Steven Hill on Instant Runoff Voting in Minneapolis Star Tribune

Communications — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 01:49:00 -0500

New America in the News:

Minneapolis voters spoke loudly last week when, by a nearly 2-to-1 ratio, they chose a new kind of balloting for most city elections -- instant-runoff voting...

But if all goes through, the 2009 election for mayor and City Council will be like nothing Minneapolis voters have seen.

Instead of two elections for those offices -- a primary and a general contest -- there will be just one. The ballot will ask voters to rank their first, second and third choices for each seat, provided there are that many candidates...

Steven Hill, political reform director for the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington and California, believes that the process will allow residents to select governing bodies that actually "mirror" them in terms of race, gender and background.

This is called proportional representation, and supporters also believe that it gives voters more choice and brings higher voter turnout, doing away with a winner-take-all outcome.

Hill, who played a key role in San Francisco's instant-runoff campaign in 2002, said that city had its third election with the system last week and that no problems were reported. In exit polls, 87 percent of voters said they understood the process, he said....

For the complete article, please visit the Star Tribune website.

The GOP Has Gone South

Articles — Sun, 12 Sep 2004 00:00:00 -0400

The choice of Zell Miller, a far-right Southern Democrat, as the keynote speaker at the Republican National Convention probably did not help the GOP attract moderate swing voters. But it symbolizes the degree to which the Republican Party has become the party of the Deep South.

In 1860, the Republican candidate for president, Abraham Lincoln, did not receive a single Southern electoral vote for president, and his election inspired the South to secede. The liberalism of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman, however, produced a small trickle of Southern conservatives out of the Democratic Party.

That trickle became a flood when… more