Editor’s note: This commentary is by Robert Bristow-Johnson of Burlington.
[T]he GOP wants to have it both ways. Again, the GOP in Vermont have a short memory and decline to sleep in the bed that they make.
Gubernatorial candidate Scott Milne has repeatedly cited the fact that most voters in Vermont had voted for someone other than Peter Shumlin as justification for Milne’s election as governor saying “It’s clear that 54% of Vermonters want a new governor and a new path forward.”
Yet in 2009, many in the GOP insisted that Burlington mayoral candidate Kurt Wright, having more first-choice votes (33 percent) than any other candidate, was the voter choice for mayor even though 67 percent of the votes were against him. But in that election, a ranked-order ballot was used and we know who voters’ contingency choices were. Unfortunately, because of known quirks of instant runoff voting (IRV) used to tabulate that election and determine a winner, a candidate (Bob Kiss) was elected when we knew from the ballot data that another candidate was preferred over him by voters in Burlington (and that candidate was not Wright).
Perhaps if IRV (or a better ranked-ballot method) had been in place for the 2014 gubernatorial election in Vermont, Scott Milne would be heading for the governor’s office right now.
Milne blames Libertarian candidate Dan Feliciano for his 2,434 vote deficit behind Shumlin. But how does he know that? How do we know whom the 8,428 Feliciano voters would have voted for had their apparent first choice not been in the race? Without collecting more information from voters on their ballots, we just don’t know and it’s mistaken to assume that these voters (or the 3,157 Emily Peyton voters) would have voted for any particular candidate other than whom they were limited to marking with the traditional vote-for-only-one ballot. A ranked-order ballot is needed to collect this contingency information from voters. And such a ballot need not be tabulated according to flawed IRV rules to determine who the majority winner (the pairwise champion) is.
In 2008, Republican Gov. Jim Douglas vetoed a bill implementing IRV for statewide offices. Perhaps if IRV (or a better ranked-ballot method) had been in place for the 2014 gubernatorial election in Vermont, Scott Milne would be heading for the governor’s office right now. But we’ll never know because we did not collect enough information from the voters in Vermont with the traditional “mark-only-one” ballot. It’s not only liberals (Progressives and Democrats) that get hurt by the traditional “vote-for-only-one” ballot. This time it may be the conservatives, Republicans, and Libertarians that do. Sometimes folks get hoisted by their own petard.
