The Case for a National TRY Strategy.

• Author: Nicita, James J.
• Position: Instant Runoff elections - Statistical Data Included

Are the Green Party and the Nader 2000 organization squandering an exceptional opportunity to secure widespread implementation of instant runoff voting (IRV)? I will confess to 20/20 hindsight here, but I fear the answer may be "yes."

It is axiomatic that Green Party candidacies, beyond solely promoting the distinct Green Party platform, use the "spoiler" threat to inspire legislative or popular attempts to enact IRV laws. These efforts are most likely to succeed if Greens put as much thought into a linked post-election IRV lobbying/organizing strategy as we put into a particular candidacy itself. The New Mexico Green Party has demonstrated such success over the years, most recently in getting an IRV bill through the state senate and missing by only one vote getting the bill out of a committee in the state house of representatives.

But where the New Mexico Green Party typically has carefully planned in advance its post-election IRV lobbying efforts, to the point of knowing precisely which state legislator to target as the one to introduce an IRV bill (in the recent case, the very state senator it spoiled in a federal congressional race), neither the Green Party nationally nor the Nader 2000 campaign prior to the election had formulated a post-November 7 IRV lobbying strategy.

Further, even in these post-election months, no discussion appears to be taking place regarding a coordinated strategy. A few weeks after the election, the Steering Committee and some committee chairs of the Association of State Green Parties met privately with Ralph Nader in Washington, DC for a post-election debriefing, but they did not discuss an IRV strategy. Similarly, no strategy was planned at the December meeting of the Coordinating Committee of the ASGP in Georgia. For its part, the Nader 2000 organization now retains only a skeletal staff in Washington, DC; it retained its state coordinators only through the end of November.

Let us not allow the momentum of the 2000 Presidential campaign to dissipate irretrievably. As the standard bearer of this campaign, Ralph Nader could have a singular leadership role to play in a national campaign for IRV. It is not too late for Nader 2000 to take advantage of its vast donor list to fund the rebuilding of its organizational capacity--including hiring state coordinators--and merely change its focus from a Presidential campaign to a national campaign to enact IRV laws. The experience would be a familiar one for the Nader...