This LA Times article here has a good overview of San Francisco's use of instant runoff voting this November for city elections.
It actually mentions our work in Illinois (kind of) in this paragraph:
At the state and federal level, the method has been praised as a way to create space for third parties in a two-party system that has excluded them. But therein lies the rub: Attempts to pass instant runoff voting plans in New Mexico, Alaska and Illinois, among other places, have failed in recent years, largely because Democrats or Republicans opposed it.
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Well, that's not actually true. In New Mexico, the Senate Democrats killed it while the House Democrats actively supported it. In Alaska, the Republicans were largely for it while the Democrats were not. But in Illinois, neither party has taken a 'party position' on instant runoff voting. Our future Senator Barack Obama introduced an instant runoff voting bill in 2002, but we haven't been able to pass one yet. Hopefully in 2005.
And the San Francisco Democratic Central Committee endorsed instant runoff voting in the March 2002 election when it was on the ballot (and without that endorsement from the Democratic Party, instant runoff voting would have not earned a majority of the vote).
Instant runoff voting should be more of a mainstream issue than it is, because the spoiler problem is not ever going away with plurality elections.
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