Voters may be asked to vote for mayor twice today. As they leave the polls, a group of election reformers will ask them to fill out a different ballot in an effort to promote instant runoff voting.
Madison resident Brian Casey is organizing today's exit poll experiment about Instant Runoff Voting. IRV is a method of casting and counting ballots where voters rank the candidates rather than simply selecting a first choice.
In the case of the mayoral election, voters would rank as many of the candidates as they like, numbering from one to six, with one being the first choice.
If one candidate receives over 50 percent of the first-choice votes, that candidate is elected. If no candidate receives a majority, than the candidate with the least votes is eliminated and the second-choice on those ballots is counted. This process continues until one candidate has a majority.
IRV has many advantages over our current plurality election process, according to Casey, who said he thinks comparing his ballots with the outcome of the mayoral election will demonstrate these advantages.
\IRV makes it easier for people to vote for candidates that they think might not be able to win while still supporting the candidate that is likely to win,"" Casey said.
Casey said IRV would allow elimination of ""spoiler"" candidates, such as third party candidates, who primary candidates label as a waste of a vote. With IRV, people can vote for their first choice candidate, even if they think that person cannot win because their second choice would then be counted. IRV would also save the city and campaigns money because it necessitates only one election, Casey said.
Progressive Dane Co-Chair Nick Berigan said his party is interested in IRV because it is efficient and tones down negative campaigning.
""You're looking for supporters of other candidates to look at you as their second choice,"" Berigan said.
Yet critics say this view of IRV's benefits is too simplistic. Some election reforms, like IRV, underestimate the importance of strategic voting, according to UW-Madison political science professor Charles Franklin, who teaches a class about political statistics.
He said with IRV there is a strategic reason to use that system to insincerely vote for a second choice.
""The drawback to it is that it is a system that is relatively easy for people to mess with, to vote perversely in order to get the weakest opponent for their candidate,"" Franklin said.
Casey said he hopes to collect several hundred ballots and will post the results on his Web site http://www.irvwisconsin.org.
