There is a less expensive way. “You can accomplish the same thing with instant runoff voting as with a general election runoff without conducting a whole separate election,” Swint has said. “It’s quick, it’s cheap, it does the same thing, so it’s something Georgia should take a look at.”

In instant-runoff voting, also sometimes called ranked-choice voting, voters indicate the order in which they prefer candidates. If no majority winner emerges immediately, the lowest vote-getter is dropped, and the votes that had been for that person are reassigned to those voters’ next-best choices. The process continues until one candidate gets more than half of the votes.

There may be an even simpler solution.

“The other thing Georgia could take a look at is just eliminating runoffs altogether and moving to a plurality vote,” in which the person who gets more votes than any other wins, Swint said.

So far, early voting for this year’s Georgia runoff has broken records. But it has cost a lot, and the number of votes cast still may not match the first-round totals. Perhaps that’s why instant-runoff voting is already being proposed for future Georgia elections.

This article is republished from The Conversation, an independent nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. It was written by: John A. Tures, LaGrange College. News from experts, from an independent nonprofit. Try our free newsletters.

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A brief history of Georgia’s runoff voting – and how this year’s contest between two Black men is a sign of progress

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John A. Tures worked on an ARPA Grant and conducted exit polling for a firm for the 2022 election.