by Carl S. Milsted, Jr.

Another year, another election, another set of unsatisfying choices for voters here in Buncombe County, NC...

On the one hand, we had Congressman Charles Taylor, a stalwart member of an increasingly corrupt Republican Party, a party which has gone on the warpath, chewed away at the Bill of Rights, run up huge deficits, created a complicated new entitlement program, and federalized education. On the other hand, we had Democrat challenger Heath Shuler, a relative unknown politically, who might not be too bad, but represents a party bent on federalizing medicine, increasing unemployment for unskilled workers, and destroying the American auto industry.

I held my nose and voted for Shuler. The Republicans deserved a spanking for recent behavior and got it.

Conversely, I know some liberals who were also quite unhappy with the choices presented. They considered Shuler to be too conservative, a stealth Republican.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have more than two choices? Wouldn’t it be nice to have a voting system where you could wholeheartedly support your favorite choice without worrying that doing so would put your least favorite choice in power?

Guess what. There is such a voting system, and you have seen it in action. It’s called range voting.

Have you ever watched a figure skating competition? How about diving? Gymnastics? If so, you have seen range voting in action. In such competitions each judge gives a numerical score to each contender. The scores are averaged, and the athlete with the highest average score wins.

It works. There is no lesser of two evils dilemma.

For those rare individuals who haven’t watched these sports, consider your high school days. Your class valedictorian was chosen by range voting. Teachers typically “vote” on each candidate using a 0-4 scale (F-A). The scores are averaged (GPA), and the student with the highest score wins. Every student is a “candidate.”

We could do something similar for choosing our government leaders. Suppose we put ten dots by each candidate’s name, corresponding to a score of 1-10. You give a 10 to your favorite candidate(s), a 1 to your least favorite(s) and in-between scores for you backup candidates. For example, a Nader supporter could give Nader a 10, Gore a 7 and Bush a 1.

This system works even if we have 20 or more candidates on the ballot. (It would have been very handy for the California special election when Gray Davis was recalled.)

The system is not perfect. No voting system is. But it is vastly superior to our current system of pick one plurality voting or even instant run-off voting. I’ll leave it for future columns to show in more detail why. For those who are impatient, see the excellent Wikipedia articles on range voting and many other voting systems. Also see www.rangevoting.org.

Carl Milsted is a senior editor for The Free Liberal.