Bob Kiss, Progressive Party nominee for Mayor of Burlington, Vermont, was elected on March 7. The election is partisan. The outgoing Mayor was a Democrat, but he didn’t run for re-election. Kiss is now a Progressive Party state legislator. The election was conducted using Instant-Runoff Voting. The first choice votes were Kiss 39%, Democrat 31%, Republican 26%, two independents together, 4%. After factoring in the 2nd choice votes from the voters who had made the Republican and one of the independents their first choices, the final tally was Kiss 54%, the Democrat 46%. This was the first partisan election conducted in the U.S. with Instant-Runoff Voting since the 1970’s.
Ballot Access News
Edited By Richard Winger
Interesting…Kiss won by 8 percentage points over the Democrat in the initial vote and the IRV recalculation. So the Republican voters split pretty evenly between the Prog and Dem.
Innovative Plan to Win Popular Election of the President Launched
Press conference for National Popular VoteOn February 23, FairVote’s chairman John B.
Anderson joined Sen. Birch Bayh (D-IN), Rep. John Buchanan (R-AL) and other supporters of an
important new campaign to elect the president by a national popular vote. Anderson ran on the
ballot in all fifty states in 1980 at the head of the National Unity Party ticket.
National Popular Vote, backed by FairVote, Common Cause and a bipartisan group of former
Members of Congress, presented at the National Press Club an innovative plan for states
representing a majority of Americans to join together in an agreement to collectively award their
electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote. States have exclusive power over how
to allocate electors. FairVote also released an impressive, ground-breaking new
report:Presidential Elections Inequality. Copies are available online and for purchase on
http://www.fairvote.org.
The Republican in this contest endorsed the Progressive candidate as the second-place choice, but the Democrat running refused to endorse anyone else, claiming that she was confident of victory on the first ballot. Seems that some candidates, regardless of their endorsement by Howard Dean, et. al., haven’t quite got the hang of elections where actual democracy is involved.
The Republican candidate also voiced approval of the people’s choice, claiming he was glad he had worked to deny Ms. Miller, the Democrat, the office.
(Also, surely the election occured on March 7, not November 7…?)