Nothing is sacred to Rob Richie when it comes to IRV!

In Rob Richie's latest screed against Joyce McCloy where he compares her to Joe McCarthy, he brings up the memory of verified voting advocate John Gideon by claiming that Joyce McCloy was behind an alleged attack on Rob Richie after he "memorialized" election integrity activist John Gideon after his death last April.

It's hard to pick a "lowlight" from her litany of attacks on us and other backers of instant runoff voting, but I suspect it was her effort in the wake of verified voting champion John Gideon's death last year to spread the allegation among his friends that I was seeking to use his death to promote instant runoff voting. I received tearful communications asking me how I could do this, given his neutrality on the subject when in fact my blog post featuring a tribute to him was entirely focused on a subject he and I regularly had discussed at our conferences he attended and by email: public ownership of voting equipment.

What exactly was Richie's tribute to John Gideon? Here is the part that dealt with IRV that so many verified voting activists had a problem with:

With such limited competition, it's easy for these companies to shake money out of state governments via unscrupulous means: They can stop producing, and stop servicing, certain models artificially early, compelling states to buy new ones. They have reason to meet just the bare-bones requirements of contracts and limit the plasticity of their hardware so that they can force upgrades on states that want to reform their voting systems — making it difficult to implement innovative voting methods like instant runoff voting (IRV). (The firms also may have reason to stymie IRV because more elections means more business.)

You later posted a note on April 29, 2009:

(Note added by author on April 29: Although FairVote promotes a range of electoral reforms, we are particularly well-known for our advocacy of ranked voting systems, particularly instant runoff voting. I've heard that some readers thought I was capitalizing on this tragedy to suggest that John Gideon was an ally on instant runoff voting

To be clear, John liked the idea of IRV, but believed that advocates should not push for implementation before certified equipment was ready to implement it. But this article is not about IRV. It's about another subject that John and I had several email exchanges about -- kicking private vendors out of our elections and having a publicly owned process. We both liked how Oklahoma did that years ago with its optical can equipment and New York with its equipment.

I apologize to anyone offended by this piece. I knew John a little from his coming to conferences we organized and from several email exchanges, but I did not know him in the way that so many leaders in the election integrity struggle did. I do think he might have liked the idea of a Gideon Initiative to pursue publicly owned election administration, but at this point I'm only raising the idea as part of my effort to salute his dedication.

OK Rob - in own words, you wanted to make it clear that John Gideon liked IRV. Really - you claim that John Gideon liked IRV? Let's read John Gideon's own words on IRV from The Daily Voting News on the Voters Unite website:

'Daily Voting News' For November 27 and 28, 2008

I have been asked often about my position on Instant Runoff Voting [also known as Ranked Coice Voting]. My answer is always that I just haven’t formed an opinion on the basics of IRV.

Rob - you still want to claim that John Gideon "liked" IRV when he stated that he hadn't formed an opinion on the basics of IRV? Or that he was neutral on IRV when in his own words he hadn't formed an opinion on the basics of IRV?

When are you going to retract your statements about Joyce and make an apology?

I do, however, have a problem with the fact that those who are avid supporters of IRV quite often favor IRV over voting system issues.

Gee Rob - who do you think John had that problem with? Here's a hint: look in a mirror!

They tend to be willing to turn a blind-eye to the use of voting systems that I would never support because there are no voting systems that actually support IRV that are federally certified.

Rob - he was writing about you and the rest of the gang at FairVote and all the other groups you claim that support IRV when you support the use of voting systems that place election integrity in jeopardy because they aren't at bare minimum federally certified. Is that pain enough for you?

Two west-coast counties, Pierce in WA and San Francisco in CA, used Sequoia systems that were a mix and match of certified parts and tested parts that were never tested and certified to be used together.

Kinda like the use of IRV on both op-scan and DRE touchscreen voting systems that were never tested and certified to be used with IRV...

Officials in Minnesota are now talking about IRV for the future. When asked about a second or third count election officials said they would hand-count those ballots but officials who have done IRV say that would be a “huge nightmare”. One of the two west coast counties is even now thinking of going back to the voters to ask that IRV voting no longer be used. We agree with this position but only until there is a system that can actually count the ballots and not be a “huge nightmare”.

In other words, John Gideon did not support IRV until there is an election system that can actually count the ballots and not be a "huge nightmare". So far, every system that has been used to count IRV is either a huge nightmare and/or can't be verified easily.

And as if all that wasn't bad enough, did you know who took over doing the "Voting News" after John died? Joyce McCloy did.

Do you know who got the "John Gideon Electronic Voting Integrity Award" this year? Joyce McCloy did.

So how dare you try and smear Joyce McCloy by comparing her to Joseph McCarthy by claiming that she spread an allegation that you were using John Gideon's death to promote IRV!

Rob - the fact is that you use every opportunity to promote IRV, even when google allows people to see that you are talking out of both sides of your mouth. To some you claim that IRV helps 3rd parties, and to others you claim it doesn't support 3rd parties.

Everyone sees you "pimping" IRV, and we roll our eyes in amazement. I read your tribute to John and I felt you were promoting IRV even before Joyce and I and others talked about it.

Rob - have you no shame?

Rob Richie: electoral reform bully!

Rob Richie must be getting desperate - he's attacking NC Verified Voting's Joyce McCloy again, all but calling Joyce McCloy a liar in his latest IRV FactCheck blog. Why does he feel the need to create a whole new blog to misrepresent IRV as beneficial instead of using the FairVote blog of the group he founded and continues to be the paid Executive Director I don't know.

Some folks in the verified voting movement suggest that Rob and the rest of the FairyTaleVote crew had to set up IRV Factcheck as a astro-turf blog hiding the connection to FairVote means that Rob and the merry band at FairVote et alia are feeling a little defensive. Hey - you'd be feeling defensive after so many losses to real grassroots groups like RangeVoting, NC Verified and other groups that oppose IRV on verified voting grounds.

But I do know that this is a new low even for IRV advocates like ol' Rob Richie. Rob is starting to reminds me of bullies I faced up to on the playgrounds of my youth. The only thing you can do to a bully is face up to them and call them out when they say stuff like Rob is saying now.

Let's look at ol' Rob's BS paragraph by paragraph:

Saturday, May 29, 2010

Joyce McCloy and McCarthyism: Her Latest Distortions

NC Voter's Joyce McCloy is at it again. It's fine to be against instant runoff voting, but Ms. McCloy unfortunately seems ready to oppose it in a matter I associate with Joseph McCarthy -- distortions, innuendo and even outright lies, as detailed earlier this week.

It's hard to pick a "lowlight" from her litany of attacks on us and other backers of instant runoff voting, but I suspect it was her effort in the wake of verified voting champion John Gideon's death last year to spread the allegation among his friends that I was seeking to use his death to promote instant runoff voting. I received tearful communications asking me how I could do this, given his neutrality on the subject when in fact my blog post featuring a tribute to him was entirely focused on a subject he and I regularly had discussed at our conferences he attended and by email: public ownership of voting equipment.

Rob - you posted a obit to John Gideon where you all but claimed he was was calling for IRV as a electoral reform, when you know perfectly well - because Joyce and others have provided proof - that John Gideon didn't want to push IRV until we had a way to count 100% of the first column votes accurately 100% of the time. John knew that IRV was much more complicated than single column voting, and that it would be a serious mistake to push for IRV at this time.

You mentioned IRV in the obit (which was later changed) so please do not claim that your obit was entirely focused on public ownership of voting equipment. If you had not manipulated John's opinion of IRV in your obit - why did you have to post an disclaimer at a later date?

From your first posting at http://www.opednews.com/articles/1/John-Gideon-R-I-P--and-by-Rob-Richie-090428-746.html

With such limited competition, it's easy for these companies to shake money out of state governments via unscrupulous means: They can stop producing, and stop servicing, certain models artificially early, compelling states to buy new ones. They have reason to meet just the bare-bones requirements of contracts and limit the plasticity of their hardware so that they can force upgrades on states that want to reform their voting systems — making it difficult to implement innovative voting methods like instant runoff voting (IRV). (The firms also may have reason to stymie IRV because more elections means more business.)

You later posted a note on April 29, 2009:

(Note added by author on April 29: Although FairVote promotes a range of electoral reforms, we are particularly well-known for our advocacy of ranked voting systems, particularly instant runoff voting. I've heard that some readers thought I was capitalizing on this tragedy to suggest that John Gideon was an ally on instant runoff voting

To be clear, John liked the idea of IRV, but believed that advocates should not push for implementation before certified equipment was ready to implement it. But this article is not about IRV. It's about another subject that John and I had several email exchanges about -- kicking private vendors out of our elections and having a publicly owned process. We both liked how Oklahoma did that years ago with its optical can equipment and New York with its equipment.

I apologize to anyone offended by this piece. I knew John a little from his coming to conferences we organized and from several email exchanges, but I did not know him in the way that so many leaders in the election integrity struggle did. I do think he might have liked the idea of a Gideon Initiative to pursue publicly owned election administration, but at this point I'm only raising the idea as part of my effort to salute his dedication.

The main problem people who knew John had with your obit was that you work IRV into every freaking thing you write about. You used your first article on John to push IRV, and then when his friends objected, you used your apology to push IRV some more. Do you include a plug for IRV when you write a note to your kid's teacher?

You are really turning into a "one-trick" pony Rob. If you fought for voter owned elections and paper ballots in your own home state of Maryland one tenth as hard as you do for IRV all over the country, Maryland would have accountable voting. But Maryland has barely made a dent in their election accountability. So why don't you get your own house in order Rob before you go sticking your nose elsewhere?

Now in a post at several of her blogs she is distorting a comment on a news article by FairVote's board chair Krist Novoselic where he was defending IRV against typical over-the-top attacks from Ms. McCloy. The context of Krist's comment was that reformers have a lot to do in different areas of the electoral process, but in no way was he suggesting that seeking secure elections wasn't important. But once again I've already heard from some of our reform allies concerned that we don't take issues like manual audits and transparent elections seriously.

Rob - you fail to understand that Joyce was responding to an assertion by Mr. Novoselic that there was some outright vote fraud in IRV elections, when Joyce made no such assertion. What Joyce and I and others have claimed is that IRV is so complex to count that most auditing procedures are useless - and that there is no way to audit only a percentage of the votes to see if they are counted correctly because, with the additional rankings, the whole thing becomes so complex that the only real meaningful audit would be a full recount. And how does that happen in one race when there might be other IRV races to count?

When you say that IRV elections are as easy to audit and count as single column races, you can't really expect to be taken seriously. I was one of several people who saw the Wake County BOE count an entire single column race in a precinct in 15 minutes. For IRV, it took an entire day to count 3000 votes across 8 precincts - and the procedures were so complicated that the Wake BOE couldn't follow them and screwed up the count. The Board conducted a secret non-public recount of all the ballots the next day which gave a different result - but there was no one present who could observe the secret recount and object and call for another count. Is that verifiable and transparent?

And when you claim that taking digital images of ballots to enable your software to count them somehow makes them easier to audit than a regular paper ballot, that's even more reason not to take you seriously. Come on Rob - which is easier for someone to hack - a digital file on a hard drive or a paper ballot under lock and key and physically sealed in a box? Right there you are condemning people who don't have or want computers from being able to independently verify an IRV election.

What you fail to understand is why verified voting activists feel that IRV undermines election integrity and transparency in election administration. Vote counting procedures should be simple enough that anyone eligible to vote should be able to count the votes on their own and not need to have a graduate degree in math or game theory or a hi-speed computer to know how to do it.

I've seen IRV do just that in my own county - Wake County, NC - where Dr. John Gilbert - the chair of the Wake Board of Elections (and the father-in-law of your paid FairVoteNC staffer Elena Everett) was IRV biggest pusher in my county. Gilbert and the BOE staff set up Elena Everett and DemocracyNC's Bob Hall to practically run IRV for Cary NC - which was not what the IRV pilot law required. So much of what was done with the 2007 IRV pilot in Cary and in Hendersonville was done under the table and off the books by folks either working or volunteering for FairVote and DemocracyNC that I wondered if they didn't have their own desks at the NC State and Wake County Boards of Elections.

After I single-handedly killed IRV in Raleigh in early 2007, your minions worked in secret with municipal leaders from Cary and Hendersonville NC so they would only see and hear from IRV advocates. That's the reason why verified voting advocates got a law passed requiring public hearings for IRV pilots - something that didn't exist before 2009, which IRV advocates fought hard against!

And you are following Elena's example of sinking very low and calling people liars. She called me a liar in the Democracy4NC yahoo newsgroup when I wrote about a PR firm doing pro-bono work on the IRV pilot. When I produced an e-mail from her own father-in-law where he referred to that pro-bono PR firm, she said it made perfect sense to accept that in-kind contribution, but she never apologized for calling me a liar. Was that something I should have brought to the attention of Torrey Dixon (the head of FairVoteNC) or to you as the head of FairVote?

That's of course not true. We were the first national group to propose establishing an affirmative right to vote in the Constitution, highlighting a full range of federal, state and local laws and practices undermining suffrage rights. For years, we have helped lead the call for public interest voting equipment, with open source software and removal of profiteering from elections -- for instance, see this excerpt from a Tompaine.com commentary in 2004;

Rob - you are confusing verified voting with other types of electoral reform. Being able to vote isn't the same thing as making sure your vote is recorded and counted properly. And doesn't FairVote profit from election administration?

"Public Interest" voting equipment. Currently voting equipment is suspect, undermining confidence in our elections. The proprietary software and hardware are created by shadowy companies with partisan ties who sell equipment by wining and dining election administrators with little knowledge of voting technology. The government should oversee the development of publicly-owned software and hardware, contracting with the sharpest minds in the private sector. And then that open-source voting equipment should be deployed throughout the nation to ensure that every county -- and every voter -- is using the best equipment.

Define best equipment? Does that mean the most accurate equipment to count single column votes in a verifiable and transparent manner, or the equipment that can best be adapted to whatever form of Instant Runoff Voting/Ranked Choice Voting/Single Transferable Voting that you can sell to civic leaders through your slick snake-oil sales pitch?

We've proposed procedures for auditing ranked choice voting elections and periodically highlight our views in communications to our members, like this November 2009 Innovative Analysis. Here also is a link to our statement on election security and audits overall.

You/your friends/your organization/your friend's organization have proposed some rather Rube Goldberg-esque methods to count the votes using hybridized and largely untested procedures that have not yet been included in the certification procedures for the voting equipment in use in most jurisdictions.

In NC, your minions worked with the State Board of Elections to use a complicated set-up of 4 scanners to run paper ballots through, which each scanner required to be programmed based on the count of the previous scanner. In DRE counties, BOE staffers will have to port the data from the first column count over to an MS Excel spreadsheet where observers won't be able to verify the results.

NC's Public Confidence In Elections Act requires all voting to be subject to random audits and to be verified by hand to eye recounts, with the hand count taking primacy over the machine count in the event the results don't match. What is the process for doing a hand count of IRV on touchscreen voting machines with 300-foot thermal paper trails? Are you going to cut up the paper rolls to do a hand-counted tabulation? What happens if you need some of the records on the thermal paper roll to hand count other IRV elections? What if you need them to be in order of votes cast to detect and fix other problems at the polls?

So tell me Rob - how does it help verified voting if IRV elections are so complicated that you have to advocate the use of outside private companies like True Ballot to use proprietary software, use the wrong counting method (Cambridge instead of the method authorized by the Aspen Council), sort the test votes in the wrong order and then not correct the problem until an outside observer notices it, then have the private company certify the election then destroy the ballot images?

But Ms. McCloy charges that we don't care about secure elections and suggests that our "outside money" is why so many people in her state support instant runoff voting. The fact is that the two staffers we had in NC for parts of 2007-2009 were funded by an in-state foundation in the wake of a new state law establishing an IRV pilot program, and we were in a support role to such influential reform groups as the League of Women Voters NC, Common Cause NC and Democracy NC, all of which continue to support IRV. Other in-state backers include several of the state's leading newspapers, as reflected by recent editorials in the Rocky Mount Telegram, Charlotte Observer, and Southern Pines Pilot -- and so do most voters in the two communities in the state that have had a chance to use IRV.

OK Rob - what was the in-state foundation that funded your two staffers in NC for parts of 2007-2009? Where they your employees or did they work for this foundation? Where do you get ALL your funding from? Don't you make some money from selling IRV solutions to either governments, schools, or businesses?

You weren't just supporting those influential reform groups in NC - you were their partners, and you were getting to them first to use your leverage to get them to support IRV when some of them, like the NC League of Women Voters continued to support paperless DRE touchscreen voting machines even after those machines lost nearly 5,000 votes in Carteret County in the November 2004 general elections?

When I single-handedly took on 4 pro-IRV advocates in front of the Raleigh City Council to argue against using IRV, the Raleigh City Council didn't vote not to use IRV - they were so not interested in IRV that no one wanted to make a motion to consider using it.

So then the coalition of state and county election officials and non-profit IRV advocates decided to work on the Cary Town Council for 6 weeks in total secrecy - denying voters in Cary or Wake County the opportunity to get information on both sides of the IRV issue. It's hard to claim that IRV is a more democratic process when you resort to such anti-democratic means to sell IRV to civic leaders and use tricks to get voters to like IRV.

You join the LWV so that you can have access to their leadership. Isn't Terry B. an officer in the Vermont LWV?

Rob - you know that FairVote was recommending less secure voting methods for IRV in San Francisco back in 2003 and 2004 - it's in writing in your long-winded complaint against the San Francisco BOE because they were going too slow for you. You even had to sue them because they didn't want to listen to you or other IRV/RCV advocates.

And it really doesn't matter if a whole bunch of groups support IRV if it ends up being a turkey. Some of those organizations and media groups have a momentum to them that they can't admit to being wrong about something once they've taken a certain position. People are funny that way.

Before long we'll have more on North Carolina and Ms. McCloy's attacks on the procedures developed by the State Board of Elections for implementing it. For the moment, let me end with the famous quote from Joseph Welch, head counsel for the United States Army while it was under investigation by Joseph McCarthy's Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations for Communist activities in the 1950s:

"Until this moment, Senator, I think I have never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. ... You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?"

Rob - perhaps you should look in the mirror and ask yourself how decent of a person you and others in FairVote are. Many people in the voting movement have pointed out many many times how you have distorted or deliberately misrepresented things like how much money IRV saves and how it increases voter turnout, how it ensures a majority win in a single election, how simple it is for voters to understand and for election administrators to implement, how Roberts Rules of Order endorses IRV - the list goes on and on.

And I've seen how your employee Elena Everett called me a liar in public and then never apologized when I provided proof that I was right all along. Another one of your employees - Dianne Russell from Maine - came down to Cary in 2007 to work on the IRV pilot. She admitted in writing to deviating from her BOE-provided voter education instructions in order to provide a more positive outcome for the IRV exit polls which she also conducted - and she admitted to faking an southern accent when interviewing voters. Ms. Russell was working as the Director for IRV America - a part of FairVote - at the time, wasn't she?

So how dare you compare Joyce McCloy to Joe McCarthy when you have two FairVote employees in my state do some less than honorable things which neither they nor you have ever apologized for?

Why not come to NC sometime and make those accusations to our faces? Or are you only able to attack people's character in print - like your buddy Bob Hall from DemocracyNC did when he attacked Joyce McCloy in print in the Winston-Salem Journal article on Sunday, November 4, 2007?

Hey - even better - come down here and call me a liar to my face like Bob Hall did back in January 2007 at the NCDP State Executive Committee meeting in front of Perry Woods and State House member Grier Martin (who were witnesses).

Is name calling and being a bully part of the FairVote Standard Operating Procedures? I don't think Rob Richie would show his face in North Carolina and tell his tall tales about IRV in the same room with Joyce of myself. I doubt he has the guts to do it.

IRV/RCV ain't saving money in Mineapolis!

Leave it to Rob Richie and the folks from IRV Factcheck (shhhssss! - don't tell anyone they are really all from FairyTaleVote) to put a positive spin on the high costs of the 2009 Minneapolis RCV election: sure it cost $365,000 to do IRV/RCV in Minneapolis, but it was only the first time. When we do it more often, and buy new voting machines, the cost will come down. Of course they will Rob - we all know you wouldn't BS us about IRV/RCV, would you?

But let's take a real close look at those numbers.
Actual Expenditures:
Total Elections Budget 2005 adj 2.5%/yr (Municipal Primary & General) $ 1,124,602.12
Total Elections Budget 2007 adj 2.5%/yr (No Election) $ 666,591.09
Total Elections Budget 2009 (RCV Municipal General) $ 1,470,329.00
Difference between 2009 and 2005 $ 345,726.88

In other words, the last time there was a municipal election in Minneapolis, there was a primary election as well. There were 16 different contests including the mayor's race, which means it was a citywide primary election. It cost Minneapolis $1,124,602.12 to hold two elections.

Move forward 4 years after all the IRV/RCV hype and BS. For 2009, Minneapolis spent $1,470,329.00, which was a $345,726.88 difference between 2005 (with a primary and general election) and 2009 (where one single IRV/RCV was supposed to save all that money).

Here's the voter turnout in the 2005 and 2009 races:



32,185 votes cast in the 2005 primary election
68,481 votes cast in the 2005 general election
45,117 votes cast in the 2009 IRV/RCV election the lowest turnout in over 100 years since 35,837 votes were cast in 1902, when the city's population was 54% of it's current estimated population!

But there were also 32,185 votes cast in the 2005 primary election - only a 5.81% difference in turnout of registered voters compared with the 2009 IRV/RCV race that was supposed to improve voter turnout!

IRV/RCV advocates like to claim that their method improves voter turnout. Well, the much-ballyhooed IRV/RCV only had a little more turnout than the low-turnout primary elections they are supposed to be an improvement over.

I've used costs per registered voter to show how expensive IRV is, but I've been told by fellow travelers from FairyTaleVote that's not a fair measurement - I must use cost per voter that turned out. OK - I will do that. But it makes matters even worse!



Adjusted for inflation, Minneapolis spent an extra $365,000 for one single IRV/RCV election than they spent for both a primary and a general election in 2005. Even though all IRV/RCV advocates like to claim that an IRV/RCV election is cheaper than holding two elections.

Dividing up the costs per registered voter, once single IRV/RCV election cost each registered Minneapolis voters only $1.46 than the cost of a separate primary and general election in 2005. But that's just per registered voter. Often there are fixed costs that don't change no matter how many voters show up.

IRV advocates like to cite the high cost per vote cast in a primary or runoff election. Adding the total number of votes cast in both the primary and general election in 2007, that antiquated system cost Minneapolis voters $11.17 per vote cast vs. $31.99 per vote cast in the 2009 IRV/RCV election - almost 3 times as much!

But even though you have no way of knowing how many voters show up at the polls, you still gotta keep the precinct polling places open. And Minneapolis had 131 precincts in 2009, the same number in 2005. But in 2005, they had to keep each of those precincts open for the general election as well as the primary election - so it's fair to say that Minneapolis had a cost per precinct of $4292.37 for each of the two elections in 2005 compared with a cost per precinct of $11,223.89 - almost 3 times the cost per precinct! And if you add up both 2005 elections - they cost $8,584.75 per precinct vs. $11,233.89 in 2009.

Oh - and one more thing. The IRV advocates on IRV Factcheck like to claim that there was only one defective ballot out of the 45,968 cast. Bullshit! Maybe only one defective ballot made it through the scanners in 2009, but the Minneapolis Election Department provided information about a higher number of spoiled ballots in 2009, which suggests some serious problems with IRV/RCV

Spoiled Ballots: In the polling place, if a voter makes an error, the voter can return the spoiled ballot to an election judge and receive a new ballot. This number is not included in Total Ballots Cast because the voter received a new ballot.

That makes perfect sense. So let's take a look at the spoiled ballot numbers for the 2005 primary, 2005 general, and the 2009 IRV/RCV election:



Holy Cow Batman - do you see the number of spoiled ballots in Minneapolis?

Compare the number and percentage of spoiled ballots in the 2005 primary election vs. the 2009 IRV/RCV election.

Both elections had many candidates on the ballots. In the 2005 primary you only had to pick one candidate in most of the races. But in the 2009 IRV/RCV race, you not only had to consider who was your favorite candidate (as you did in 2005) but you also had to rank other choices - two additional choices for a total of three possible choices in each race. Think that was easy? Guess again - the spoiled ballot numbers and percentages were three times higher in the 2009 IRV/RCV race as they were in the 2005 primary election.

And when you look at the spoiled ballots as a percentage of the 45,968 total votes cast in the 2009 IRV/RCV race vs. the 100,666 votes cast in both the 2005 primary and general elections. In both 2005 race, the total # of spoiled ballots was 1366, or 1.35% of the 100,666 total votes cast.

In the single IRV/RCV election of 2009, there were 1888 spoiled ballots out of 45,968 ballots - or 4.11%. In other words, a much higher number of spoiled ballots for a smaller number of voters. At that rate, if 70,00 voters would have turned out in 2009, you would have had 2875 spoiled ballots compared with 1366 for November 2005 and 1366 for both 2005 elections.

I don't know where anyone at IRV Factcheck gets off claiming that IRV saves money, and is easy for voters to understand. The number and percentage of spoiled ballots say otherwise - and they also say that the folks pushing IRV - including those at IRV Factcheck - are doing some misrepresentation.

Of course, it wouldn't be the first time they have misrepresented information about IRV - and in one notable case, the courts said IRV/RCV advocates have broken election laws as well:

The panel has concluded that these violations, which were reflected in approximately 40,000 pieces of campaign literature, were multiple and deliberate. They were made despite the clarity of the statutory prohibitions, and the Respondent remains completely unapologetic.

The St. Paul Better Ballot Campaign, which broke the law, was part of Jeanne Massey's FairVoteMN group and in fact FairVoteMN has held "Get out of Jail" fundraising party on January 19th to raise money to pay the $5,000 fine for deliberately breaking MN election law.

IRV Factcheck takes the cake when it comes to misrepresenting the facts about IRV!

Buyer's remorse for Minneaopolis Ranked Choice Voting?

Read an article on a report on the the first Ranked-Choice Voting experience in Minneapolis, held in 2009.

The continuing cost of RCV: $244,000

Barring a change in available technologies, Minneapolis municipal elections could cost almost $250,000 extra every year that ranked-choice voting is in place.

These are costs over and above regular election costs - just specific to their form of IRV.

Last year, the first time the city used RCV, there were about $365,000 in expenses specific to the new voting system, according to an Elections Department study received and filed by the City Council’s Committee of the Whole. That included one-time costs such as vast voter education and a post-election wrap-up survey commissioned to St. Cloud State University researchers.

And they produced a much better post election study of the costs of IRV than we got from either the Wake or Henderson County BOE, or from the State BOE - who all seem to think that one single IRV election will always cost less than a traditional election and any needed runoffs.

But some of those voter education costs are projected to stick around — at least for the near future — since a refresher could be necessary when RCV returns in almost four years. Combined with other on-going costs, such as paying for ballots to be counted by hand, the projected ongoing costs of RCV total about $242,000.

That's right - RCV means continuing costs for voter education and for hand counting as long as there are many different types of IRV/RCV that could be counted on machines or systems are not fully tested and certified for use with IRV/RCV.

Technology could be the savior here. There are machines that can count RCV ballots; however, none are certified yet by the state, and that certification isn’t expected unless more cities switch to RCV. And even then, while the city would save a projected $140,000 in RCV costs by being able to eliminate the hand count, the cost of technology is unknown.

Why would any more cities take the risk of switching to IRV/RCV knowing that they are going to be increasing their costs until and unless more cities also vote to increase their costs for the short term? I thought IRV/RCV was supposed to cost less?

At least one council member, President Barb Johnson (4th Ward), was miffed by the study. She noted that RCV’s supporters had promoted the system by saying it would draw out more voters and cost less than a traditional primary-plus-general election system. Considering the study’s results and last year’s very low voter turnout, she said, “all of these things did not happen in our city.”

Minneapolis had the lowest voter turnout in 100 years! So much for the claim that IRV draws out more voters!

“It is disturbing to me that we’re talking about an extra quarter of a million dollars for a system that was supposed to decrease our costs,” Johnson said.

Thanks for waking up President Johnson! A Cary Town Councilor had the same wake up call in 2007 after she watched the IRV tabulation and saw how complex and confusing it was - and couldn't even be done correctly according to written procedures. Yet because so much of the 2007 IRV pilot program in NC was done under the table and off the books, we may never know exactly how IRV compared cost-wise to traditional elections and rarely needed runoffs.

Find the report at http://bit.ly/d5q2Y1.

Here is exactly the sort of cost report that many verified voting advocates in NC have been asking to see from ANY community or county (or even the State Board of Elections) on their experiences with IRV/RCV. But of course we are not getting this sort of detail even from our own State BOE - whose staff all seem to be in love with IRV and feel it's the coming thing.

Now I wonder if the citizens of St. Paul MN (who passed RCV on the same date as Minneapolis took part in their first RCV elction) will find out about this study and take steps to stop RCV dead in its tracks before they make the same mistakes as Minneapolis did?

This new blog is the latest IRV con job!

Friends! Have you heard the latest "good news" about IRV? There is a new blog out there called IRV Factcheck.

Don't take my word for what the site is supposed to do - read it for yourself:

IRV Factcheck

This site is designed to allow election reform activists, charter commissions and election officials who are looking at instant runoff voting (also called "ranked choice voting" and "alternative voting") to find answers to questions that have been raised about it. You'll find news about important developments and detailed refutations of misrepresentations.

Well this reads like it might be a very valuable site full of facts that aren't available anywhere else written by people who don't publish anywhere else......wait a minute, take a look at those names at the bottom of the page:

Terrill Bouricius
Rob Richie
Jeanne Massey
Bob Richard
Jack Santucci
Greg Dennis

Wait - I recognize some if not all of those names as people that are affiliated with FairVote.

• Terrill Bouricius - Senior Analyst at FairVote
  
• Rob Richie - Executive Director at FairVote
  
• Jeanne Massey - Executive Director of FairVote Minnesota
  
• Bob Richard - on the board of Californians for Electoral Reform, and very closely allied with FairVote: A small portion of membership dues are sent to FairVote.
• Jack Santucci - former FairVote analyst
  
• Greg Dennis - current Google test engineer, and former PhD student at MIT and still responsible for the http://www.somervilleirv.org web site. Some of his work is cited on FairVote's main website.
  

Hmmm - this makes me wonder. Isn't FairVote already doing a pretty heavy-handed job of providing information on IRV to election reform activists (other than those already working for FairVote and their fellow travelers), charter commissions, and election officials? When you "google" IRV, don't you always get most of the stuff from FairVote anyway?

Isn't FairVote and their state organizations, the New America Foundation, and other groups already doing a bang-up job of answering questions raised about IRV?

Aren't all the employees, interns and volunteers already making friends with all the right people in the news media to trumpet the important developments and refute in detail the misrepresentations of those scurrilous anti-IRV people (myself included)?

Does FairVote really need another site devoted to promoting IRV - unless of course they want a site that doesn't appear to be yet another production of FairyTaleVote.org, so that it can appear to be a fair and balanced (like Fox News) attempt to educate election reform activists, charter commissions and election officials without having to link directly to FairVote?

So it looks as though the http://irvfactcheck.blogspot.com is just another attempt by Rob Richie and his co-horts to hog more of the Internet in their desperate attempt to con election reform activists, charter commissions and election officials into believing that IRV is a great electoral reform and that anyone who opposes it is a liar and/or a tool of special interests.

It's an indication that those of us verified voting activists who oppose IRV are having some success if so many of the leading IRV pushers created a website to pretend to appear to be separate from the main IRV advocacy groups that in some cases (like with Rob Richie) they helped to start in the first place. Sort of like a faux astroturf group.....

I've already downloaded and saved all the pages they have - especially the BS about IRV in NC, and the MD fiscal reports, and I will refute it in detail as I have time.

But if you are looking for a few laughs, keep checking back with the Rob and the rest of the FairVote crew on their brand-new blog that of course is totally separate from whatever else FairVote is doing!

Latest IRV con in NC!

As I worked the polling places on May 4, I wondered how many races were going to require a runoff. I also wondered how long it would take before some folks would be pushing Instant Runoff Voting again.

Sure enough, one of my precinct voters told me that he heard DemocracyNC's Bob Hall talking about IRV on WUNC radio. I will find the link soon.

But sure enough, the first of what I assume will be many letters to the editor pushing IRV in very simplistic terms came out today - from Adam Sotak of DemocracyNC:

As your May 6 article noted, a high-cost, low-turnout statewide runoff is on the horizon. I remember one of these runoffs a few years back at which I was only the fifth person in my precinct to vote - and that was at 6:30 p.m.! There's got to be a better way. In fact, there is.

Instant runoff voting provides a cost-effective and simple solution. Voters go to the polls and rank their choices for an office: 1, 2, 3. (Nobody has to rank more candidates than he wants to.) In the first round of counting, only the first choices are tallied. A candidate who gets the prescribed threshold of first-choice votes (in this case 40 percent) is declared the winner.

If a virtual runoff is needed, all candidates except the top two vote-getters are eliminated, just as in the current system. If your first choice is in the runoff, your vote stays with that candidate. If your first choice was cut, your vote goes to the runoff candidate you ranked best. The candidate with the most votes wins.

Some cities in North Carolina have already successfully used IRV. It's time to expand this idea for statewide races.

Mr. Sotak is wrong when he states that IRV provides a cost-effective and simple solution to runoff elections. And now there is a new phrase to describe IRV - "Virtual runoff". That's a good idea, because you aren't having a real runoff. Nor does IRV give you a real majority.

IRV advocates would have you believe that having one election is always cheaper than having a traditional election and a runoff. That's not quite true. If you wanted to do IRV in NC, you would need entirely new voting systems because our current machines won't handle IRV without some serious jury rigging that makes our elections less transparent and verifiable. And our own State Board of Elections stated that IRV was too risky to use in the 2008 primary elections because they couldn't be made to comply with state and federal election regulations. So what's changed now, other than wanting to take short-cuts?

Voter would need voter education for the complex and sometimes confusing IRV method each and every year. That's not cheap. Other states have done fiscal studies of IRV and they have found that IRV would be a more costly voting method than having runoff elections. The Maryland legislature studied IRV twice and both times found it to be more expensive. If you took their cost and applied them to NC, it would cost us $18 million to implement and $4 million each and every year for voter education. All that just to save $3 million this year - and you'd never end up saving money with IRV!.

With more than 3 candidates in an IRV race, there's a chance that a voter wouldn't vote for a candidate who made it to the final count. So that voter's votes wouldn't help any of their candidates. And in an IRV race, the top finisher in the first round has a greater than 90% chance to win any subsequent round. So all IRV does is delay the inevitable. In a traditional runoff election, the second-place finisher in the first round goes on to beat the first-place winner 33% of the time. So Cal Cunningham would be more likely to lose with IRV than in a traditional runoff election, where voters would have a real chance to make another choice, based on any number of factors: endorsements from opponents in the primary, new information that comes out, more debates - all things that voters DON'T know about with IRV. IRV is hardly as democratic as a real runoff - even Roberts Rules of Order favors traditional runoff elections over IRV - or what they call "Preferential voting".

And it turns out that in over 90% of IRV elections that are settled beyond the first round, the "winner" doesn't even get as many votes as they would need to win the first round. That happened in Cary in 2007, where a winner was declared with only 1401 out of 3022 votes. Hardly the 1512 votes they would have needed in the first round. And there were many problems with IRV that one single time that we used it to count those 2nd and 3rd column votes!

Furthermore, IRV is only allowed in a limited number of cities per year as part of an election pilot. Only 2 cities used IRV in 2007 - Cary and Hendersonville. Cary Town leaders didn't like the confusion caused by the problems counting the 3022 IRV ballots, and didn't want to be lab rats in 2009. Hendersonville voters ranked their choices on IRV ballots in 2007 and 2009, but voters lucked out - winners were determined in the first round, sparing voters, candidates and election officials the fun of counting ranked votes from DRE touchscreen voting machines and then transferring them over to a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet for the final tally - a method that is not only not very transparent, but most likely untested for accuracy and is definitely uncertified.

There would be no way to count these votes in a statewide election without hauling all the ballots to Raleigh to have them counted. And even if there was, in a big primary election like we had in 2008, it would have taken so long to count the ranked votes that the results wouldn't have been tallied until AFTER the results of the traditional runoff election was known, So much for IRV being instant.

And many other places that got talked into using IRV are dumping it, some after only one try:

• Aspen, CO (where there is now a criminal investigation as to whether some election laws were broken in order to do IRV in Aspen, including the illegal certification of the election by a private company that didn't have the power to certify an election);
• Burlington, VT where more people voted to dump IRV than voted to pass it a few years before;
• Pierce County, WA - where 63% of voters didn't like IRV and the costs for IRV were HALF of the county election budget.

I talked to other poll greeters for Republican candidates about the possibility of runoffs in their races, and told them to watch out for people pushing IRV. When I described how IRV works, and told them about my experiences observing the 2007 Cary IRV election and vote counting, they shook their heads in wonder - and heard more than one person say that this sounded like a con game. IRV doesn't work and it has many more problems than our current methods.

Brad Friedman - the well-respected blogger and election expert - wrote that IRV stands for "Instant Runoff Virus" I call it "Instant Runoff Voodoo"!

It's ENRON vote counting, and we don't need it here in NC.