IRV FLAWS NOT DEBATABLE

Editors, Daily Planet:

On March 2, Berkeley residents voted overwhelmingly for Measure I, empowering the City Council to replace our antiquated, 18th-century voting system with a more modern procedure. Make no mistake: This is a victory for democracy, and we can hope that future elections will produce results that better reflect the will of the people.

But not necessarily.

Measure I does not specify the system that will be used to replace our traditional "plurality voting" system. It leaves that detail to the City Council. It is clear, however, that the authors of Measure I prefer the "single transferable vote" system known as Instant Runoff Voting. IRV has a great deal of political momentum, and its proponents portray it as an electoral silver bullet. They claim that IRV will immunize us from "spoiler candidates," and create a system where we are all free to vote our minds, without ever having to worry about accidentally voting against our own interests. This is far from the truth. In fact:

• IRV does not eliminate the effect of spoiler candidates. It merely raises the bar of popularity that a candidate must achieve before he or she becomes a spoiler.
• Under IRV, if you mark your favorite candidate "1," you could still end up handing the victory to a candidate you dislike.
• Under IRV, by marking your favorite candidate "1," you could end up producing a worse result than if you had stayed home and not voted at all. Not even our traditional "plurality" system can go that wrong.

These flaws are not debatable political points; they are provable mathematical facts. IRV proponents try to belittle them by saying they are unlikely to happen. The truth is we don't know when or how often these flaws will manifest. It could be next year, next decade, or next century. When it happens, will we be brave enough to seek out an even better system than IRV, or will we retreat to our traditional system, however flawed it may be?

There are many alternatives to IRV that we might consider, and the one I advocate is Approval Voting. The idea behind Approval Voting is simple: on a traditional ballot, vote for as many (or as few) candidates as you like. Most votes wins. Approval Voting always elects the candidate acceptable to the most voters, and is truly invulnerable to "spoiler" candidates. Because Approval Voting is such a small change from our current system, it is simple to understand and inexpensive to implement. Approval Voting can be implemented without any changes to current voting hardware and software; if we wanted to, we could implement it tomorrow. To the 20,000-plus Berkeley voters who voted for Measure I, I ask: If you could implement cheaper and better voting reform than IRV, and have it sooner, why wouldn't you?

By all means, don't take my word for it. I encourage all voters to do their own research into alternative voting systems. On the Internet, there is an excellent article on Approval Voting at http://alum.mit.edu/ne/whatmatters/200211/, and a comparison of various systems can be found at www.electionmethods.org.

Our current system is like the proverbial broken clock: It's right twice a day, but it's still broken. In our haste to replace it, let's not choose a clock that's only right three times a day. When deciding how to best implement Measure I, I urge the councilmembers and voters of Berkeley to consider all the available alternatives, including Approval Voting. Let's get it right the first time.

Marc LeBlanc

Member, Citizens for Approval Voting