December 14, 2007: Our two-party system is badly broken, often forcing voters to choose between "the lesser of two evils" or vote for their second or third choice to avoid "spoiling" an election. Fortunately, there's something voters can do about it--change the way votes are cast and counted. Instead of the vote-for-one, winner-takes-all system we currently use, in which a candidate can win with merely a plurality of the vote, runoff-based systems of the type used in many parts of the world and in many parts of the U.S. ensure that the winning candidate in a contest has received over 50% of the vote. This is accomplished with runoff voting. Traditionally this works in the following way: if no candidate receives over 50% of the vote, the candidate who comes in last is removed from the field and a runoff election is held with the remaining candidates. This process is repeated until a candidate receives over 50% of the vote.

This can be expensive and time-consuming, so instant runoff voting, or IRV, has been developed. In this method, each voter ranks all the candidates, and the runoff process takes place all at once in a single tally.

The benefits of runoff voting are clear for many voters--under IRV they can rank their preferred candidate first without in effect voting for their least preferred candidate. No more "lesser of two evils" and "spoiler effect." This will enable more candidates to run to reflect more diverse political ideas, because candidates won't worry that they're splitting some constituency's vote.

The efforts of IRV for Urbana to put this reform in front of the public have been met with political resistance, but I remain interested in whether the citizens of Urbana would support IRV. The question is ultimately ours to decide.