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A rundown of runoff elections
By HOWARD TROXLER, Times Columnist
© St. Petersburg Times
published March 17, 2003
Editor's note: The city of Tampa whittled a five-person field for mayor down to two during its March 4 election. The all-important runoff election on March 25 will determine who will become the city's next mayor. Today, Times columnist Howard Troxler explains what a runoff election is.
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The other day, on March 4, the city of Tampa held an election to choose a new mayor. There were five candidates on the ballot.
Yet the mayor's race is still not over. Now the city will hold a second election for mayor, three weeks later on March 25.
This second election is called a "runoff."
In a runoff, only the top TWO candidates from the first election stay on the ballot. The winner of the runoff will be the new mayor.
Why do Tampa and a lot of other places use two elections like this?
Why don't they just say that the winner is whoever gets the most votes the first time?
That's a good question. There has been a lot of disagreement in American history about the best way to go. There still is, too.
Tampa and other places that use runoff elections often have a rule. They hold a runoff only when no single candidate gets more than 50 percent of the total votes cast. (Some places require only 40 percent.)
That rule makes sense. When one candidate has won a big share of the votes, even in a crowded race, that's a pretty strong showing. It proves that this person already has wide support among the people.
But when nobody gets a big enough share of the vote, that shows that the public is still divided. A runoff election is supposed to give voters a second chance to pick the candidate the true majority likes the best.
That "second chance" has been important in Florida's history. Sometimes the candidate who finished second in the first election turns around and wins in the runoff.
In fact, three of Florida's most popular governors of the past 50 years -- Leroy Collins, Reubin Askew and Bob Graham -- were originally second-place finishers.
What if we didn't use runoff elections?
Without a runoff, the candidate who got the highest votes in the first election would automatically be the winner -- even if that number was still only a small percentage of the total number of votes cast by the public.
Let's say there was a really crowded election with 10 candidates in the same race (hey, it has happened). Let's say the one candidate who got the most votes still only won 15 or 20 percent of the total. Is it fair that this candidate should win, when most of the public voted for other candidates?
That leads us to another argument in favor of runoff elections. Runoffs make it less likely that we will elect a "fringe" candidate, a person who holds views that most of the citizens do not support at all. If the rest of the candidates split up the rest of the vote among themselves, such a fringe candidate might win.
BUT ...
Remember, there are always at least two sides to every issue. There are plenty of reasonable people who think runoff elections are a bad idea.
Runoff elections are expensive, for one thing. Not nearly as many people usually bother to vote. An awful lot of the time, the winner of the first election wins the runoff election, anyway. Do we really need all the fuss and bother?
There's another reason to worry about runoffs. Some people say runoffs make it harder for a member of a minority, such as African-Americans or Hispanics, to be elected in a race where most of the voters are of a different background. A minority candidate might run strongly the first time, only to lose in the runoff when the majority "gangs up" against him or her. There have been times in our history that runoffs were deliberately and unfairly used to keep out minorities.
So we go back and forth. In the 2002 election, Florida tried an experiment and got rid of runoffs in Democratic and Republican "primary" elections. Those are the elections in which the political parties choose their nominees for the big November election.
With no runoff, a Democrat named Bill McBride of Tampa won the first and only election and became that party's nominee against Gov. Jeb Bush. If there had been a runoff, Democrats might have chosen Janet Reno of Miami, who might (or might not!) have been a stronger candidate.
For now, Florida will keep using runoffs. The debate will keep going. But from now on, when you hear the word "runoff" used to describe an election, you'll know why we have them, and why some people say we shouldn't.
Here's the rest of today's Xpress
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