Abstract
Instant-Runoff Voting (IRV) has been marketed to “guarantee that the majority candidate is elected,” to “eliminate the spoiler effect,” and to empower voters, particularly those supporting third-party or independent candidates, to “vote your hopes, not your fears,” which is meant to level the playing field between such candidates and those from the major-party duopoly. This paper shows that in Burlington Vermont, IRV objectively failed to deliver on these promises. However, this failure is not blamed on the use of ranked ballots, but rather on the Hare method of tallying the ballots and identifying the winner. To avoid the failure, this paper presents a variation on IRV, Bottom Two Runoff-IRV (BTR-IRV), including a template for possible legislative language.
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Notes
In August 2022, the Special General Election for U.S. Congress in Alaska provided another example of an IRV election in which the Condorcet winner was not elected.
In April 2022, the Vermont Legislature passed the charter change with the specific RCV method removed, to be resolved by the Burlington City Council at the ordinance level.
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This manuscript was written entirely by Robert Bristow-Johnson.
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Bristow-Johnson, R. The failure of Instant Runoff to accomplish the purpose for which it was adopted: a case study from Burlington Vermont. Const Polit Econ 34, 378–389 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10602-023-09393-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10602-023-09393-1
Keywords
- Ranked choice voting
- Bottom two runoff
- Instant-runoff voting
- Spoiler
- Tactical voting
- Center squeeze
- Condorcet