Michelle Poyourow is a former staffer at the Bicycle Transportation Alliance. I don't know what she's moved on to do since then, but she wrote a letter to the Oregon, which I found at their website. It's a wonderfully clear and concise explanation of the benefits of Instant Runoff Voting. She focuses on how IRV allows us to avoid primary elections, something of mixed value but, in the end, a good thing. The effort for election reform will involve a lot of people trying to muddy things up to maintain the status quo; the more we can keep our message simple, the better our chances of prevailing. Having messages like this from Poyourow is exactly what we need.

One of the best ways to lower the costs of elections is to eliminate primaries and use Instant Runoff Voting (IRV). You'll find it in use in Australia, Canada, Ireland, major U.S. cities and elsewhere around the world, and its popularity is growing fast.

With IRV, voters rank candidates in order of preference. The "first choices" are tallied up. If one candidate has a majority of support, he or she wins. If not, then voters' second, and even third, choices are applied until one candidate has a majority of support. As a result, candidates with broad appeal are more likely to win an election than they are today, and we save money on costly, divisive primary elections.

If you are a moderate, and most of us are, this is the voting system for you. Voter-Owned Elections make our elections more representative, at a modest cost; Instant Runoff Voting does the same, while also saving us money.

MICHELLE POYOUROW
Southeast Portland