| Joseph Morrissey | 2,055 | 38 % |
| Floyd Miles | 1,488 | 27 % |
| J.M. "Jackie" Jackson | 1,053 | 19 % |
| David Lambert | 545 | 10 % |
| Shirley McCall Goodall | 285 | 5 % |
Morrissey won easily, leading his next challenger by 11%. Sic semper tyrannis. This character has been disbarred by the Virginia bar and cannot practice law. He has gotten into two fist fights with others in the courtroom, and has been the object of lawsuits and has served time in jail. How did he get elected, then? Part of it was that the people don't like what government is doing. That is why Morrissey, a white person, got a huge vote in a mostly black district. But that does not explain it all. 62% of the voters voted against Morrissey; they voted for someone else. So how did Morrissey win?
It is the election system that allowed him to win. The 62% that were opposed to him split among four candidates. All of Morrissey's support went to Morrissey. So Morrissey won. Is this a fair system? I wouldn't think so. 62% of the electorate did not want him in. However, 95% did not want Shirley Goodall elected. But Shirley has hit no one, that I know of, has not served jail time or otherwise been controversial. The difference is that although Morrissey was first place among 37% of the voters, I suspect most of the rest rated him last or next to last.
That is why a runoff system would be better. In that system, if a candidate wins more than 50% of the vote, he wins. Otherwise, there is a runoff election involving only the top two candidates. If that had happened, I suspect the result would have been something like:
| Floyd Miles | 3,071 | 57% |
| Joseph Morrissey | 2,355 | 43% |
This is because all but 300 of the voters of the other candidates voted for Miles rather than Morrissey (these figures are hypothetical). The flaw with the existing system is that although it reflects voters' first choice among those running, it does not reflect their second or later choices.
This type of paradox has happened before, sometimes with devastating results. In Chile, Salvador Allende was elected president in a three-way race; his percentage was in the upper 30s. He was a Marxist, and that displeased some people in the administration of the United States. Some undercover figures there engineered a coup, resulting in a repressive dictatorshop under Augusto Pinochet for many years. In Minnesota in the late 1990s, the world champion wrestler Jesse Ventura won as an independent over the Democrat and Republican with a vote in the mid to upper 30s. I don't know if Jesse would have won if a runoff had occurred.
There are other voting systems around. An improvement in the runoff scheme is what I call the Olympic system, because the Olympics use it to decide sites for their Games. In this system, if a majority vote occurs, that wins the election. If it does not, the last place city is dropped from contention and another runoff occurs. If a majority occurs, that wins the election. Otherwise, the last place of those remaining is dropped and another runoff occurs. This continues until a majority occurs, which it will unless it ends in a tie between the remaining two candidates. There are flaws in these systems as well. No system will be perfect.
One system seems to stand out. In approval voting, voters are asked to pick any number of candidates, not necessarily one. Of course voting for all the candidates is equivalent to throwing your vote away, because you are not expressing a preference among them. This system (and all the others I have described here) are the same for two-candidate contests. In a three-way contest, voting for two of the candidates is effectively a vote against the third one. This allows voters to express dissatisfaction with a candidate. The Mathematical Association of America and American Mathematical Society use this system in their elections.
I suspect that if approval voting had occurred, so many votes for {Miles, Goodall, Jackson, Lambert} would have occurred that there is no way Morrissey would have won.
