Brooklyn council member Brad Lander is set to introduce today to the City Council a new ‘Instant Runoff’ bill that would eliminate costly runoff elections in favor of instant runoffs in which voters would rank candidates to choose their favored contender in a primary election.

According to the Daily News, the new system could avoid the difficulties expected this year as the Board of Elections warns that it won’t have time to reset new electronic voting machines in the two weeks between the September primary and the runoff expected and would also save taxpayers about $20 million.

Instant-runoff voting is an electoral system used to elect a single winner from a field of more than two candidates. It is a form of preferential voting (or ranked choice voting) in which voters rank the candidates in order of preference rather than simply selecting a single candidate.

Ballots are initially distributed based on each elector’s first preference. If a candidate secures more than half of votes cast, that candidate wins. Otherwise, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated. Ballots assigned to eliminated candidates are recounted and assigned to one of the remaining candidates based on the next preference on each ballot. This process continues until one candidate wins by obtaining more than half the votes.

“This whole debate would all be unnecessary if we simply had instant runoff voting. We would save money, we would save time, we would save headaches,” said Councilman Brad Lander (D-Brooklyn), who is sponsoring the bill along with Councilwoman Gale Brewer (D-Manhattan). “This would enable more people to participate in the runoff.”

The bill could take effect as early as 2017. Instant runoff voting has been used in cities like San Francisco, Oakland and Minneapolis.

(Jacob Kornbluh – YWN)