Town meeting season is coming up, which means elections will be held in a couple hundred towns and school districts over the next two months for selectmen, budget committee, supervisor of the checklist, etc. Everybody in New Hampshire uses good old fashionied majority voting: Whoever gets the most votes, wins. But there are other methods.

One is instant-runoff voting (IRV - wikipedia article here), which is designed to create a majority winner when more than two people are contesting for a single seat, without having to go through follow-up elections. In it, voters rank all their candidates by preference; if nobody gets a simple majority of votes, the candidate with the fewest top-preference rankings is tossed out and his/her ballots parceled among the remaining candidates according to the next ranking on each ballot - which instantly re-enacts what would (presumably) have happened if there was a second, runoff vote. This process continues until there is a winner.

So far as I know isn’t used in New Hampshire, but is used in the city elections in Burlington, Vermont. (This was drawn to my attention by a letter to the editor of the Burlington paper, blaming instant-runoff voting for some current city problems.)

It sounds pretty cool to me, although it would make election night in the newsroom a nightmare - trying to figure out which of, say, eight candidates won the three open selectmen seats would take more calculation that we could handle on deadline.

Tags: election