The main thing this press release would need to have inserted is some quotes from participating students or teachers.

For immediate release [Date of press release]

Contact: [local student], [student’s phone number]

The Vermont House of Representatives last April passed a resolution creating a commission to study reforming Vermont’s election laws. One task this commission has undertaken is conducting mock demonstration elections using alternative voting systems in schools around the state. The [name of class] at [name of school] participated in this project this week.

As with the year 2000 computer system bug, Vermont may face a year 2000 election system bug. In the year 2000 public campaign financing will be available for the governor’s and lt.-governor’s races. That reform will create the opportunity for voters to have more than just two serious candidates to vote for. As the students in [name of class] learned, when there are more than two candidates there is a strong chance that nobody will get a majority. Under Vermont’s constitution, if no one gets a majority for governor, the decision is taken away from the voters, and the legislature picks a governor instead. This could be a regular event starting in 2000. But this is not a new problem, either. In fact, 21 of Vermont’s gubernatorial elections were settled by the legislature rather than the people.

The students participated in a mock election using the "fix" that has been proposed for this problem. The "fix" known as Instant Runoff Voting, keeps the ultimate decision in the hands of the voters. The procedures that underlie Instant Runoff Voting were invented in the 1850s by Thomas Hare in England, and are used in Australia, Ireland, and even to select finalists for the Academy Awards. With Instant Runoff Voting, voters are encouraged to mark their ballot with their first-choice, second-choice, and so on. Using the same logic as a runoff, but without a new election, if no candidate gets a majority of first-choice votes, the bottom candidates are dropped. The remaining candidates get the second-choice ballots from the voters whose first-choice’s were eliminated, to determine which candidate has the most support.

The [name of the class] found the Instant Runoff Voting system to be simple to use and more democratic than the common system used in Vermont of simply declaring whoever gets the most votes the winner, even if that candidate is opposed by a majority of the voters. The Commission will make their final report to the Vermont House by January 15, 1999.

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