TX Gov Perry wins re-election with just 39% of vote, making strong case for “Instant Runoff” balloting.

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In last Tuesday’s election, Texas’ incumbent governor Rick Perry won an re-election despite 61% of the electorate voting against him.

So how does someone get elected governor with only 39% of the vote?

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Not one, but *two* Independent candidates in the race helped split the “anti-Perry” vote for a total of 30%. Bell trailed Perry by only 9%. Would ALL of those Indy votes have gone to Perry’s Democratic challenger had they of not run? We’ll never know, but one thing it does show is the need for something called “instant runoff” voting (link to animation explaining process):

Here is how IRV works: The above linked animation demonstrates this nicely, but simply stated, when voters go to the polls, they are asked to select their preferred candidates in order… favorite to least favored. When no one candidate achieves greater than 50% of the vote in a race with three or more candidates, the votes of the lesser candidates are analyzed. If 25% of the people that chose Candidate-A chose Candidate-B as their second choice, and 75% of those same voters Chose Candidate-C as their second choice, then Candidate-B gets 25% of “A”s vote, and “Candidate-C” gets 75%. This process is repeated with successive candidates until one candidate surpasses the 50% threshold.

Never should a candidate win an election with less than 50% of the vote. While the Founding Fathers designed our government to ensure that minority rights were still given value and heard, nowhere did they suggest that the minority should be allowed to rule over the majority.

That’s just not right.

Our election process is in serious need of reform. From printed receipts that allow for recounts, campaign finance reform, election intimidation & fraud, and candidates winning with less than 50% ruling over the majority, changes are desperately needed. Let’s hope that, simply because they won last Tuesday, Democrats don’t lose the urgency we all felt prior to the election for reform.

(Footnote: While the press is talking about “Democrats regain control of Congress for the first time in twelve years”, the last time Democrats controlled BOTH the House and the Senate at the same time was 1981… 25 years ago! )

This entry was posted on November 10, 2006 at 1:04 am and is filed under Political News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.