Green Party candidate says system needs to be changed

As the Green Party’s presidential nominee, David Cobb knows he doesn’t have a chance of being elected under the current electoral system.

He’d like the system – from the way presidential debates are run to the way ballots are cast and counted – to change.

“The voting system is flawed,” Cobb said Monday in an interview with The Spokesman-Review. This country has “one of the most narrow ranges of political discourse.”

Cobb, a Texas attorney who received the Green Party’s nomination earlier this year, is pushing to get his name on as many states’ ballots as possible. He’s on in Washington and 28 other states so far; the party is still collecting the 10,000 signatures it needs in Idaho.

What Cobb and other Green Party members would like is an electoral system known as instant runoff voting. Under that process, a voter can rank the choices for candidates, first, second, third and so on.

Using this November as an example, a person could mark an IRV ballot in the presidential race first for Cobb, second for Ralph Nader and third for George W. Bush.

In the first round of ballot counting, Cobb would get that person’s vote. If one candidate gets a majority, the election is over and that candidate wins. But if no candidate gets a majority, the candidate with the least votes is eliminated and the ballots are counted again. If Cobb were eliminated, that person’s vote would go to Nader; if he were still in, Cobb would keep that vote. As each round of balloting continued, the number of names on the ballot would shrink until one of the remaining candidates had a majority of votes.

IRV is used in some European countries, Cobb said. Green Party members are pushing an initiative to get it on the ballot in Washington.

Secretary of State Sam Reed, who was in Spokane on Monday to pump up support for the current primary system, said IRV seems to work well in parliamentary elections in those countries. But he didn’t think IRV was practical for a year like 2004, when many federal, state and local races – some with as many as a dozen candidates – are on the ballot.

“It’s a somewhat complicated system to rank candidates,” Reed said. “In America, the person who gets the most votes wins.”

Cobb says his current run is about building a movement and a political party, not about capturing the White House. It’s a movement that stresses an end to the war in Iraq, dismantling the military industrial complex and creating government sponsored universal health care.

He thinks the American public is being cheated by keeping candidates from alternative parties – he doesn’t care for the term third party or minor party – out of the presidential debates. Any candidate who is on the ballot in enough states to theoretically capture an Electoral College majority should be allowed to participate.

That could be five or six candidates, but the Democrats and Republicans manage debates with that many candidates before the New Hampshire primary, he noted.

Cobb rejects the suggestion that he and other electoral long shots are just taking votes from one of the two major party candidates, possibly influencing the outcome of a close election. Some critics say Ralph Nader tipped the 2000 presidential election for Bush by taking votes from Al Gore; others say Libertarian Jeff Jared tipped the U.S. Senate race that year in favor of Democrat Maria Cantwell by taking votes from incumbent Republican Slade Gorton.

“What others call spoiling, we call participating,” he said. “Ultimately, I can’t steal votes from anybody; I have to earn votes, just like John Kerry and George Bush.”