Dick Murphy, who recently resigned as San Diego's mayor, found out the hard way that governments are legitimate only if both winners and losers accept that the game was played fairly. For future elections to carry greater legitimacy, San Diego must change its election law to ensure its officials are supported by a majority of voters. Other California cities would be wise to make similar changes before a similar electoral disaster hits them.

Nearly everyone agrees that more voters in the last election favored write-in candidate Donna Frye over Murphy. However, courts declared Murphy the winner because 5,547 Frye votes didn't count because even though those voters wrote Frye's name on the ballot, they failed to fill in a little circle next to her name. State law requires that write-in votes be counted only if that bubble is filled in, regardless of the clear intent of the voter.

As Viktor Yanukovich learned in the Ukraine, simply declaring victory in the face of contrary public opinion doesn't work. Frye supporters challenged the election in court and those appeals are still pending. Other supporters began organizing a recall petition.

The election failed to give Murphy the legitimacy he needed to deal with serious financial scandals and a public pension crisis. In the end, Murphy did the right thing and recognized he could not effectively govern under these circumstances.

It's obvious that California law should be changed to ensure that the clear intent of the voter is duly counted with write-in ballots. Earlier this month, both the California Senate and Assembly passed bills to do just that.

But ensuring accurate vote counts will not alone solve San Diego's problem. Even if all of Frye's write-in votes had counted, she would not have received a majority of votes. Frye, a Democrat, received more support than the other two candidates, both Republicans. But, nearly two-thirds of San Diego voters supported one of the Republicans. Had Frye been declared the winner based on her 34% plurality, she too would have been hamstrung by a non-mandate from the voters.

One way to ensure that a winning candidate receives a majority of votes is to narrow the field with a runoff election. San Diego has a runoff system, which was supposed to set up a two-man contest between Republicans Dick Murphy and Ron Roberts. Frye upset the applecart when she ran as a write-in candidate, an act that some Murphy supporters think was illegitimate.

San Diego could tighten its rules to prevent write-in candidates during runoffs. But to many people, a general election that features only two candidates from the same party seems unfair.

A better approach would be the election system recently adopted in San Francisco called Instant Runoff Voting. This approach allows multiple candidates to appear on the general election ballot, but selects a winner with majority support by allowing voters to rank candidates in order of preference.

In this instance, most of Murphy's supporters would probably have ranked him as their first choice, fellow Republican Ron Roberts as their second choice, and Frye as their third choice. Frye's supporters would have ranked her as their first choice, and then whichever Republican they liked more as their second.

Using Instant Runoff Voting, the third place candidate, Roberts, would have been eliminated. Then, a runoff between Frye and Murphy could have been conducted instantly using the rankings on the ballots. Frye's 163,170 votes (including the missing bubble votes) would stay with her and Murphy's 157,959 would stay with him in the runoff - just as those voters would if they were asked to show up again weeks later in a physical runoff. But Robert's 141,884 votes would be distributed to their second ranked candidate. Murphy would almost certainly have received most of these votes, pushing him to a legitimate majority victory even if Frye's missing bubble votes were all counted.

Murphy would almost certainly have been able to govern more effectively after winning a clear-cut victory under a system of Instant Runoff Voting. Now that he'll have some time on his hands after leaving office, maybe he will become an advocate for this needed election reform.