Instant Runoff Voting

Thank you to the Chair and members of the Elections committee for this opportunity to testify on behalf of AB 1121.

I thought it might be helpful to you to know how instant runoff voting has worked for voters in San Francisco. We have the benefit of three exit polls, two conducted by San Francisco State University’s Public Research Institute, and a third by the Asian Law Caucus, for the 2004, 2005 and 2006 elections, in which voters were asked… more

This year, California state and local governments will spend close to $10 million on at least three elections we do not need. That makes no sense amidst California’s and our nation’s brutal recession.

Los Angeles, CA -- Today, Los Angeles County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas called for Los Angeles County to look into using instant runoff voting (IRV) for future special elections in order to increase voter turnout and lower election costs.

Madison Nguyen shouldn't be the only one breathing a sigh a relief.

When San Jose District 7 voters rejected a recall of the city councilwoman Tuesday, they spared the entire city the cost of holding two additional special elections.

Only 4.7% of eligible voters showed up, according to the New America Foundation's Instant Runoff Voting (IRV) project. The cost of holding the election ...

Now that our country has elected a 21st century president, we should reconsider our 18th century electoral system.

What are you doing today? How would you like to be voting in runoff elections for the Board of Supervisors? That's what many would be doing if San Francisco hadn't voted in 2002 to replace the old December runoff system with an "instant runoff" system known as ranked choice voting.

Whether using ranked choice voting or December runoffs, the goal is the same: to elect officeholders with majority support from the public. But with ranked-choice voting, you accomplish this in one November election.

But one ranked-choice voting advocate, Steven Hill of the New America Foundation, responds that such concerns are nonsense. Two North Carolina communities ...

Now that a winner has emerged in Oregon's down-to-the-wire U.S. Senate race, one nagging question persists: What effect did the third-party candidacy of Dave Brownlow have on the election?

The question is important for a number of reasons. With the vote for Republican Gordon Smith and Democrat Jeff Merkley so close -- each received 47 percent of the total -- the more than 80,000 votes earned by Brownlow of the Constitution Party is far greater than the margin of difference between the two leading candidates. So when… more

The realm of electoral system design is still a fairly esoteric branch of political science in the United States--unfortunately so, since no single detail has a greater impact on the quality of representative government. The choice of an electoral system affects which candidate gets elected and all other aspects of a representative democracy, including the number of viable political parties, the quality of campaigns, voter participation levels, the role of campaign finance, legislative policy and more.

But despite the central importance of electoral system selection, the… more