Instant runoff system to be tested in San Francisco

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Monday, October 18, 2004

Instant runoff system to be tested in San Francisco
By Tom Elias

For decades, local election outcomes in San Francisco have not become known until December, after a runoff that follows the November general election.

That's been time-consuming and expensive.

But not this fall. In every local race with more than two contestants, San Francisco voters will be told to name their first choice and then designate a second, third and fourth pick, depending on how many contestants are running. If no one wins over 50 percent of the vote in a race, and the first choice on some ballots is not one of the two leaders after all the votes are counted, votes will be reallocated, with those cast for folks finishing down the list now going to their second choices. If there's still no winner, third picks will be used.

It's called an "instant runoff" system, since it performs essentially the same function as a runoff election, but without the cost or delay. In the United States, this has been tried only once before -- in Ann Arbor, Mich., in 1975, when a Republican mayoral candidate got 49 percent of the vote and the Democrat 40. The eventual winner was the original second-place finisher, the second-pick of virtually all voters who first went for a leftist minor-party candidate eliminated in the first round.

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Find this article at:
http://www.dailybreeze.com/opinion/1108626.html

Tom Elias is author of The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government's Campaign to Squelch It, now in an updated second edition. His e-mail address is [e-mail].