John Anderson promotes Instant Runoff Voting

[oberliner]

Ross Perot. Ralph Nader. Like theirs, my face is pinned up on the dart boards of angry partisans everywhere. I was bitterly accused of spoiling the 1980 election and helping Ronald Reagan beat Jimmy Carter.

But the real culprit is America's practice of plurality voting, by which candidates win without an absolute majority. In this system, third-party hopefuls can rarely aspire to be more than "spoilers." Worse, the one-third of all voters who are not registered as Republican or Democrat feel pressured to vote against their worst nightmare rather than their best hope.

A simple reform would correct this problem. Instant runoff voting (IRV), which lets voters rank their choices, would allow America to achieve the basic goal of its electoral system – electing the candidate with the most support.

Plurality voting, used by all states in presidential elections, allows candidates to win all of a state's electoral votes without getting an absolute majority of the popular vote. In recent elections, this system has hurt Democrats and Republicans alike. In 1992, Ross Perot took 19 percent of the vote. That support, observers speculate, sapped George H.W. Bush's support, giving himjust 37 percent of the vote and helping Bill Clinton to win with 43 percent. In 2000, Al Gore lost Florida and the presidency by 537 votes to George W. Bush, even as Ralph Nader won 97,488 votes in Florida – more than 181 times Bush's victory margin.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/csm/20070928/cm_csm/yanderson28;_ylt=Aljv56l5zf5rKirD4z7O1pn9wxIF