Governor asks Senate Committee to Enact Instant Runoff Voting

Voters’ Choice Coalition
Press Release
March 15, 2000

Governor Howard Dean today testified before the Senate Government Operations Committee urging them to adjust the way Vermonters elect future governors. Noting that the advent of campaign finance reform has helped bring Vermont into a new era of multi-party elections, the Governor predicted there would be no outright majority winners for the foreseeable future, leaving the election of a governor to the General Assembly. 

The Governor said he believed most Vermonters agree with him that the Governor should be directly elected by a majority of the voters. He proposed two possible ways to achieve this goal. One is a two-round runoff election three weeks after the November election in the event there is no initial majority winner. The Governor observed that the downsides of a two-round runoff election include extending the campaign season, cost and administrative obstacles, and most importantly, the likelihood of dramatically reduced voter turnout.

The other method of achieving majority rule with direct election, which the Governor prefers over a two-round election system, is known as instant runoff voting. Instant runoff voting is used in many governmental elections including the House of Representatives in Australia, the President of the Republic of Ireland, the Mayor of London, and is a recommended election procedure in modern editions of Robert’s Rules of Order. 

Instant runoff voting works by allowing voters to rank candidates, thus indicating who their alternate choices would be if their favorite candidate were eliminated in a runoff. A House bill, H.199, would provide for an instant runoff recount by Washington Superior Court in cases of no initial majority for any state-wide election. In an instant runoff recount, the candidates with the fewest first-choice votes would be eliminated sequentially, and all ballots would count as a vote for the top-ranked candidate on each ballot that was still in the running -- in essence, achieving the same goal of a traditional runoff, but without the need to call the voters out to a second election.

Instant runoff voting was unanimously recommended by a citizens commission established the Vermont House of Representatives in 1998 to study the election reform proposal. The instant runoff voting bill, co-sponsored by four Democrats, four Republicans and one Progressive, is currently in the House Government Operations Committee.

The Voters’ Choice Coalition is made up of Vermont organizations and voters that have endorsed instant runoff voting. The member organizations include: The Vermont League of Women Voters, Common Cause/Vermont, the Vermont State Grange, the Vermont chapter of the American Association of University Women, the Vermont Public Interest Research Group (VPIRG), and the Green Mountain Chapter of the Older Women’s League