The Caledonian-Record Online Edition · Thursday April 19, 2007

- Instant runoff voting (IRV) is a bad idea whose time has not come, but Vermont's legislative leadership is going to try to resurrect it.

IRV is a voting scheme wherein voters are required to list their candidates for office in order of their preference. If there are five candidates for office, the voter would list his preferences from one to five. If no candidate got 50 percent of the vote, the tabulators would select the two highest first-choice vote-getters and add the second preferences, then third, then fourth, then fifth, until one of them accumulates 50 percent and becomes the winner - and all of this in the interests of efficiency and saving time.

IRV is a bad idea because in a closely contested race, the winner will be chosen by people who didn't vote for him or her. Gov. Douglas summarized it best. He said, "I think elections ought to be actual contests, not hypothetical ones."

Imagine an election in which, of five candidates, the top two candidates got only 30 percent of the vote each, but the third candidate got 52 percent of the second-choice votes. He's out of the running because his majority was all second choices. Inevitably, the winner will be one of the two first-choice 30 percenters, and he would have been determined by third-, fourth- and fifth-choice votes.

That's not democracy. That's government by collective. In fact, to paraphrase Sen. Bill Doyle, R-Washington and the dean of the Senate, IRV is an attempt to fix something that ain't broke.