Instant Runoff Voting

I had a nice blog entry almost finished where I again showed that the movement to debunk peak oil is filled with a bunch of economists that say "people have said we were running out of resources in the past, and it's never happened, so it obviously never will!" while the petrolium geologists all still agree that production is in the process of peaking over the next few years. But of course Firefox crashed before I could publish it, further supporting my dad's advice that I should compose the blog entries in a word processor (though he suggests that mostly so he won't have to be my spell-checker).

Anyway, since it's election day and since my blog entry on bogus peak-oil debunking articles wasn't fated to happen, I'd like to introduce you to (or remind you of, if you know about this already) Instant Runoff Voting.

"IRV is a reform that allows voters to rank candidates in order of preference, so that in cases where there is no initial majority winner, a runoff recount can be conducted without a new election to determine which candidate is actually preferred by a majority of voters."

It opens elections to a wider number of candidates, eliminates the "spoiler" factor for alternative parties, and allows a winner to be chosen based on a true majority rather than a plurality. I, for one, believe that America should adopt Instant Runoff Voting immediately, but of course changing anything at the Federal level is quite impossible. So I will be contacting my state and local officials to raise the issue on the local level where some progress may actually be made.