Unfortunately, this system is what essayist Richard P. Gabriel would have called “New Jersey,” or an example of “worse-is-better” philosophy. It values the simplicity of implementation over the correctness of the results. But, governing something according to a few apparently simplistic rules provides no guarantee whatsoever of simple or desirable behavior. 

So yes, IRV does definitely provide a way of reducing the “spoiler effect” over First Past the Post voting by allowing losing third-party candidates’ votes to go support the “lesser evil” rather than spoiling things for the most-desired candidate. IRV provides an extremely simple ballot interface that doesn’t require voters to understand much about the voting method itself. I suppose if Americans want to be anti-intellectual, we could support such a new voting system. 

However, its mathematical properties as a voting system carry a downside. IRV does not have the voting-system property known as monotonicity, which means that under IRV, ranking a candidate higher can actually cause them to lose. Experts have calculated that the probability of any particular election resulting in a monotonicity failure is about 5 percent to 15 percent according to Nicholas Miller from the University of Maryland in a 2002 publishing for the Public Choice Society. It actually occurred in the 2009 mayoral election for Burlington, Vt., according to Rangevoting.org. IRV can genuinely result in people electing a candidate that they most definitely didn’t want. 

Instead, I propose that when we need to elect a single-seat office, we use Schulze Method Condorcet Voting. Schulze does things the MIT way; It does the right thing. It uses the exact same ranked preference ballot format as IRV, except that it allows voters the give the same preference to more than one candidate, skip preference numbers and leave some candidates unranked. So where IRV will result in more spoiled ballots due to human error, Schulze Method voting lets people mess up their ballot a little, or just not care about certain things, while still counting all the preferences that they choose to express. It also not only possesses the monotonicity property, but it’s a Condorcet Method The only downside to the Schulze Method is that it requires a rather complex algorithm to count the ballots and decide the winner of the vote. On the upside of the downside that algorithm runs in polynomial time. 

If we want something simpler, we could sacrifice the Condorcet Method’s property and use a Borda Count. This would involve the same balloting procedure as IRV and the Schulze Method, but it counts the votes by assigning a point value to each preference rank and then simply adding up the points given for each candidate. The candidate with the most points then wins. 

This system only sacrifices the majority criterion: the candidate preferred at rank one by an absolute majority of voters might fail to get elected under a Borda Count if ranked lowly by the minority voters. Even this comes with a hidden benefit: Borda Count voting leads to the election of consensus candidates who please everyone and defeats the tyranny of the majority. 

In a country so rampantly partisan that many people on the right now consider the government to have gone fascist, I think we could do with an electoral balloting system that reduces partisanship and builds consensus by nature. 

Or, on the other hand, we could always just go with a proportional-representation Parliament like a proper democracy. Still, even those can get too democratic at times, leading to the election of unsavory politicians from parties with few total votes to high. Besides, I doubt we could get such a measure through the United States Congress or a Constitutional Convention. Passing a consensus-building Borda Count into electoral law will require only plain legislation and will have the direct benefit of electing candidates who fit a consensus not between the various echo chambers created by the media or the parties themselves but between the voters’ actual views. 

Instead of getting excited about IRV, a system that would in fact take away our ability to elect who we want just to save us from the dreaded “spoiler effect”, let’s do that. 

 Eli Gottlieb is a Collegian columnist and can be reached at [email protected].