On January 23, the Green Party of Ireland announced that is is withdrawing from the coalition government. See this story. New elections were already being planned, but now they will most likely occur very quickly.

Robert J. Healey, Jr., the Cool Moose Party nominee for Lieutenant Governor of Rhode Island last year, polled 39.15% of the total vote. This was the highest share of the vote for any “other” statewide nominee in Rhode Island since 1875, when independent gubernatorial candidate Rowland Hazard received 39.19% of the vote.

Healey had no Republican opponent, but he was in a race with a Democrat and an independent candidate. He campaigned on a platform of abolishing the office of Lieutenant Governor in order to save taxpayer dollars.

The British blog www.anthonysmith.me.uk has an imaginative “flowchart” showing how a rational voter decides whom to vote for, under the run-of-the-mill system used generally in the United States as well as in most British elections. The British call that system “First Past the Post”. The most common U.S. term for it is the “plurality-winner” system.

The point of the anthonysmith blog post is to show that Instant Runoff Voting (which the British call the Alternative Vote system) is actually simpler for the voter than the old-fashioned system in current use in almost all our elections. See it here. Thanks to Bob Richard for the link.