballots cast for defeated candidates. In addition, voters cast votes not knowing who the runoff candidates will be or how their votes will be affected by other voters. Thus, any claims of a true majority victory have to be considered false and misleading.

-- Voters won't know whether their ranking order will help or hurt their cause. IRV is a shot in the dark; the least-favored candidate could win after ballots are counted and recounted.

-- IRV "elections" will likely not be decided until weeks or months later (as happened in San Francisco in 2003). Voters will not be able to trust the result or know if their vote even mattered. This is the "hanging chad" problem times 1,000.

-- Supporters say IRV will attract more voices and lead to better, issue-oriented debates. But it instead could easily create huge candidate fields and turn elections into name-recognition contests — virtually eliminating any chance for meaningful debate. And if IRV provides such a poor format for healthy debate in the first place, attracting multiple viewpoints won't do much good.

-- IRV would eliminate primary elections, which are a vital part of our representative government. Eliminating primaries would reduce voters' influence over their government and won't ultimately save taxpayers a dime. Supporters contend we need IRV because the turnout for primaries is so low. But why is low turnout in primary elections such a bad thing? The people who show up to vote decide who the candidates are. If people don't show up, that must mean it's not important to them, and that's their right, too.

-- Supporters also argue that IRV would reduce polarization. That's not necessarily a good thing. As Thomas Jefferson said, "In every free and deliberating society, there must, from the nature of man, be opposite parties, and violent dissensions and discords."

Millions of taxpayer dollars are being wasted in the attempt to implement IRV even though preferential voting has already been ruled unconstitutional, a fact that was made known to the city of Minneapolis by its own assistant attorney and by the Minnesota attorney general's office.

Those who promote IRV say they want "majority rule with fair representation for all." Unfortunately, mere majority rule is not necessarily a good thing, which is why the Founders gave us a representative republic rather than a direct democracy. And IRV doesn't guarantee a majority winner, anyway.

Besides, we can't have "fair representation" if voters aren't allowed to select the candidates to run in the general election, and if they can't even be sure of what effect their vote rankings will have on the outcome.

As the Minnesota Supreme Court said in 1915, "The preferential system directly diminishes the right of an elector to give an effective vote for the candidate of his choice."

IRV violates the Constitution. It puts a blindfold on the voters and will further alienate them from the electoral process by diminishing the effectiveness of each voter's vote.