Instant-Runoff Voting Passes in Maine a Boon for Third and Fourth Parties Breaking the Hold of Our Duopoly System of Republican - Democrats!

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Instant-runoff voting (IRV), also known as the alternative vote (AV), transferable vote, (single-seat) ranked-choice voting (RCV), or preferential voting, is a voting system used in single-seat elections when there are more than two candidates. Instead of voting only for a single candidate, in IRV voters can rank the candidates in order of preference. Ballots are initially counted for each elector's top choice. If a candidate secures more than half of these votes, that candidate wins. Otherwise, the candidate in last place is eliminated and removed from consideration. The top remaining choices on all the ballots are then counted again. This process repeats until one candidate is the top remaining choice of a majority of the voters. When the field is reduced to two, it has become an "instant runoff" that allows a comparison of the top two candidates head-to-head.

Maine Just Voted for a Better Way to Vote

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n Tuesday, Maine became the first state to challenge America’s first-past-the-post voting system, as voters approved, by a margin of 52 percent to 48 percent, a referendum instituting ranked-choice voting for state and federal elections. It’s by far the biggest victory for a reform movement that has attracted high-profile endorsements from politicians like John McCain and Howard Dean but had so far failed to gain traction beyond a few progressive American cities. For Maine, it’s a shift that could make third-party voting more viable overnight—by eliminating the ability of third-parties to play spoiler.

Ranked-choice voting, sometimes called instant runoff voting, has a smoothing function. Under the system just approved in Maine, voters rank five candidates from 1 to 5 on their ballots. Election officials then eliminate the candidate with the fewest first-choice votes and immediately re-assign those voters to their second-choice candidate. The process repeats until one candidate is favored over the remaining alternatives by a majority of voters. It gives candidates with lots of second-choice votes a chance. Gone is the three-way election where the winning candidate gets only 38 percent of the vote.

DYI:  States rights working just as our founding fathers had anticipated with each of the 50 State's the incubator's of new ideas.  This certainly would have change the Republican run off when Ron Paul was a candidate.  A large percentage wanted Ron Paul but didn't vote for him for they felt he would not have won.  With instant run-off the dynamics would have changed dynamically.  With instant run-off the current Presidential primaries and election would have been totally different with one NOT assuming a Trump or Clinton square off.

I like the idea as it encourages the formation of addition parties who would have a possibility of winning not just to be a spoiler if they are lucky.  This would help to break up the duopoly Republican - Democrat parties and force them to run more freedom constitutional type candidates that I believe a vast majority of Americans desire.  At any rate, will see over time if the Maine experiment has legs with the other States.

DYI