A famous tyrant once quipped, "It's not who votes that counts, but who counts the votes." Yet it turns out that democracy suffers from other technical problems.

How the votes are counted, that matters too.

In Pierce County, Washington, a new voting system came online for the last election: Ranked Choice Voting or (as it is usually called) Instant Runoff Voting (IRV). And a number of politicians aren't happy about it. Challengers appear to have a better chance in the system, with a smaller percentage of big spenders winning under IRV. So the Pierce County Council has put the new system up for repeal on this November's ballot.

The chief sin of the system can't be that incumbents don't like it, of course. Nor can it be that poorer funded challengers like it a lot (as appears to be the case). The fact that a dark horse got in as Assessor-Treasurer and asked the state attorney and auditor to look into the county, that can't officially matter, either. So, in searching about for a reason to nix the new system, politicians say it is "too complicated."

And if you try to explain it from front end to back end in one sentence, you do end up with quite a long sentence.

So maybe we should explain it in parts.

Front end: Voters rank their top three candidates from all those running.

Hey, if we can rank our favorite pop songs, and Dave Letterman can go all the way up to ten every night for his best or worst this or that ("Top Ten Reasons to Think Politicians Are In It for Themselves" -- hint, hint, eh, Letterman?), then this isn't too complicated.

I usually know who my favorite candidates are, in strong order of preference.

The problem I have is probably the problem you have: My preferences might not have a shot at winning. And if I voted my true preference, I might never, ever vote for a winner. My vote would never seem to count.

Let's say we could choose our next president from any of the previous presidents, revived and ready to lead. If I got to choose any president from our nation's past, and vote, and picked my favorite (say, Grover Cleveland?) that would be a "wasted vote" under normal ballots. Almost no one else likes ol' Grover. My second favorite, Tom Jefferson, also has too few partisans. Another wasted vote.

But if I voted for my third favorite, there's a chance that I might vote for a winner. So I cast a vote for George Washington, instead.

George might have a chance of beating Abe Lincoln -- lots o' folks' favorite -- who I'm afraid trails my Top Three as well as Cool Cal Coolidge and a few others.

Because of this second-guessing of who others likely support, people "falsify their preferences" in voting all the time. And, in the process, they may vote for a candidate they don't even like, against their preferred candidate, to prevent a victory by someone further down the bozo list.

IRV is different.

You list your Top Three, as in the Pierce County method. If you vote for Grover first, and only two other history buffs did likewise -- and here we get to the back end -- your ballot would be taken off the Grover stack, at the first runoff count, and put in the stack of your second pick. And so on until the counts show a true majority winner.

What this re-counting does is mimic a runoff, allowing the primary and general elections to be fused into one. The runoff election is made "instant" by the recounting of ballots according to the listed preferences of voters. Continued...