Now, here’s the $million question:

Did Luis Morano win because of Cumulative voting or the $100-per-voter spent on voter education.

$100 per voter is a hefty amount. Consider that a NY SBE member had told me that NY spends about $9 per registered voter per year in net annual election expenditures.

Could bullet voting have achieved the same result? If so, that would be simpler.

Whether you dislike Cumulative Voting or not, Instant Runoff Voting is much much worse. Cumulative votes can be added up at the polls. IRV cannot – it is not additive. With IRV you can hurt your preferred choice by voting for them. IRV is complex to count, costly to administer, and results are not intuitive. Instant Runoff Voting is a misnomer, it does not provide the same results as a traditional runoff, voters make their choices before they know who would be “in” the final runoff, and it is so complex that it would be hard to detect error or fraud.

Also, “choice voting” seems to be the single transferable vote system advocated by the likes of John Stuart Mill and used in many places around the world, such as all city elections in Scotland and Ireland.

Winner take all is hardly part of our Constitution and hardly embodies the spirit of the Federalist Papers that expressed concern about one faction dominating other factions.

EDITOR NOTE: Winner take all might not be in the Constitution, but going back to the first elections in the Jamestown Colony, it has been in our legal DNA.  Most Americans would cringe at the idea we should turn to Scotland or Ireland for an example to replace ours.  Been there.  Done that.  We kind of did it the other way around.  No going back now.