A bill has been introduced in the Georgia General Assembly that would introduce “instant runoff” elections for Georgia municipal elections as a test run for statewide races. 

The bill, that is getting bipartisan support, would allow a voter to pick their favorite candidate on a ballot with more than two candidates and then select a second candidate as their next-favorite.  If no candidate wins more than half of the first-choice votes, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated. At that point, voters who selected the defeated candidate as their top choice have those votes added to the totals of their next choice. The process continues until a candidate has amassed more than half of the votes.

Georgia has not always had runoff elections.  The move to runoff elections came during the 1960’s when a segregationist politician Georgia politician named Denmark Groover  pushed through legislation to establish General Election runoffs.  Groover later admitted to the motives behind the runoff election legislation saying, “I was a segregationist. I was a county unit man. But if you want to establish if I was racially prejudiced, I was. If you want to establish that some of my political activity was racially motivated, it was.”  Groover later tried to reverse some of his segregationist policies, but the runoff in the General Election remains to this day.

Only nine other states, other than Georgia, use runoff elections.  In the majority of states, the candidate with the most votes wins.