A recent MPR News/U of M Humphrey Institute poll on Minnesota's U.S. Senate race and the presidential election found that 77 percent of likely voters say they would consider voting for an independent or third-party candidate. Among those who say they wouldn’t, 61 percent say their main concern is wasting their vote.

With IRV, voters don’t ever need to be concerned about wasting their vote. IRV makes all candidates “viable.”

The current poll shows that DFL candidate Al Franken and Republican candidate Norm Coleman are in a close race and Independent Party candidate Dean Barkley has the support of eight percent of voters.

Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain are also close in the polls, with third-party candidates Ralph Nader, Cynthia McKinney and Bob Barr peeling votes away form the two major-party candidates.

If these races remain close, third-party candidates will play a decisive role in the election, and whoever wins will again top out with less than a majority of the popular vote.

Under our winner-take-all voting system, the will of the majority is easily and often defeated.

This is bad for democracy.

In addition to producing winners without a popular mandate to govern, it restricts choice on the ballot, makes “spoilers” out of third-party candidates and marginalizes their messages, rewards negative campaigning, scares voters away from voting their true preference and deters a growing number away from voting altogether.

IRV accomplishes just the opposite: It brings new and independent voices to the political process, lowers barriers to political participation, provides voters with more choices and the opportunity to cast a vote for their preferred candidate, eliminates concerns of “wasting” one’s vote, creates more civil elections, and saves money because it doesn’t require separate runoff elections.  

This is good for democracy.

Some people say the current plurality system works fine – if only third-party candidates don’t run or if only voters see the senselessness in voting for a third-party candidate.

But the MPR/U of M Humphrey Institute poll knocks this thinking off its feet. Independent voters outnumber faithful party voters in Minnesota, and they are an irresistible growth market for independent candidates.

The last three Minnesota gubernatorial races all had high-profile third-party candidates who split the vote three or four ways. The results: Jesse Ventura won with 38 percent of the vote in 1998 and Tim Pawlenty with 42 percent in 2002 and 46 percent in 2006. Now third parties are impacting the Minnesota and U.S. Senate race.

There’s no need to squeeze choices and independent voices from the ballot. IRV fixes the “three’s a crowd” problem by eliminating the risk that a third-party candidate can block the election of the candidate who otherwise would have a majority of votes. It allows choice without the consequences it can wreak in our current system. IRV changes the rules of the game in favor of voters.

Here's how it would work this November in the Senate race: Franken, Coleman, and the Independence Party candidate who wins the Sept. 9 Primary would be listed on the ballot. Instead of filling in the bubble by your choice, you would put a "1" by your first choice, a "2" by the second, etc. All the first choices on the ballots would be counted. If one of the candidates received a majority of first-choice votes, he would be elected. If not, the candidate with the fewest votes would be eliminated. In an immediate second count – an instant runoff – the votes that were cast by supporters of the eliminated candidate would be redistributed to their designated second choices and one of the two remaining candidates would win.

This simple process gives us a winner with majority support, gets rid of the “spoiler” factor and makes “strategic” voting unnecessary.

IRV is increasingly popular in Minnesota and across the country as a simple and inexpensive fix – a runoff on a single ballot – that would solve serious problems in our current elections. It's not just popular among voters, it has the support of candidates as well - including all of the presidential candidates above.

Jeanne Massey,
Executive Director, FairVote Minnesota