Can States Experiment With Alternative Voting Methods?

Image (CC) Jonathunder.

As blogger Matt Yglesias notes, “We have fifty states, but in some ways remarkably little institutional diversity between them.” Only Nebraska, for example, has a unicameral legislature–but Maine is now considering it as well.

Across the country FairVote has also backed another election reform. It’s called instant runoff voting, and it allows voters to rank their choices for an elected official. Here’s FairVote’s primer on how it works:

IRV allows voters to rank candidates in order of preference (i.e. first, second, third, fourth and so on). Voters have the option to rank as many or as few candidates as they wish, but can vote without fear that ranking less favored candidates will harm the chances of their most preferred candidates. [...] The weakest candidates are successively eliminated and their voters’ ballots are redistributed to next choices until a candidate crosses a majority of votes.

Instant runoff voting (often abbreviated as “IRV”) is already used in places like San Francisco and Burlington, VT, and Minneapolis and Memphis will soon be implementing it as well. Opponents had brought suit against IRV in Minneapolis, but the Minnesota Supreme Court just ruled today that the city is free to try out the alternative voting method:

Instant Runoff Voting as adopted in Minneapolis is not facially invalid under the United States or Minnesota Constitution, and does not contravene any principles established by this court in Brown v. Smallwood, 130 Minn. 492, 153 N.W. 953 (1915).

Now cities and towns across Minnesota can continue the lively American tradition of democratic innovation. And reformers across the country can follow their lead.

For more information visit posts tagged “IRV” at the national FairVote blog, or the FairVote Minnesota homepage.