Voting Reform

I can't remember if I've posted about this before, but I think there's a serious problem when you can't vote for a minor party without throwing your vote away. For example, in the upcoming election, let's say I liked Nader better than Kerry, but that I'd much prefer Kerry over Bush. Since there is no way Nader can win, if I vote for him, I'll actually be helping Bush win. Nader might actually be the favorite choice of most people, but he can't win because no one thinks he can win, and no one wants to waste their vote on a candidate who can't win.

I've thought a little bit about this in the past, and I thought maybe some kind of runoff election might be a good way to go, but that's expensive, and it's hard enough to get people to go out and vote once, let alone multiple times. However, in my ignorance, I was unaware that a better solution has already been thought of, and they're going to implement it in San Francisco next month. The solution is called "ranked-choice voting". Basically, it involves being able to rank the candidates according to your first choice, second choice, etc.. It takes a long time to count the votes, but if we vote using computers, then that shouldn't be a problem.

Here is a link to an article that describes this more:

link