I strongly suspect that there are many voters who would have preferred McClintock over Arnold, but voted for Arnold because they preferred him to Bustamante.

We'll never know for sure, but it's probably fair to assume that in any sort of ranking system, more people would put Arnold ahead of McClintock than vice versa. That's why, in my hypothetical exercise, I added McClintock's votes to Arnold. Likewise for adding Huffington's votes to Bustamante.

Regardless, I still support the idea of a non-traditional voting system. I've mentioned it here before, but my favorite is approval voting. You can cast votes for as many candidates as you want (zero or one vote per candidate), and all those votes count equally. You can vote for Arnold and McClintock. You can vote for Nader and Gore. You don't get to express your rankings among your choices, but you do get rid of the incentive to vote "strategically" rather than for your true preferences.

The arguments against multiple voting systems with ranking tend to be that they still encourage strategic voting in some form or another. Your second and third choices can start to have a serious impact on the election's outcome, and it's entirely unclear whether voters can meaningfully rank all their candidates. Also, on an entirely practical level, approval voting requires only one bit per candidate, so it meshes nicely with most existing voting equipment, including punch cards.

My fear, in an approval voting system, is that a plurality of Californians would have cast a "serious" vote plus some "joke" votes, just for fun, and then you'd end up with a porn star for governor.