Actually, it's GORE who should have chosen him. That would have put Florida out of reach even with Jeb and Harris's shenanigans.

Here is the ongoing Gore's Running Mate Poll at the Gore Portal, which Gore supporters (and others) are welcome to participate in.

Just added Sens. Bob Graham and Kent Conrad.

me neither.  Gore doesn't need a PAC at this point and I am not convinced he will not run.  = )

Make your appeal to Al Gore at the  Gore 2008 Draft Portal.

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Voted for Bob Graham in the Retro poll. If Gore doesn't run, Graham would be a sensible choice because of his conscientious diligence in trying to prevent an unnecessary war, as one can read here (important enough to post the whole thing):

    What I Knew Before the Invasion

   By Bob Graham
    Sunday, November 20, 2005; Page B07

   In the past week President Bush has twice attacked Democrats for being hypocrites on the Iraq war. "[M]ore than 100 Democrats in the House and Senate, who had access to the same intelligence, voted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power," he said.

   The president's attacks are outrageous. Yes, more than 100 Democrats voted to authorize him to take the nation to war. Most of them, though, like their Republican colleagues, did so in the legitimate belief that the president and his administration were truthful in their statements that Saddam Hussein was a gathering menace -- that if Hussein was not disarmed, the smoking gun would become a mushroom cloud.

   The president has undermined trust. No longer will the members of Congress be entitled to accept his veracity. Caveat emptor has become the word. Every member of Congress is on his or her own to determine the truth.

   As chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence during the tragedy of Sept. 11, 2001, and the run-up to the Iraq war, I probably had as much access to the intelligence on which the war was predicated as any other member of Congress.

   I, too, presumed the president was being truthful -- until a series of events undercut that confidence.

   In February 2002, after a briefing on the status of the war in Afghanistan, the commanding officer, Gen. Tommy Franks, told me the war was being compromised as specialized personnel and equipment were being shifted from Afghanistan to prepare for the war in Iraq -- a war more than a year away. Even at this early date, the White House was signaling that the threat posed by Saddam Hussein was of such urgency that it had priority over the crushing of al Qaeda.

   In the early fall of 2002, a joint House-Senate intelligence inquiry committee, which I co-chaired, was in the final stages of its investigation of what happened before Sept. 11. As the unclassified final report of the inquiry documented, several failures of intelligence contributed to the tragedy. But as of October 2002, 13 months later, the administration was resisting initiating any substantial action to understand, much less fix, those problems.

   At a meeting of the Senate intelligence committee on Sept. 5, 2002, CIA Director George Tenet was asked what the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) provided as the rationale for a preemptive war in Iraq. An NIE is the product of the entire intelligence community, and its most comprehensive assessment. I was stunned when Tenet said that no NIE had been requested by the White House and none had been prepared. Invoking our rarely used senatorial authority, I directed the completion of an NIE.

   Tenet objected, saying that his people were too committed to other assignments to analyze Saddam Hussein's capabilities and will to use chemical, biological and possibly nuclear weapons. We insisted, and three weeks later the community produced a classified NIE.

   There were troubling aspects to this 90-page document. While slanted toward the conclusion that Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction stored or produced at 550 sites, it contained vigorous dissents on key parts of the information, especially by the departments of State and Energy. Particular skepticism was raised about aluminum tubes that were offered as evidence Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program. As to Hussein's will to use whatever weapons he might have, the estimate indicated he would not do so unless he was first attacked.

   Under questioning, Tenet added that the information in the NIE had not been independently verified by an operative responsible to the United States. In fact, no such person was inside Iraq. Most of the alleged intelligence came from Iraqi exiles or third countries, all of which had an interest in the United States' removing Hussein, by force if necessary.

   The American people needed to know these reservations, and I requested that an unclassified, public version of the NIE be prepared. On Oct. 4, Tenet presented a 25-page document titled "Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction Programs." It represented an unqualified case that Hussein possessed them, avoided a discussion of whether he had the will to use them and omitted the dissenting opinions contained in the classified version. Its conclusions, such as "If Baghdad acquired sufficient weapons-grade fissile material from abroad, it could make a nuclear weapon within a year," underscored the White House's claim that exactly such material was being provided from Africa to Iraq.

   From my advantaged position, I had earlier concluded that a war with Iraq would be a distraction from the successful and expeditious completion of our aims in Afghanistan. Now I had come to question whether the White House was telling the truth -- or even had an interest in knowing the truth.

   On Oct. 11, I voted no on the resolution to give the president authority to go to war against Iraq. I was able to apply caveat emptor. Most of my colleagues could not.

   The writer is a former Democratic senator from Florida. He is currently a fellow at Harvard University's Institute of Politics.

Sen. Jack Reed (RI) who is a great progressive with military experience and opposed the Iraq war as well, is another interesting option to explore for 2008.

that Gore should not run.

PACs generally show a candidate's interest in running for presidency, including but not necessarily money-wise. The fact of the matter is, that while Gore could raise millions of dollars instantly, he still lacks the desire to actually run for president (and I don't blame him, he already has twice!).

While I think it might be more effective to be polite to our hosts, you can count me in the camp that dislikes IRV.  I'm aware that plenty of well-intentioned people support IRV. But I think they'd all be much better off backing either Approval or some variety of Condorcet. The proportional representation variant of IRV, usually called STV-PR (Single Transferrable Vote, Proportional Representation) is pretty good for blocks of four or more seats. For single winner elections, IRV is almost as bad as what we have now, and in one non-trivial regard, it's worse.

Here's the most famous theoretical example of IRV's failings:

Imagine a world in which the Green Party manages to pull over most liberal Democrats, and the Democrats pull in a bunch of moderate Republicans. So, most Greens will vote Green over Democrat over Republican; most Democrats (having drawn from the conservative wing of the old Dems, and moderate Repubs) will vote Dem over Rep over Green; and most Reps will vote Rep over Dem over Green. Not too implausible, right?

On election day, in a town with 100 voters, the returns thus far, with 98 votes counted, look like this:

35 Republicans: R > D > G
32 Democrats: D > R > G
31 Greens: G > D > R

Before I count the ballots under IRV, please note that both the Reps and Dems prefer D over G; and both the Greens and Dems prefer D over R. So, D gets a two-thirds majority, in a one-on-one race against either of his possible opponents. Clearly, he is the majority winner under any sane system.

Now, to count the votes: G has the least first choice ballots, so he gets eliminated; his votes go to D, and D wins. Great!

But wait: there were two more votes! Turns out, they're both Greens:

35 Republicans: R > D > G
32 Democrats: D > R > G
33 Greens: G > D > R

Now, when we run the IRV algorithm, the Democrat is eliminated first; votes transfer to the Republican, and R wins.

Note that the situation mentioned above, where two-thirds of the voters prefer the Democrat over the Republican has not changed. The Dem should, by rights, be seen as the majority choice.

But even worse, the voters who changed the results, themselves preferred the Democrat over the Republican! They would've been happier with the outcome if they'd just stayed home, rather than participating in the election. This "Participation Failure" problem, where a voter's own ballot can make things worse for that voter, is the place where IRV is actually worse than our current system. Sure, it may seem a little contrived, but the scenario I outlined isn't totally implausible, and if something like this ever did happen, the two-thirds who got shafted would revolt, setting back electoral reform for a generation or two. A system that behaves this way is simply unacceptable.

Here's a second example. Suppose we have five candidates, spanning a spectrum: FarLeft, CenterLeft, CenterModerate, CenterRight, and FarRight. Individual voters have a favorite, and then their preferences expand evenly "outward" from that position. I'll use "=" to show places where the ballots are split evenly on how they order a pair of candidates. The votes look like this:

35 FL > CL > CM > CR > FR
65 CL > FL = CM > CR > FR
99 CM > CL = CR > FL = FR
65 CR > CM = FR > CL > FL
35 FR > CR > CM > CL > FL

The important thing to note is that FarLeft and FarRight, having the least first-choice votes, get eliminated first. Their votes flow inwards, to CenterLeft and CenterRight, who now each have 100 votes... meaning that CenterModerate, with 99 votes, gets eliminated.

So, CenterModerate started out with the most first-choice votes, and, if you compare him against any other contender, he has at least two-thirds of the votes in any head-to-head race. Yet he still loses! This effect is called the "Center Squeeze" (and when generalized to all systems that have this property of favoring a permanently bifurcated electorate, it's called "Duverger's Law"). Basically, it shows that IRV does not help with the problem of polarization.

All the ill effects we associate with that polarization -- negative campaigning, people focusing more on the "us vs them" than on good policy, etc -- will be unaffected by IRV. And IRV will, in the long run, fail to encourage cooperation from the small parties, because those parties will still have the potential to become spoilers. As a friend of mine puts it, in IRV, it's safe to vote a third party as your favorite, as long as they have absolutely no chance of winning.

In the real world, we see Australia, with IRV, having two real parties. They technically have more than that, but in fact, the Labor party generally holds roughly half the electorate, and the next three parties all cooperate as a super-party generally known as the Coalition, which also holds roughly half the electorate:
http://www.abc.net.au/elections/federal/ 2004/guide/pendulumindex.htm

The Coalition parties usually try to avoid running candidates against each other in vulnerable seats (which would be similar to a hostile primary challenge, in one of the US parties). In order to make sure they avoid enacting the Participation Failure situation, the Coalition parties (as well as minor parties like the Greens) distribute How To Vote Cards
http://www.australianpolitics.com/electi ons/htv/
The cards very occasionally encourage people to vote their own party as preference 2, instead of 1. (Or at least, that is what I've been told by a woman who grew up in Australia, and had been a registered Green.)

The biggest example of "runoff failure" one can point to -- though granted, this was a top-two runoff, not IRV -- is the French Presidential Election of 2002. I'm partially guessing at who should be called right and who left (I know, for example, that the Union for French Democracy has a mixed history; sometimes they support the right, but they're pro-EU, and dislike the right's xenophobic tendencies), but please think through the example before nitpicking it. Here are the votes from the original election, as published in the French papers. (You can get this data from a wide variety of sources.)

Parties that look like they're on the right:
19.88% Rally for the Republic (Jacques Chirac)
16.86% National Front (Jean-Marie Le Pen)
4.23% Hunt, Fish, Nature, Traditions
2.34% National Republican Movement (extreme splinter from National Front)
1.19% Forum of Social Republicans (ran on an anti-gay platform)

Total on the right: 44.5%

On the left (the names largely speak for themselves):
16.18% Socialist Party (Lionel Jospin)
6.84% Union for French Democracy
5.72% Workers' Struggle
5.33% Citizens' Movement
5.25% The Greens
4.25% Revolutionary Communist League
3.91% Liberal Democracy
3.37% French Communist Party
2.32% Left Radical Party
1.88% Citizenship, Action, Participation for the XXIst Century
0.47% Party of the Workers

Total on the left: 55.5%

So, a center-left candidate should win, handily, against a center-right candidate, if you held the race between them; and any centrist candidate should win against any more-extreme candidate.

And yet, if you suppose that in an instant-runoff race, any of the left parties might've broken 16.18% before votes got transferred to Jospin, he would've been eliminated.

There are a lot of systems out there that are better than IRV, and many of them aren't even particularly complicated.

For a ranked-ballot, there's a vast family of "Condorcet" systems, named after the Marquis de Condorcet, who made the first attempt at mathematically analyzing electoral systems -- it's a great shame he was published twenty years after our Constitution was written, because he's exactly the sort of philosopher the Founding Fathers would've read and appreciated. His basic system simply looks at each head-to-head race, and picks the guy who wins against everybody else. There's one minor catch -- such a candidate doesn't always exist; you need a way to deal with situations where A beats B beats C beats A:

5 voters say: A > B > C
6 voters say: B > C > A
7 voters say: C > A > B

But, there are many perfectly acceptable ways to deal with this, and such situations are extremely unlikely to occur in practice -- political scientists who study these things estimate that less than 1 in 1000 real-world elections with three contenders, produce a cycle. There are also quite a few good metaphors for explaining Condorcet to the electorate (such as looking at it like a sports league -- each team plays each other team, and one of them comes out as the champion). Try explaining IRV to the man on the street, some time.

I personally think that the best, easiest, and cheapest reform is Approval Voting, in which you simply vote Yes/No on each candidate (like a ballot measure), and the guy with most Yes marks wins. This lets us reform the system without spending a nickel on new equipment, and with only the most minimal effort required to explain the system to the general public.

You might complain that this doesn't let you express a preference between two people you're voting for, but I don't find that terribly persuasive; if somebody approves just the Democrat, that's they're favorite; if they approve the Dem and the Green, it's almost certainly the case that the Green is their favorite, but they just don't think he's likely to win, so they're approving the Dem as well to help him beat the Republican.

The technical issue here is that if you allow "rated" ballots, where people give each candidate a score -- say, 0 to 9 -- it turns out that there is a strategic advantage in only using the top and bottom scores. People who follow that strategy have a greater chance of deciding the election. So, it's simpler to only provide two scores in the first place. Sure, it leads to some tough choices, from time to time, but it's not like we don't face those choices today (whether to cast a ballot for a true favorite, or for a compromise), and that will happen, at least, much less under Approval. And IRV's promise of avoiding this problem turns out to be illusory, as seen in the Participation Failure example -- those last two Greens would've been better off if they'd betrayed their true favorite, and voted the Democrat first.

In general, as long as there's any sort of decent polling available, you can vote effectively (and interpret votes) on an Approval ballot. You approve your favorite among the frontrunners, plus everybody you like better. In the Participation Failure example, you might see something like this:

The 35 Republicans break into:
20 Yes on R only
15 Yes on R and D

The 32 Dems break into:
16 Yes on D and R
16 Yes on D only

The 33 Greens break into:
15 Yes on G and D
18 Yes on G only

The final "Yes" scores are R=51, D=62, G=33.

I often hear the complaint that Approval violates "one man, one vote". It's more accurate that Approval Voting says "one man, one vote per candidate." Approval doesn't give any more power to somebody who votes Yes on more than one alternative. If you think about it, voting Yes on every candidate has the exact same effect as voting No on every candidate. If your ballot doesn't change the relative positions of the candidates, it might as well not get cast.

There is also a lot of merit to the idea of Proportional Representation (and as I mentioned earlier, the IRV variant that works in PR is pretty good, as long as the number of seats is at least four). There are also some party-based and candidate-based PR systems based on approval, and some other even more sophisticated candidate-based PR systems (the basic idea is to allocate support from candidates who clearly have too little support to win, towards candidates still in the race, using a "similarity metric" based on the actual ballots cast).

Of course, PR is much more complex and difficult to pitch to voters; also, it can be difficult to administer. This costs the city or state money, and creates a lot of unhappy citizens. I've talked about this problem with a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors; he had some rather harsh words for how the shift to preference ballots has played out in San Francisco, because many of his constituents have been confused and upset. Possibly an approval ballot PR system would be easier for people.

I apologize for being so long-winded, but this is, of course, a complex topic. I hope, even if I haven't persuaded you that IRV is a bad thing to support, that I've at least convinced you that there are some credible arguments against it, and some good alternatives.

Yeah, IRV sucks. Also, the demochoice polling site sucks. I say this with the confidence of someone who has written better - BetterPolls.com (If it's missing a feature you think it should have, I'd love feedback)

I'm not sure where exactly you were going with your post, must be the beer I had with dinner. Perhaps one way to "open" a poll is to allow write-ins, which betterpolls.com does.

Anyhow, my current favorite solution to the voter expressiveness problem is to allow voting a -10 to 10 rating on each candidate. Then you can say how much you like the choices not just which over which other. 6th choices might rate 10,9,1,-5,-9,-10

After the previous straw poll, I used my software on the votes dumped out of demochoice and produced some pretty histograms and counted the ballots using systems other than IRV like Approval and Virtual-Round-Robin/Condorcet and others. I guess I'll have to do that again tomorrow.

OOPS. Posted this in the wrong thread.

I know, I've been voting for him ever since these polls started, but I was shocked to see him leading this one so far.  I wonder what has changed the people's mind who have switched to him.  Nothing earth shattering has happened with him the past few monthes.

Secretary of Labor in a Gore administration.

Gore's an honorable man but an AWFUL politician.

Sure, he is not a finger-in-the-wind opportunist like most of them. But he was good enough to have won the Presidency once.

If we ever want to see the political process reformed and brought to a higher plateua, we better hope that Gore runs.

Perhaps it actually helps measure things like netroots support and the size of their mailing list as well as just the myDD membership.  I have occasionally been reminded to vote in polls by campaigns other than the one I actually voted for...