Something Steve Benen said reminded me that there may be a fix for the national conundrum – who to vote for in a winner-take-all contest. First, the conundrum:
… we’re occasionally reminded that while the Republican Party rejects everything the Green Party stands for, the GOP nevertheless sees the Green Party as incredibly useful in moving the country to the right. Indeed, we know just as a matter of arithmetic that if Green Party voters had backed the Democratic ticket in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin in 2016, Donald Trump would not be president today.
This is an oft-noted wail of voters – they would prefer a 3rd party candidate, but aren’t they wasting their vote by voting for that candidate?
Minneapolis, just a few miles to my west, uses instant-runoff voting. In this method, voters may list their preferred candidates in preferred order. During counting, losing candidates have their votes redistributed to surviving candidates based on the order specified by the voters. In the end, these ballots may indicate the most accurate measurement of preferences for 3rd party candidates, while permitting such voters to also specify someone else who is “acceptable”. How about we implement this for the Presidency? Heck, we could probably do this on a state-by-state basis. (Maybe the only way, legally speaking.)
I’m sure this has been suggested many times before, but it’s worth reiterating.
Incidentally, Steve’s report is about someone on the GOP payroll in Montana who registered for the Green Party primary for the Senate seat that’s in contention, perhaps hoping to split the vote that would otherwise go to the Democratic candidate through hard line leftist appeals if he were to win the primary. It seems to me that electoral shenanigans such as this, legal or illegal, might be abandoned if we had instant-runoff, as they would become ineffective.
