Ranked vote elections (aka instant runoff elections)

What Utah needs right now is ranked voting.  That way we could all vote BOTH on principle AND strategically.

Here's how ranked voting works.  Let's say you could live with 3 of 4 candidates for president (or city treasurer, whatever).  You can rank the candidates, and ignore the 4th one because you would never vote for them.

Your rank	Candidate	Popular vote of first rank votes
1	Integrity Iverson (3rd party)	19%
2	Livable Longfellow (3rd party)	20%
3	Horrible Hendricks (your party's first pick)	21%
(not ranked)	Opposition Olessen	40%

Given this scenario, everyone who voted for I.I. would be sadly disappointed their first pick was the lowest of the 3. Because of that, I.I. is taken out, and the numbers are run again. Ballots who ranked I.I. first are now counted for their second vote.

Let's say that 18% of voters had marked I.I. first and LL as 2nd (like you), and 1% put I.I. first and Horrible Hendricks as their second choice. The re-rankings now look like this:

Your rank	Candidate	Popular vote of first rank votes
2	Livable Longfellow (3rd party)	20% + 18% = 38%
3	Horrible Hendricks (your party's first pick)	21% + 1% = 22%
(not ranked)	Opposition Olessen	40%

Now, if we had gone by the current simple popular vote system, Horrible would have had the popular vote in round 1.   But now LL is ranked above Horrible.  Since Horrible is now the least popular, they are dropped off, and votes for HH are recounted.  Let's assume that this gives LL another 4%, and that the remainder of the ballots have no further valid ranks (they were already counted out), which leaves the final vote at:

LL: 42%
OO: 40%

This is somewhat contrived.  You could come up with much more elaborate scenarios.

This kind of election changes how you vote. You probably only voted for I.I. and L.L. because ranked elections let you do so safely--in the current election system, you would have voted for Horrible because it seemed like you'd only split the vote and help Opposition win.

This kind of voting allows you both a conscience AND a strategy.  You don't have to vote for Horrible first, but if you think they are the most likely to win and you don't want a split-vote scenario, you can still rank them lower than your first pick and your ballot counts (eventually) toward them, in the worst scenario.

We could really use this today.  I wish we had it.