VOL. 132 | NO. 233 | Thursday, November 23, 2017

Sometimes you respect the will of the people, even if they don’t have it quite right. But with Instant Runoff Voting (IRV), you have the best of both worlds: the people have spoken, and they got it right. If only the city council would listen.

In 2008, 71 percent of Memphis referendum voters supported IRV for city council elections. IRV is truly the best of both worlds. It ensures a majority winner, so the least-preferred candidate of the majority doesn’t squeak by with 37 percent of the vote because the majority of voters were split among several like-minded candidates. But it also ensures that all voters have an equal and realistic chance to participate.

Lately, we’ve used runoff elections in single-member district council races. If no candidate gets a majority in the first round, you have to come back six weeks later to choose between the top two candidates.

The problem is that turnout is terrible in that runoff. Turnout drops from 28 percent in the October first round to only 5 percent in the runoff. The few voters who can get to the runoff are disproportionately white and affluent – not representative of the council district as a whole. Such low-turnout races reward well-financed or well-organized “get out the vote” efforts, regardless of a candidate’s true support. IRV is the solution.

Under IRV, voters rank their first, second and third candidate preferences. If no candidate gets a majority, the weakest candidate is eliminated, with that candidate’s votes being redistributed among the remaining candidates based on those voters’ second-place choices. This process repeats until someone wins with a majority. (See www.saveirvmemphis.com.)

Rather than paying for a second, low-turnout decisive election, it’s “one and done” with more participation and lower cost, saving about $250,000 per year.

IRV is used in 11 cities across the country. In a 2016 referendum, Maine voters approved this system for statewide elections – after electing an unpopular governor with 37 percent of the vote because two candidates split the opposition vote.

After nine years of official obstruction, we are finally set to implement IRV in the 2019 city council elections. But council incumbents, wary of any change to the system that elected them, are trying to repeal it on Dec. 5. This is bad for several reasons.

On the merits, the objections raised by opponents – too complicated, hard to administer, etc. – are not borne out by the experience of over 200 ranked-choice voting elections in 12 cities over 50 years.

More important, these objections were considered and rejected by Memphis voters in 2008. To make us go through another repeal referendum, when we haven’t even tried IRV once yet, disrespects the voters’ will.

We don’t have to put up with low-turnout, expensive runoffs, or vote-splitting plurality elections where the majority loses. We can have the best of both worlds. Email the council at IRV@saveirvmemphis.com to ask them to respect what we said in 2008.

Steve Mulroy is a University of Memphis law professor and former Shelby County commissioner.