Wow, I actually agree with former Governor and Senator George Allen on something…well, sort of. Check out the following audio, from Allen’s interview on WRVA this past Friday, to see what I’m talking about:
“What [Virginia Republicans] need to do is have…an unassembled convention, and you either do ranked voting – because if somebody doesn’t get a majority, you don’t want people having to come back 2 or 3 hours later for a second ballot…Ultimately, long term what we ought to do in Virginia – and the Democrats have somewhat of a similar situation where you could get somebody only with 25%, 30% of the vote getting the nomination – is do what some other states do, you have to have a majority, and if somebody doesn’t get a majority in the primary, you have a runoff…That way, you make sure that somebody’s got a majority, rather than somebody getting the nomination with 25%, 33%, and that’s a problem when you have a bunch of folks running, but you handle that with a runoff…”
So I agree strongly with Allen that we want to have nominees with a *majority* of votes, not just a plurality, possibly even a small plurality in a multi-candidate field, as we’ve got on the Republican and Democratic sides this year for Governor and Lt. Governor. Where I disagree with him is that I think we should do INSTANT runoff voting, as opposed to having a separate runoff election. Because Instant Runoff Voting is a lot quicker, easier, less expensive, etc., basically. But other than that…yes, hell has frozen over and I basically agree with former Governor/Senator George Allen on this specific issue. On everything else, including his constant blather about cutting regulations and shrinking the size of government? Nah – the guy continues to be wrong on basically everything – with rare exceptions, such as ranked voting, lol.
