Symington plus Pollina equals VIRV

In a recent post I called the 2008 Vermont gubernatorial election for the Republican incumbent, Jim Douglas. I did so because former Speaker of the House Gaye Symington’s entry into the race will split the left of center vote. I did not accuse either the Democrat, Symington, or Progressive contender Anthony Pollina of being a spoiler, but with both of them in the race I consider the election spoiled.

I have been thinking about the problem since then and wishing that our legislature had passed an Instant Runoff Voting (IRV) bill. IRV is a voting process whereby each voter ranks the candidates in order of preference. In the event that there is no candidate with a majority of the votes, those who voted for the candidate with the least votes get their second choice votes distributed according to their preference among the remaining candidates. And so it goes until there is a clear winner. This allows voters to express their preference for a dark horse candidate without helping out a candidate they don’t like. IRV is used in Burlington, Vermont, as well a cities, states, and countries around the world.

But we don’t have IRV. If Symington and Pollina agree on it, we could have VIRV, or Virtual Instant Runoff Voting. I am operating on the assumption that most Democrats supporting Symington would prefer Pollina to Douglas and that most Progressives supporting Pollina would prefer Symington to Douglas.

What if both Pollina and Symington announced that, in the event that neither of them had a measurable lead over Douglas in late October, the one with lower poll numbers would drop out and ask his or her followers to vote for the other?

Let’s say a poll is conducted on October 20. Douglas has 43%, Candidate X (either Symington or Pollina – I’m being deliberately nonspecific) has 38% and Candidate Y has 19%. We can safely assume that Candidate Y is not going to pull 19-plus percentage points in the last two weeks of the campaign. Candidate Y has had a fair chance to compete and express political points during the campaign season, but pragmatically speaking is out of the race. What would be the point in carrying on? VIRV would merely do what IRV would have done, had our legislature been so wise as to pass it.

There are details the two campaigns would have to work out. Which poll(s) would be used? How much of a gap in the numbers would there have to be in order to trigger VIRV? If Symington and Pollina are effectively tied in the late October polls, what then?

As I noted in my previous essay on the subject, in the long run the Democrats and the Progressives need to shed some ideological fixations and cooperate. We need statewide IRV to have any pretense of democracy in a three party state. In the meantime, Pollina and Symington can agree to approximate it to serve the will of the people.