No IRV in NC!

More of the same old IRV "gas"....

2010-06-27T15:49:00.004-04:00

Like I have written in numerous postings, I knew when the Democratic US Senate race went to runoff, there would be more of the same old tired calls for IRV. And I even said that these claims would be couched as "a better way".

Sure enough - here comes another such bogus claim in the form of an AP wire story printed in the Daily Reflector: - it should be called the Daily Mirage!

Is there a better way than primary runoff for NC?

The Associated Press

Sunday, June 27, 2010

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) - A turnout of 4.5 percent of the eligible voters was better than expected for North Carolina's second primary last week, raising the question of whether runoffs have outlived their usefulness.

I think the only people raising that question are people trying to push IRV and their friends on the editorial boards.

Fifty years ago, when North Carolina was a one-party state, nearly as many people would vote in a statewide Democratic runoff as the first race, because their votes likely would choose the eventual winner of the general election. Today, in a competitive two-party state, turnout at the local firehouse on the day of the runoff may not be much more than the poll workers themselves.

Then a primary in a one-part state wasn't really much of a primary, was it? If, as the promoters of IRV claim, more choice is supposed to be better and leads to greater voter turnout - why aren't more voters taking part in non-presidential year primary elections?

That's led some election reform advocates to argue there's got to be a better way to choose only a handful of nominees who didn't win the first time.

"One way or another, it seems like the runoff election systems for picking a party's nominee in a statewide election is outdated," said Bob Hall, with the election reform group Democracy North Carolina.

This is interesting that Bob Hall claims that runoffs are outdated. The solution he proposes is also advocated by groups who want to make political parties irrelevant: make all races non-partisan.

But remember our state motto: Esse quam videri (to be rather than to seem). Just because a runoff seems outdated to Bob Hall or to other IRV/RCV advocates, it doesn't mean that runoffs have ceased to serve a valuable purpose.

Save for experiments in two municipalities with voters ranking candidates on the first election day, North Carolina lawmakers don't seem interested in changing the runoff system. Some like it because it ultimately declares victory to the candidate who receives a majority of votes.

There were three experiments in two municipalities: one in Cary in 2007 where 25% of voters didn't know they'd be expected to rank their choices and 30% didn't understand IRV, and two in Hendersonville (one in 2007 and one in 2009) where 33% of voters didn't know they'd be expected to rank their choices. Only in one district race in Cary was IRV used to determine a final winner, and the tabulation process was so messed up that, in the end, the winner only got 1401 votes out of 3022 - not a majority.

"I realize turnout's low and it costs a lot of money, but it still keeps people in the process," said Rep. Phil Haire, D-Jackson. He's a past critic of legislation that would reduce or eliminate the 40 percent threshold a candidate must surpass in the first primary to avoid a runoff. "I believe in elections."

Interestingly enough, before the threshold was dropped to 40%, the number of races that went to runoff was higher - but so was the turnout! Dropping the threshold decreased the number of races that went to runoff and also decreased the turnout. So if you believe in upholding the will of the People, you have to give them a chance to tell you want they want - and they do that by voting.

North Carolina is one of only nine states - all in the South - where runoffs are used regularly in all races, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. The leading vote-getter must receive a majority of all votes cast to avoid a primary or general election runoff in each one except North Carolina, where the threshold fell to 40 percent in 1990 after some argued that it was preventing minorities from becoming nominees.

It was also done to decrease the number of runoff elections in the hope of lowering costs - but that doesn't matter if the runoff is in a statewide race.

if 42 other states don't have runoff elections, why not just get rid of them? If all you care about is saving money, why not just have a primary election and give the nomination to the person who gets the most votes?

State Rep. Mickey Michaux, who came out on the losing end of a 1982 congressional primary runoff, said the primary runoff is outdated and puts the winner in a tough position entering the general election against the opposing party's nominee.

"It's too expensive and it doesn't do the (candidates) any good to beat up on each other," said Michaux, D-Durham.

Some African-American candidates feel differently - and have used the runoff to their advantage much more recently than Michaux's race 28 years ago. Durham's Stella Adams, 1st Vice Chair of the NC Democratic Party, feels that runoffs are a good thing - and IRV is a bad thing. So much so that she threatened legal action if Durham adopted IRV. African American municipal office candidates in Rocky Mount and Wilmington benefited from runoffs in 2007 - the first year of the IRV pilot program. Rocky Mount was one of the communities that voted "no" on IRV that year!

Unofficial elections data show 212,833 registered voters cast ballots in last Tuesday's runoff out of a potential 4.7 million who were qualified to vote in the Democratic U.S. Senate primary, three GOP races for Congress, a state Senate race and local races.

Recent history shows runoff turnouts ranging from 1.8 percent in 2008 to as high as 8 percent. Gary Bartlett, executive director of the State Board of Elections, had estimated the turnout would be on the low end of that range, but the percentage improved as the U.S. Senate runoff between Cal Cunningham and Elaine Marshall attracted more than 158,000 votes. Marshall won the nomination.

Marshall won the nomination with a clear majority of the votes cast in the June primary, not a smaller number of votes in an IRV round which was less than the number of votes she would have needed to win the first round. A traditional runoff also allowed the two remaining candidates more time to communicate with the voters compared with trying to do so in a field of 6 before the May primary. It also gave the other candidates in the May primary a chance to endorse one of the two remaining candidates - something that was impossible for them to do in a traditional runoff. Candidates also didn't have to tell voters how to rank them in with other candidates, wasting time and diluting their main message.

Bartlett estimated the costs for all 100 counties to put on the elections at between $3.5 million and $5 million. Counties want the General Assembly to eliminate the runoff elections, citing the expense, said Todd McGee with the North Carolina Association of County Commissioners.

What counties what the GA to eliminate the runoffs? And replace them with what - IRV elections that are more confusing for voters, more complex to administer, and more costly all around?

Think $3.5 to $5 million is expensive? Try $20 million to implement IRV statewide, and $3 million for voter education every year there is an election. You'd NEVER break even with IRV!

State Republican Party officials also used the runoff to their advantage in the 8th District race, where Tim D'Annunzio finished first in the May 4 primary but received 36 percent of the votes. They took the unusual position of actively backing second-place finisher Harold Johnson after documents from D'Annunzio's divorce revealed past drug use and bizarre religious claims. Johnson cruised to the runoff victory.

And with IRV/RCV, D'Annunzio would have most likely won an IRV race, because over 95% of IRV races ultimately are won by the first place finisher in the first round. Republicans would have been stuck with this guy! Voters would have been robbed of the chance to learn vital information about one of their candidates that was only made available after the primary election. In traditional runoffs, the second place finisher flips and wins the runoff 33% of the time. Which seems more "democratic"?

An alternative to primary runoffs could include making the parties choose between the two leading vote-getters at a party caucus or convention. The state also could require parties to pay for their runoffs.

The General Assembly agreed in 2006 to let some towns and cities use "instant runoff voting" for municipal elections. Voters in Cary and Hendersonville have used the method, where voters rank their order of preference among listed candidates. A runoff winner is chosen by counting the top choice for the two top vote-getters on ballots of voters whose first-choice candidate was eliminated. Those choices are added to the original counts of the two leaders. The candidate with the most combined votes is the winner.

NC's one and only election decided by IRV (because there wasn't a first round majority winner) was the Cary District B election. 3022 votes were cast in 8 precincts, in early voting and via absentee by mail balloting. It took the Wake BOE an entire day to set up, sort, stack and count those ballots. It was not done according to published rules that called for overhead projectors for observers to make sure ballots were sorted properly, and for only board members to handle ballots. Instead, ballots were split up among board members and volunteers and were sorted in a mad rush, denying observers a chance to see not only if the ballots were sorted properly, but also to see if voters had problems ranking candidates properly. The process was so confusing for board members that one had to swap his duties with the volunteer tally sheet writer.

At the end of the day, the BOE had a different total than the observers had. They discovered a calculator error, then decided to do a full-blown non-public recount of the votes in the office of a staff member. No candidate or observer was present for the recount, or even notified. more missing votes were discovered, but I guess we'll just have to trust this secret recount. In the end, Don Frantz had 1401 out of 3022 votes. In other words, Frantz won with 1401 IRV votes when he would have needed 1512 to win the first round.

North Carolina State University professor Michael Cobb said surveys he assembled on voters of both towns showed an overwhelmingly majority found it easy to understand. It also saved another trip to the polls.

"Instant runoff voting isn't necessarily the best method but it certainly has a lot of positive features," Cobb said.

What positive features?

Does it cost less? No - other jurisdictions that have done a more thorough cost accounting of IRV have shown that IRV costs more than traditional elections - in some cases more than a regular election and a runoff. Pierce County, WA discovered that IRV doubled the cost of their elections. Minneapolis discovered that one single IRV election cost them $365,000 more than holding two elections 4 years earlier - and that was even adjusting for inflation.

The MD Legislature has done two detailed fiscal studies of IRV (which is two more than our legislature has done) and come up with some costs for IRV - an increase of $3.10 to $3.50 per registered voter that does not include the cost of new election equipment because there is no federally certified voting equipment that will handle IRV. Add to that a pitiful $0.48 per voter for voter education.

MD is a state that's a little smaller than NC, but has a similar diversity in population. Applying those costs to NC would $20 million to implement IRV statewide (not including certified equipment to tabulate the vote - which doesn't exist) and $3 million for voter education every year there is an election. You'd NEVER break even with IRV!

Does it increase voter turnout? No - turnout in the 2009 MN IRV election was the lowest in over 100 years! In San Francisco, turnout is down 100,000 voters since they first began using IRV in 2004.

Joyce McCloy, founder of the N.C. Coalition for Verified Voting, said instant runoff voting requires intense voter education but still leaves an unacceptable percentage of voters confused.

"I don't really hear any demands from voters or political parties to end the runoffs," McCloy said.

Is IRV confusing for voters? Yes - the numbers provided by Dr. Cobb's survey show that 25% of Cary voters and 33% of Hendersonville voters didn't know they'd be expected to rank their choices in the 2007 IRV elections. This were numbers from an exit poll conducted by IRV advocates. Some of those folks failed to follow instructions for educating voters on the way in - in order to provide a more positive outcome for the survey. So it's very likely that a greater percentage of voters might not have understood or been ready for IRV.

Another survey done in 2008 by the Town of Cary (no IRV advocates asking the questions) showed that 30% of voters didn't understand IRV.

It looks like a majority of people understand IRV and were ready to rank candidates, but those numbers are shocking for several reasons. IRV disenfranchised 25% of those Cary voters and 33% of those Hendersonville voters who bothered to show up. 30% of Cary voters didn't understand IRV - so how many people are going to take part in an election they don't understand or know they have to rank candidates in? If we want more voters to participate in elections - we don't want to make it so complicated that voters will stay away.

And these two experiments took place in communities where they have a very educated and literate voting population. Across our state, NC has some terrifyingly low rates of adult literacy in many of our counties. Do we really want to make voting more complicated for the very people that have the greatest stake in voting to elect the right people to make public policy choices to help get these people better education, jobs and opportunities in life?

Is IRV easy to count? No - in fact there are no certified voting systems we can purchase here in NC that are able to tabulate IRV ballots. Our own NC State Board of Elections said as much in March 2007 when they said it was too risky to use IRV in the May 2008 primary election unless we have certified upgrades.

The stuff we have won't do IRV unless we jury-rig the hell out of it and violate all sorts of election law and regulations. There is no way to do all the vote counting at precincts which our law now requires.

How would we tabulate IRV ballots cast on DRE touchscreen voting machines? Simple - you load the 2nd and 3rd column votes into an Microsoft Excel spreadsheet (no federal certification for election use - and how do you verify it's been done right?) and then let the machines do the work. It's impossible to duplicate this procedure by hand as required by NC election law. And whether you vote on paper op-scan ballots or on a DRE machine - each IRV election would have to be done totally separate before doing another one - and recounts would have to wait till ALL IRV contests are settled. Recounts and election audits would be so complicated and expensive that we'd be finding reasons NOT to do them - and then changing our laws to eliminate the need for them.

Election integrity advocates worked very hard to get the Public Confidence in Elections Act passed in 2005, over the objections of electronic voting advocates and others who were also pushing IRV. IRV advocates claim they are only advocating electoral reforms that make the process more democratic, but IRV's complexity tends to incentivize more complex and costly electronic voting equipment that makes IRV easier to administer but less verifiable.

So why are all these editorial boards pushing IRV when it doesn't deliver on promised benefits? Or can't they do critical thinking and just want to throw the baby out with the bathwater?

Now Terry Bouricius has no shame: falsehoods about IRV cost-savings in North Carolina!

2010-06-24T08:53:00.012-04:00

When I realized we'd be having a statewide runoff for the Democratic party nominee for US Senate, I knew I'd be reading a lot of editorials, op-ed pieces, letters to the editor, blogs, etc., calling for IRV because it's cheaper and saves time. And I knew I'd be refuting the intellectually misleading and (in some cases) dishonest claims supporting IRV - I had already done it it after the 2008 statewide primary runoff.

But some of the claims are just outrageous nonsense! Especially the claim on FairyTaleVote's IRV Factcheck posted by Terry Bouricius at 10:03 AM today about cost savings in Cary NC in 2007 :

Cary (NC) and Hendersonville (NC) are two cities that have participated in a state pilot program similar to the program envisioned in the New York legislation – a law first passed in 2006 and extended and expanded for three more years in 2008 after two IRV elections in 2007. The Wake County Board of Elections director Cherie Poucher estimates that IRV saved Cary $280,000 in its election in 2007, and would have saved as much as four times that amount if the mayor’s race had gone to a runoff.

Terry - this is totally wrong. Cherie Poucher claimed that IRV only saved $28,000 in the election of 2007 because there was only one district of 8 precincts that needed to use IRV tabulation.

Your claim of saving four times $280,000 (somewhere around $1.2 million) if the mayor's race had gone to a runoff is also bogus. Your own buddy Bob Hall of DemocracyNC (one of your front-line troopers pushing IRV in NC) made a different claim:

How much money is IRV expected to save?
About $62,000. That's what the Town of Cary would have had to reimburse the county if they had to hold a second election, open all 36 precincts, print ballots, pay staff and so on. All elections are paid for by local governments.

And it gets better. Here are the dollar amounts for the entire Town of Cary and Wake County from the Wake BOE Chair Dr. John Gilbert and BOE Executive Director Cherie Poucher:

Gilbert said the instant runoff would save the county about $62,000. The savings will come because polling places, and workers to staff them, will not be needed in Cary in November.
For a full countywide election, the savings could be about $337,000, Poucher said. That amount is what the board has budgeted for second primaries, currently the closest comparison the county and state have to runoffs.

Terry - are you math-challenged? Don't you realize that $62K for the ENTIRE Town of Cary is a lots less than the $280,000 savings you claim for 8 precincts and the $1.2 million you claim for the entire Town! Cherie Poucher said that IRV for the entire county would save only $337,000 - which is a lot less than the amount you claim for the entire Town of Cary.

Geeze - if you can't get those basic facts right in a blog called IRV Factcheck, what the hell good is it?

NOTE on June 26, 2010: I checked the IRV Factcheck blog and the extra zero had been taken out, bringing the figure down to $28,000 - in keeping with the figure provided by Wake BOE ED Cherie Poucher. But they still haven't fixed the totally false claim for a savings of four times the amount of the single District Race. 4 times $28K is $112,000 - still $50,000 more than the amount alleged by Dr. John Gilbert for the Mayor's race. Furthermore, nothing has been done to tally up the value of the in-kind services provided to the IRV pilot program in Cary by non-profits by FairVote, FairVoteNC, DemocracyNC, the League of Women Voters, NC Center For Voter Education, and the pro-bono work by commercial businesses.

Until the value of the in-kind services provided by non-profits and pro-bono work done by commercial businesses, any amount of money claimed to have been saved by using IRV cannot be taken seriously.

Hendersonville has implemented IRV with little cost, and while no runoffs have been avoided, savings would have been immediate if there had been runoffs. After voting unanimously to use IRV for a second time in 2009, the Hendersonville city council in 2010 voted to explore how it could make IRV a permanent part of its elections.

Geeze Terry - are you lying or can you not check your own FairyTaleVote archives? The 2009 Hendersonville vote was not unanimous - it was 4 to 1!

Council approves instant runoff for next city election

By John Harbin
Published April 10th 2009 in Times-News

The Hendersonville City Council voted 4 to 1 to use the instant runoff voting method in this year’s election.

The person who voted against using IRV was Councilman Steve Caraker:

“I was elected under the process,” Councilman Steve Carker said. “In information I have received since then, I feel this system needs more trial. I will vote against it.”

Yet another official elected under IRV who doesn't like it - just like Don Franz from Cary.

Part of the problem with these claims for saving money is the way that IRV has been implemented both in Cary and Hendersonville is that it was done under the table and off the books. All the cost savings have been shifted of the taxpayer's books. So we will never know exactly how much IRV cost Hendersonville in 2009. But with IRV, you pay for all the extra costs (whether on or off the books) even if you don't have the instant runoff. You always pay more for IRV whether you need it or not!

IRV advocacy organizations like FairVote (and their local FairVoteNC affiliate), DemocracyNC and the League of Women Voters performed "in kind" work that was not valued properly. FairVoteNC hired a part-time worker named Elana Everett, who ironically was the daughter-in-law of the Wake BOE Chair Dr. John Gilbert, who was one of the biggest advocates of IRV in the state. She was the former head of the NC Green Party, which pushes IRV across the state and nationwide.

Elena, along with Bob Hall and many others, performed many hours of work to promote IRV and do voter education. They even helped design the ballots set up the procedures for doing the IRV tabulation. Some mysterious outside PR firm did work on the IRV pilot in Cary, but no one will name that firm. Elena even called me a liar and claimed I made up the detail about the PR firm until I provided a copy of an e-mail from her father-in-law referring to that PR firm.

What was the value of the services performed by FairVote's Dianne Russell, the paid Director of IRV America when she not only provided voter education for Cary voters but also did exit polling when they came out of the polling place? She admitted in writing that she boiled down her voter education instructions to something quick so that voters would get it and have a positive experience with the system - then presumably tell her how great it was on the way back out. Should we trust exit polls that were influenced by pollsters trying to push something? Then - Russell admitted she faked a southern accent while she was interviewing voters. I presume that voters being interviewed by Russell on the way out would notice if she had a Maine accent on the way into the polls - does that mean Russell faked a southern accent the whole time she was "working" for FairVote in NC?

No one has ever kept track of or placed a value on those hours. If they had done that - would there have been any money saved?

The MD Legislature did fiscal studies of the costs of implementing IRV, and found that IRV would not be cheap. I analyzed those costs, and applied them to NC, and found that it would cost $20 million to implement and $3 million for voter education. There is no way you would break even with IRV - it would always cost more.

And when IRV was used in real elections and all the costs were accounted for (not done under the table and off the books like in NC), IRV DOUBLED the costs of elections in Pierce County, Washington.

And you may have read my blog posting about the higher costs of IRV in Minneapolis during the 2009 election that also had the lowest voter turnout in over 100 years!

So Terry - either you made a mistake by including an extra "zero" you shouldn't have, or you meant to exaggerate the cost savings for IRV. Which is it?

And that's not the only bogus claim you made in that IRV Factcheck posting, but I'll deal with the rest of them at a later time.

But please - if you can't check your facts accurately, stay the hell out of my state. We already have enough people who play fast and loose with the facts here.

More incorrect information on IRV in NC!

2010-06-22T12:33:00.008-04:00

Well here's more claims that IRV saves money:

Runoff Election Comes With A Price
Tuesday - June 22, 2010
Written by Josh Ellis/David Horn

RALEIGH) -- Tuesday’s runoff election in North Carolina is expected to cost between $4 million and $5 million. That is according to State Board of Elections director Gary Bartlett.
Bartlett said in many ways, the runoff election is just like any other election. "You've got to open up the same polling places. You have got to do ballot coding, ballot printing. You have got to have absentee meetings done by the county boards and then the biggest expense is that you must have the manpower to run the election," said Bartlett.

Of course a runoff is like any other election. It's a separate election where you start out at ZERO.

You can see an interview with Gary Bartlett where he talks about the low turnout runoff and possibilities to change our election laws to decrease the need for low-turnout runoffs. He claims the voters aren't as engaged nor do they consider this as important as a general election. The parties and the general assembly should get together to get more voters to participate in the primary process.

One wonders why in NC, where we have party primaries and so many crybabies claiming that runoffs aren't needed, we just don't do away with thresholds and have winner take all primary elections? The candidate who gets the most votes wins - end of story. 41 other states don't have runoff elections. If we don't want to pay for primary runoffs, why not just get rid of them?

North Carolina Center for Voter Education director Damon Circosta said the high cost of runoff elections could be avoided. "We need to find a way, while we've got people at the polls, to make sure we record what would be their choice in a runoff election, hence the instant runoff voting," said Circosta. "All it is is a system where when you have people at the polls the first time, you record what their choice would be in a runoff scenario and then you don't have to bring them back for a second time and open the polls again."

Damon (and I presume the Center For Voter Education) continue to claim that once that IRV would save the high costs of runoff elections. And where are they getting this information to make the claim that IRV saves money when there is ample evidence from real world elections that IRV not only doesn't save money - it actually costs MORE than having two separate elections (primary & runoff, primary and general election, general election and runoff, etc.).

And yes it is very easy to say that IRV is just a system where you have people at the polls one time and you record their additional choices so they don't have to come back a second time. Problem is, our election equipment in NC won't handle IRV without some risks - risks that our State Board of Elections has been aware of since 2007 when they were first pushing IRV.

I have asked Damon and NC Center for Voter Education President Wayne Goodwin if the Center supports IRV, and if so, why? I still haven't received any response directly addressing those questions. Damon texted me at 11:54 AM today:

Board of cve never taken official position on irv. Cve always seeks to improve elections.

Does this mean that the Board of the CVE feels that IRV improves elections, or is it just the staff that feels that way? If it's just the staff that feels that way, does the Board of the CVE and other non-profit electoral reform groups support the actions of their staff to promote IRV without taking an official position on IRV?

I know why groups like FairVote and DemocracyNC support IRV. But I don't know why other groups support IRV, unless there is some sort of requirement that non-profit groups support each other's agenda no matter what?

And what would be wrong with just going with winner take all in the primary? Or with a sliding scale threshold? Let's keep the 40% threshold. If someone gets greater than 40% - they win outright even if one gets 45% and the other gets 44% (according to both Gary Bartlett and Don Wright of the NC State Board of Elections).

But let's say that the leader got between 30% and 40%. Did the second place finisher get between 30% and 40% - or at least within 10 points? If so - hold a runoff. If not - the leader wins. That way you don't have the expense of a runoff.

The thing about runoff elections is that in a traditional top-two runoff, the second-place finisher "flips" and wins the runoff 33% of the time. In an IRV election, the 1st round winner wins the IRV tabulation in greater than 90-95% of the time. Which seems more democratic?

Note: the story was updated after both Joyce McCloy and myself contacted NCNN to present other information about IRV:

A grassroots group called, "NC Voter" maintains that Instant Runoff Voting is not the solution. The group questions exactly how IRV would be counted. Advocates with the group say the process does not end up saving money and it "does not provide a majority, but awards winners with less than 50 percent of the ballots cast." "NC Voter" references from other states at ncvoter.net.

Let's hope that before our General Assembly considers all the information on IRV before they get conned into extending the existing IRV pilot program (already extended to 2011 from the original 2009 cut off date) or getting rid of the program altogether and making IRV an approved voting method. From what I heard today both from the SBOE and various legislators, there is no movement to bring up IRV during this short session. But, as one legislator told me, that could change....

I knew it was coming - calls for IRV in statewide NC races!

2010-06-20T23:29:00.007-04:00

As soon as I knew that there would be a runoff in the Democratic Primary for US Senate, I knew that various people would be calling for Instant Runoff Voting. Here is one of those claims - from Damon Circosta of the NC Center for Voter Education:

High Cost, Low Turnout Likely for Runoff Elections

By Damon Circosta
Published: June 14, 2010

RALEIGH - Most people don’t equate summer with election season. When one conjures up visions of voting the images are typically of a crisp autumn day. Or perhaps for primary voters Election Day might involve sprouting trees and the blooms of a North Carolina spring.

Summer, for both voters and politicians, is usually a quiet time. The public’s attention is on other things like vacation plans and kids camps. Candidates are usually out of the spotlight and quietly amassing resources for the fall campaign.

But every so often, election season extends into the dog days of summer.

This year, for many voters across the state, there is an opportunity to engage in democracy. But with so much else on the minds of the electorate, most of us won’t be braving the heat to head to the polls.

Really - summer is not a season for elections? Who says so? We have always known that runoffs occur after an election. Knowing that elections require a runoff vote - why should this be a surprise for an informed electorate? Or for someone who works for the Center For Voter Education?

Shouldn't the "Center For Voter Education" be among the chief drum-beaters trying to get people out to vote, instead of lamenting why people aren't getting out to vote - thus creating a self-fulfilling prophecy?

North Carolina law provides for a runoff to be held if no candidate achieves more than 40 percent of the vote in a primary election. In the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate, as well as in Republican primary contests for congressional districts 8, 12 and 13, no clear winner prevailed. These races are headed for a June 22 runoff election between the top two candidates.

When the threshold used to be higher, we had more runoffs, and higher turnout for those runoffs. When we lowered the threshold, we didn't need as many runoffs, and we ended up having lower turnout for the runoffs we had.

Perhaps the remedy for low-turnout runoff elections is not to lower the threshold but to raise it?

Turnout projections are exceedingly low for these runoffs. In a state with about 6 million registered voters, fewer than 100,000 will likely show up to the polls. Nevertheless, the expense of holding a statewide election remains relatively constant. It doesn’t matter if two people or 2,000 people show up at a precinct. It must be opened and staffed all day.

While it is correct that there are over 6 million registered voters in NC, there are not that many registered Democrats who could vote in the runoff. According to the NC State Board of Elections as of 11:40PM on June 20, 2010, there are only 2,750,763 registered Democrats who could vote in the Statewide Primary for US Senate in the Democratic Primary.

Unaffiliated voters could vote in either the Democratic or Republican ballot in the May primary, they would have to vote the same ballot in the runoff election. I am not sure how many of the state's 1,410,324 UNA voters voted the Democratic ballot in May and thus would be eligible to vote in the June runoff.

In the Democratic Senate primary, some people expressed concern when Cal Cunningham, the second-place finisher, called for a runoff. Citing concerns about the $5 million expense of holding a statewide election and doubts about his ability to overcome frontrunner Elaine Marshall, these critics said it was an irresponsible move. While reasonable people may disagree about his prospects, it sets a dangerous precedent when we ask candidates to bow out of elections to spare the state the expense.

While I agree that some people expressed concern that Cal ran, it was his right under the law to call for a runoff because he was the second-place finisher and the first-place finisher didn't cross the threshold.

And I agree that it sets a dangerous precedent when we ask candidates to bow out of a runoff election to spare the state the expense. But I don't agree that we should endanger election integrity and public confidence in elections in our state to experiment further with Instant Runoff Voting.

Administering elections can be a costly enterprise. Accessible polls and accurately counted votes require resources. While everyone likes to see our government operate as cost-effectively as possible, scrimping on the very mechanism we use to hold our government accountable doesn’t make sense.

There are ways to achieve more citizen input in a less costly manner than holding a second primary election. Some municipalities in North Carolina and other states have experimented with something called instant runoff voting.

Yes - some municipalities have experimented with IRV. Some do not like it. Cary and Hendersonville tried it in 2007. Cary had the state's only election where IRV was used to count voter's second and third choices when no one won the election on the first choice alone. The Wake County Board of Elections couldn't follow the complicated hand sort/stack and counting procedures, and made some calculator errors that necessitated a secret count the next day with no outside observers or candidates knew about or attended. That secret count found some votes that had been missed the previous day. And out of the original 3022 first column votes, the winner of that race got 1401 votes - 111 votes short of the 1512 votes he would have needed to win in the first column of votes.

Hendersonville tried it, but had winners using just the first column votes. Hendersonville tried IRV again in 2009, and also had winners using just the first column votes. They never needed to count the additional voter choices, and there is no evidence that the Henderson County BOE could have accomplished that task using their DRE touchscreen voting machines.

Quite simply, the voting equipment that North Carolina uses is not certified to tabulate IRV ballots. That's why all the IRV experiments have either used complicated and confusing hand-counting methods like in Cary, or hybrid and jury-rigged counting methods proposed for DRE machines that involve somehow porting voting data over to Excel Spreadsheets, where the tabulation will be done all by machine with little to no possibility for outside observers to verify the tabulations.

The idea is that during the first primary election, voters are offered the opportunity to select whom they would vote for if there were to be a runoff. It’s not perfect and would require spending some money to make sure that the instant runoff system was accurate and secure. But such a system could save money in the long run and also make voting more convenient, hopefully increasing turnout.

Studies done by legislatures that take their responsibilities seriously (as our NC legislator fail to do when it comes to IRV) and real world experiences of places like Pierce County, WA and even Minneapolis MN have shown that IRV does not save money - it actually costs more money.

The MD legislature performed fiscal studies on IRV in 2006 and 2008, and costs per registered voter in MD ranged from an additional $3.08 to $3.50 per registered voter to implement IRV, and an extra $0.48 per registered voter for voter education each and every year there was an election. Applying those very reasonable costs to our state's 6 million voters - it would cost between $18 to $20 MILLION to implement IRV right up front and $3 million each and every year for voter education. Using those very reasonable costs, we'd never break even with IRV even if we needed a statewide runoff every two years!

Pierce County WA found their costs DOUBLED using IRV. IRV cost Minneapolis voters more: a primary and general election in 2005 was $1.12 million (adjusted 2009 dollars) vs. $1.46 million for one single IRV election. Furthermore, Minneapolis found that turnout for their first IRV election was the lowest since 1902 - in over 100 years! IRV has been used in San Francisco since 2004, and costs have gone up while turnout has gone down!

And another problem with continued calls for using IRV in NC is that our own State Board of Elections stated in 2007 (before the first communities decided to use IRV) was that IRV was too risky to use for statewide primary elections (like in 2008 and 2010) because it would violate state and federal election laws. There simply were no certified voting systems (machines and software) that was federally certified to do IRV elections in 2008 - nor in 2010.

Under the system used for certifying voting systems, the voting system companies have to get the whole system tested - not just the machines and software, but even the documentation and the manual procedures. Companies have to submit the whole system for federal certification which they have to pay for. And since there are many different IRV vote counting methods and each is much more complicated than single-column elections, few (if any) companies want to foot the bill. So should we lower our standards for claims of savings and increased turnout that haven't materialized in the experiments done so far?

That's the experimental side - the IRV pilot program in NC. It was originally supposed to run from 2007 through 2009 (inclusive) where only two communities used it in 2007 - but 4 communities voted "no" on IRV: Asheville, Atlantic Beach, Raleigh and Rocky Mount.

So even though no one could use IRV in 2008 because it was deemed "too risky", some of the same advocacy groups pushing IRV now came out right after the June 2008 Democratic Labor Commissioner Runoff to call for extending the IRV pilot - citing mainly the need to save money. They got the pilot program extended until 2011, but only one community - Hendersonville where they never really put IRV to the full test - used it in 2009.

Where IRV was mandated as an election method that must be used, it has also fallen short on promises. IRV was dumped in Burlington, VT by a larger majority and a larger turnout of voters than in the referendum that voted to use IRV. 67% of Pierce County WA voters voted to dump IRV after only one try. Aspen CO voters gave IRV a no--confidence vote after only one try, and now the Aspen DA is investigating whether or not the IRV election violated state election laws.

Short of implementing instant runoff voting, there are other changes we could make, such as rethinking the requirement that a candidate must get 40 percent of the vote to avoid a runoff. Our election system is not set in stone. Using the democratic process, we are free to alter the system to make it more effective.

Not really sure that lowering the threshold is the right way to go, since turnout has only gone down in runoffs since the threshold has been lowered. Perhaps set a sliding threshold based on where the top vote getter placed compared with where the second-place finisher did - and factoring in how many other candidates there were? And not sure we want to say that it's more effective to us a confusing and complex vote counting method that we claim saves money but really doesn't?

The fraction of registered voters who will carve out some time on June 22 to vote, or who cast a ballot using the early voting system, hold a considerable amount of sway in this election. It’s time to consider ways of changing the election process so more of us will get involved.

Yes it is true that we need to get more people involved. So let's raise the thereshold for winning a primary election, so that more elections go to runoff and we get more bang for our runoff buck!

And by all means, let's not have our local Boards of Elections do things to discourage people from voting. They should be encouraging people to wait in line to be the first to vote like people wait in line to buy concert tickets - instead of trying to run people off!

But we in North Carolina are fortunate in many ways that our election administration systems are better than in many other states. After passage of the Public Confidence in Elections Act in 2005, NC was ranked #1 in election audit accuracy in 2006 by the non-profit Brennan Center. The same group ranked NC as being one of the 8 states best able to run the 2008 general election. Election integrity advocates have worked hard to get NC where we are today, and we have to be vigilant to make sure that we know enough about so-called "electoral reforms" like IRV before we decide whether or not we want to implement them.

North Carolina has better elections than South Carolina. SC has open primaries (where you can cross party lines and vote for candidates in other parties even if you are not an Unaffiliated voter). Their elections are run on paperless DRE touchscreen machines that were decertified for us in other states. They can't even tell whether or not there was any election fraud in their Democratic US Senate primary, because to check for fraud in that one race might challenge the integrity of ALL SC elections. Those same machines are used in the SC general election - including for US President - so how could we possibly trust them to correctly record and count any election. And add to that mess the fact that some folks are pushing for National Popular Vote for President to abolish the Electoral College and you can see why we shouldn't be pushing for ANYTHING that will further complicate election integrity.

IRVFactcheck fails to deal with majority failure

2010-06-12T23:05:00.004-04:00

The folks at the pro-IRV/RCV astro-turf group "IRV Factcheck" are at it again - this time Rob Richie and the folks at FairyTaleVote are using some really bogus ENRON-type "math" to explain how IRV really does deliver majorities:

Saturday, June 12, 2010
Rebutting the "Majority Failure" Argument Against IRV

One misleading argument made by some IRV opponents is that a "real" runoff (top two runoff, with a second election weeks or months after the first) produces a "real" majority, but that IRV may not produce such a majority. This argument is based on using different standards to compute majorities under IRV and traditional runoffs.

OK Rob - IRV and traditional runoffs are two different types of elections - why not use different standards to compute majorities?

In a traditional runoff, you start from ZERO and you then count all the new votes. You don't add the new votes to the old votes like you do with IRV. Traditional runoff elections are easier to count than IRV elections also. And as Minneapolis has proven, two elections (a primary and a general election) are cheaper than one IRV election!

These IRV opponents argue that there is a failure to produce a "real" majority under IRV because they use the total number of votes in the first round to compute a majority, not the total number of votes cast in the instant runoff. Sometimes the number of exhausted ballots - that is, ballots that don't rank any of the remaining candidates in the final instant runoff - can mean that neither of the two finalists has more than 50% of the votes cast in the first round.

Sometimes? Rob - try the largest freaking majority of the time!

The mayoral election in Burlington (VT) in 2009 is used as an example of this "failure." In the first round of that election, the results were:

Kurt Wright 2,951
Bob Kiss 2,585
Andy Montroll 2,063
Dan Smith 1,306
Write-ins 36
James Simpson 35
(With four invalid ballots, three of which were later found to be valid in a partial recount.)

OK - are we talking about 8976 total votes, or 8976 ballots of which only one was found to be invalid? What the hell is an "invalid ballot" anyway?

OK - let's play their game. Let's go with 8975 - and a majority would be 4488 votes (50% would be 4487.5 and rounded up one would be 4488). What did Bob Kiss get?

In the final result of the election, the results were:

Bob Kiss 4,313
Kurt Wright 4,061
(with 602 exhausted ballots and the 4 invalid ballots)

OK - so are you counting 3 out of the 4 invalid ballots in the first round but then claiming all 4 to be invalid in this round?

4313 is 175 votes short of the number of votes needed to have won in the first round. This is an example of "ENRON vote counting" that you get from IRV. How can 4313 votes be a majority in any subsequent round of IRV when it wasn't enough to win in the first round? Rob and the True Believers will no doubt explain.....

IRV opponents argue that although Kiss won a majority of the valid ballots in the final round of voting, he failed to win a "real" majority because his final round votes were only 48% of the votes case in the first round.

Yes - that's right - Kiss didn't win a real majority. Nice to finally hear you admit it!

IRV advocates point out that the result was due to some voters exercising their option to abstain from a choice between the two finalists - just as many registered voters abstained from voting in the first place. That doesn't change the fact that winner Bob Kiss earned majority support from voters who chose to indicate a preference for either him or Kurt Wright.

No Rob - we claim that Kiss didn't win a real majority of the first column voters. Most voters don't understand the subtle differences that you are trying to explain. But they do understand that you are trying to sell them two different explanations of what a "majority" is: one for the first round, and a totally different one for IRV.

Australia avoids this possible outcome by requiring voters to rank all candidates in its IRV races for the House of Representatives. That's certainly an option for those who care about this definition of a majority, and it does ensure the voters take the time to indicate their last choice along with their first choice. But if eligible voters have the right to skip voting altogether, some will argue that they have the right to skip ranking candidates they don't like.

Actually Rob, all such a requirement ensures is that voters will rank one or maybe two candidates per race - the rest will just be meaningless place fillers to ensure that their first one or two votes counts. Because they really don't know a damn thing about the other candidates - it's called "donkey voting" and my friend Lisa's husband who lives in Australia says that's how they vote!

But it's not fair to say that in contrast to IRV, traditional runoff produces a "real" majority while discounting the total number of votes cast in the first round when calculating a majority.

Actually Rob - it's very fair to say that. That is because a traditional runoff election a totally separate election from the election that required the runoff. It gives the voters a chance to consider the two remaining candidates in a totally new light from the original election. If your candidate made it to the runoff, you are free to vote for the same candidate again if you like, vote for another candidate, or vote for no candidate. You don't have those freedoms with IRV.

In fact, with some types of IRV where you can only vote for 3 candidates, and there are more than 3 candidates in the race, you might very well vote for candidates that never make it past the 1st round. You had two additional choices - and none of those counted. Which means that you don't even have a chance to participate in the IRV runoff.

Compare and contrast that with a traditional runoff where, if your candidate doesn't make it, you can vote for one of the remaining two, or not vote at all. But at least you have a chance to be heard in the runoff - you don't always get that with IRV.

But it's not fair to say that in contrast to IRV, traditional runoff produces a "real" majority while discounting the total number of votes cast in the first round when calculating a majority. By this argument, Vincent Dober won a "real" majority in the March 2009 Burlington's City Council Ward 7 election even though he received considerably fewer votes in the second round of the runoff election than his opponent received in the first:

Round 1:
Ellie Blais 461
Vincent Dober 612
Eli Lesser-Goldsmith 619
Write-ins 4

These are the results from the March 3, 2009 election where there was no IRV. 1696 votes cast on March 3, 2009 - 50% plus one vote is 849. No one got 849, so they had a runoff. So any runoff had to start again from ZERO - got it?

Round 2
Vincent Dober 515
Eli-Lesser Goldsmith 425

This is from the runoff election held on March 24, 2009 - totally separate election. Not an IRV election. That means you start at ZERO - you don't add totals from one day's election to the totals from another day's election. Out of a total of 940 votes cast on March 23, 2009 - Dober got 54.79% of the votes (a clear majority) and Goldsmith got 45.21%.

But Rob and the gang don't seem to understand that that Ward 7 had an election and a separate runoff. So IRV rules (whatever they happen to be at any given place and time with their slippery always changing thresholds) don't apply.

Under the standards that IRV opponents apply to IRV, we would use the first round totals to compute a majority, and Dober in the runoff would have secured only 30% of the vote - a considerably worse majority "failure" than in the Mayoral election held at the same time with IRV.

Actually - IRV supporters can't seem to tell the difference between IRV and non-IRV elections, or understand why the total number of 1st round votes in a general election wouldn't have any bearing on a runoff.

IRV opponents can't have it both ways.

Really Rob - isn't it you IRV advocates who are trying to have it both ways? Selling IRV as a single election but applying two different standards for victory?

Either Bob Kiss and Vincent Dober both won majorities or neither of them did. Under normal usage, the candidate with more than 50% of the votes counted in the final round is called a "majority winner."

Actually Rob, that's an incredibly lame argument you are making. First off, the Kiss election was an IRV election and the Dober election was not. You are arguing for sliding thresholds in elections - something that most people object to even when you try and obfuscate by talking about % turnout in subsequent IRV rounds vs. traditional runoffs.

With IRV when you starting ENRON election math, you run into the old sliding scale. Where a winner of an IRV election settled with votes in the rounds beyond the first round has fewer votes than needed to have won in the 1st round of the IRV contest. In fact, it's entirely possible for someone to win an IRV election with not a single additional vote counted from one round to another. In fact, if fewer voters just decided to stop ranking their choices, someone who wasn't a winner in the 3rd round of a race might be the winner in the the 4th round without gaining a single additional vote! Dropping turnout could cause someone to win!

A more consistent standard to compare IRV and traditional runoffs would be to look at the decline in participation from the first round to the last. In the Mayoral election under IRV, 93% of the voters who cast a ballot in the first round ended up participating in the final round. In the City Council election under a traditional runoff, only 55% of the voters who cast a ballot in the first round ended up participating in the second round.

But what does that prove? More voters participating in all the rounds of the IRV election for mayor didn't result in a winner with a clear majority of the votes cast in the first round. But the City Council Ward 7 races were two separate races. And there was a clear majority winner in the runoff.

Just like there was a real majority of Burlington voters who spoke loudly in 2010 when they voted to dump IRV in Burlington.

Another revealing example is the 2008 U.S. Senate election in Georgia. Incumbent Republican Senator Saxby Chambliss won re-election in a December runoff after falling short of a majority in November. Turnout in the second round was only 57% of the first round in spite of the fact that a Democratic filibuster-proof majority was at stake in the Senate.

First round:
Saxby Chambliss 1,867,097
Jim Martin 1,757,393
Allen Buckley 127,923
Write-ins 72
Total 3,752,577

Second round:
Saxby Chambliss 1,228,033
Jim Martin 909,923
Total 2,137,956

Rob - there was no second round in the 2008 GA US Senate race. There was a separate general election and a separate runoff. Are you deliberately trying to confuse people by comparing a separate runoff election to IRV?

And many people felt that the reason why the runoff went the way it did was because Chambliss made the runoff a race about "race" - the race of President-elect Obama. Chamblis turned out the vote in the runoff by making the runoff all about overturning the Obama victory in November. He even got McCain and Palin to campaign for him.

Martin was very conscious of his role in perhaps being the 60th vote in the Senate. Indeed his whole runoff campaign was about continuing the change to help Obama. What a pity that Obama For America (the president-elect's campaign operation) folded up their tents and didn't do the work in GA that would have given Obama a veto-proof majority. That short-sightedness on the part of Obama For America (and the successor organization Organizing For America) cost the President and the Democratic Party victories in the NJ and VA governor's races in late 2009 and the Mass Senate special election in early 2010.

If this election was held under IRV, the number of ballots cast for the final round would have been at least 96.6% of the first round total. It would likely have been higher, as most of Libertarian candidate Allen Buckley's supporters probably would have indicated a second preference. Even if Buckley won a far larger share of the vote and none of his supporters cast votes for their second choice, it would have been mathematically impossible for final round votes to fall to only 57% of the first round total as under a traditional runoff.

What the hell difference would it have made what % of the ballots cast in the final round of an GA senate race held under IRV? First off, GA uses DRE touchscreen voting machines and they can't even be sure they can count them correctly. It was proven that uncertified software patches were administered to the Diebold DRE machines in 2002 - which probably had an effect on giving the race to Chambliss in 2002. Buckely was a Libertarian, and we have no way to know what percentage of them would have ranked a second choice. And those that had cast a second choice would have been more likely to vote for Chambliss than for Martin. Sort of like how the 2007 Cary District B race would have been different had it been a traditional runoff vs. IRV

Another point is that there was no certified software that could count the IRV ballots in this race. They would have most likely had to be counted by hand and given the turnout in the November 2008 election, the IRV tabulations would not have been calculated before the results of the simpler to tabulate separate GA senate runoff elections were done.

To be fair, it is possible for second round turnout to exceed that of the first round under a traditional runoff - and every now and then it happens. However, large declines in turnout seem to be the norm under traditional runoffs - sometimes dramatically so, with turnout falling on the order of ten times in statewide primary runoffs in Texas and North Carolina in 2008. Federal primary runoffs in the several stats that hold them provide particularly strong evidence for large declines in participation from the first to the second rounds of traditional runoffs. From 1994 to 2008, turnout declined in 113 of 116 regularly scheduled federal primary runoffs, and the average decline was about 35% - see FairVote's data on these runoffs.

Perhaps the reason why large declines in turnout seem to be the norm is because we've lowered the thresholds (and standards) for many other elections. If you only have one runoff every so often, your turnout will be down. In the 2008 NC statewide runoff for Democratic candidate for Labor Commissioner, turnout was very low in those areas where that was the only race - and those areas voted for candidate Mary Fant Donnen. In other areas where there were more than one race in the runoff, turnout was higher - lots higher. And in those counties, the higher turnout gave more votes to candidate John Brooks. Had more counties had more runoff elections, the results could have been very different. Perhaps the key to greater voter turnout in runoff elections is to have more runoffs, not less?

Bottom line: you can't make a majority of voters like one of the candidates running. But you can enact IRV to make sure you always elect the candidate who has majority support over his or her top opponent in the final round and to ensure the defeat of the candidate whom a majority of voters see as their last choice - a result that plurality voting makes all too possible.

As we have proven the only sure-fire way to make sure that you elect a candidate who has majority support over his or her top opponent is to have a traditional runoff election. IRV does not ensure that the IRV winner has a true majority. IRV can even award a win to someone who didn't get a single additional vote.

And when you compare the additional extra added cost of conducting IRV elections vs. the cost of a general election and rarely needed runoffs (or even the primary elections FairVote is trying to get rid of), you have to wonder why anyone would be trying to push this costly, complex and confusing election system as an electoral reform? That is perhaps why Election Integrity advocates call Rob Richie's organization "FairyTale Vote"!

It's now official: Rob Richie and FairVote have no shame!

2010-06-02T07:52:00.011-04:00

On his astro-turf IRV Factcheck blog, FairVote's Rob Richie attacked NC Verified Voting advocate Joyce McCloy, claiming she was behind the wave of anger directed at Richie after Richie published a tribute to election integrity advocate John Gideon claiming that Gideon supported IRV.

Richie is getting to be a one-trick pony: he can't help but work something about IRV into everything he writes! But his half-assed denial of dragging Gideon's name into the whole IRV debate was also an attack on an election integrity advocate who not only does the Daily Voting News but also got an election integrity award named after John Gideon himself!

To say that some people were pissed is an understatement. You all know how I feel. Brad Friedman of BradBlog wrote to Richie and demanded an apology:

Subject: Shame on you, Rob. You owe Joyce a BIG apology
From: Brad FriedmanDate: 5/29/2010 5:46 PM
Rob Richie -
I have done my best, publicly, to stay out of the public and well-funded Internet and lobbyist-whisper-campaign jihad that you and Fair Vote have waged on those who have an honest, and very reasonable, opposition to IRV and the serious dangers it poses to transparent, citizen-overseeable democracy. Vigorous, fair minded, public debate of differing opinions is, after all, at the heart of democracy.
But now you've simply, and outrageously, gone too far. You owe an immediate and sincere apology to Joyce McCloy for the insinuations in this article and in its inappropriate headline.

You compare McCloy's advocacy for transparent, citizen-overseeable elections to "McCarthyism", which is obnoxious enough, but then you go on to write (seemingly without any self-awareness or irony whatsoever):
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.

You "suspect" that, do you? Do you have any such evidence of same? Or are you just hoping to use *McCarthyite* tactics to defame her, in hopes of supporting your own cause, in a public space?
For the record, there were MANY within the Election Integrity Movement (no, not the "election security movement" as FairVote's chair recently, embarrassingly, described it -- revealing an extraordinary lack of understanding and/or concern for EI), who decried what seemed to be your opportunistic invocation of John Gideon's name after his death.

For the record, no, he did NOT support IRV, nor was he 'neutral' on the subject, contrary to your blog post above. He opposed it, at least as made clear to me during many of my daily conversations with him. If he did not express that publicly, (don't know if he put his position on public record or not), he certainly expressed many times to me his concerns about it, and the idea that it was an insane notion, given our current electoral system mess.
Nonetheless, I am unaware of evidence to suggest, as you do, that it was McCloy's "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." But yet you use to suggest as much.

That is appalling, Rob. Simply appalling.
Your shameless attack(s) against McCloy -- and the similar, recent, embarrassing attack against the EI movement as a whole by your chairman -- would suggest that the positive values of IRV in elections, whatever they may be, are not enough to support your advocacy for them. Instead, you feel it necessary to attack a fellow (if unpaid, unlike yourself) democracy advocate -- one who recently won an award in John Gideon's name, btw(!) -- simply because she has the temerity to public disagree with your position, and proffer a case to support her reasons for doing so.

Shame on you, Rob. Or, as Joseph Welch famously said, since you were kind enough to (ironically enough) quote it: "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?"

Please retract, correct, apologize for what you've done here, and then reign in FairVote's reckless, embarrassing chair person for the obnoxious, disrespectful and ill-informed blog comments recently posted as well.

And, after you do the above, I hope you will inform yourself and your chair person, about what the Election Integrity Movement is, and what "transparency" and citizen oversight actually mean. No, contrary to your post above, it has nothing -- nothing -- to do with your well-funded group's praise-worthy support of a "right to voice in the Constitution".

Once again: Shame on you, Rob. I hope you show the sense of decency to set things right this time.

Brad Friedman
Creator/Publisher The BRAD BLOG, http://BradBlog.com

How did Rob Richie respond to Brad's message to him? Well, he changed the original attack posting against Joyce McCloy which was sort of an apology to Joyce. Here is the archived original attack post on Joyce, and here is the edited version which is at the original link.

It wasn't much of an apology. For Brad, that was the last straw. Here is Brad's next note to Rob:

EMAIL # 2

Subject: That's it? Seriously?
From: Brad Friedman
Date: 6/01/2010 3:53 PM

That's it? That your transparent correction and retraction and apology for comparing a fellow democracy advocate to McCarthy? You simply made your post disappear?

It's apparent that not only does FairVote not give a damn about transparent, citizen-overseeable elections, it also doesn't give a damn about transparency advocacy for so-called Instant Runoff Voting!

Little surprise then that real Election Integrity heroes like Joyce McCloy and so many others are fighting so hard against IRV as well as the deceptive propagandizing that FairVote has been doing in favor of it.

And while you delete the post and offer an "apology" for an "inaccuracy" of one aspect of your item, you didn't see fit to have the decency to apology for comparing her to Joseph McCarthy even as you, yourself, used nothing less than a McCarthy-esque tactic to disparage her and her efforts in the very same breath.

Since you determined to delete your original offensive post, refuse to allow comments at your so-called "IRV Fact Check" blog, and refused as well to post my reply to it, as requested, I'm CC'ing Joyce here and asking her to post my comment in full at any of her blogs, to any of her mailing lists with or without your original offensive post as she she's fit. (Joyce, please feel free to include the above text as well).

Repeated dishonest and deceptive tactics that I have witnessed over the years by both you and FairVote have now officially equaled the dishonesty and deceptive tactics I've seen by voting machine companies such as Diebold, ES&S and Sequoia. For that, you and your group have officially earned a spot in the Democracy Hall of Shame. While I have endeavored to work with you over the years, even where you and I did not always see eye-to-eye, you have finally crossed the line. If you and FairVote were looking for a war with the Election Integrity community, don't be surprised if you've finally brought one on. Folks like Joyce do not give up in their fight for transparent, overseeable democracy, and neither do I…

Brad

Brad Friedman
Publisher/Editor, The BRAD BLOG
http://www.BradBlog.com

Twitter: @TheBradBlog.com

Brad Friedman is the publisher of www.BradBlog.org , The Green News Report, a 2010 Project Censored Award Recipient. a winner of Politics Site of the Day, winner of 2004 and 2005 Kofax awards, a 2008 weblog awards finalist, a March 2010 Buzzflash Wings of Justice honoree, and a member of the Velvet Revolution Election Protection Strike Force.

Welcome to the fight! I've been at war with FairVote and other groups for years over how IRV threatens election integrity. I've had FairVote employees and fellow travelers call me a "liar" for years. I've had election officials in my own party who get flown around the country by FairVote to promote IRV call me a "Republican" when I took on 4 of them and defeated IRV in Raleigh back in 2007. For the record, I am a very partisan Democrat when not dealing with verified voting matters.

I had the husband of the leader of the local League of Women Voters get in my face and almost punch me out for the work I've done to defeat IRV in my own state. The original IRV pilot bill calls for up to 10 municipalities and counties to try it between 2007 and 2009 (inclusive). In 2007, 7 communities considered it but only 2 used it, and only one contest needed IRV to determine a winner beyond the 1st column. That IRV tabulation was botched by the state's best county Board of Election because they were too vested in making IRV look "...as easy as 1-2-3!"

In 2008 - no communities used it because it was too risky to use - a violation of state and federal election laws and regulations. But IRV advocates took advantage of a low-turnout statewide primary runoff to call for and get an 2 years of the original IRV extension pilot. But that allowed election integrity advocates to include requirements that the IRV pilot follow election laws and regulations - something not included in the original pilot program legislation.

In 2009, IRV advocates really pushed Cary NC to participate in the pilot again, but Cary turned them down cold. It was then that election integrity advocates learned, while there were legal requirements for hearings if communities were going to consider switching legal and tested election methods, there was no such requirement for communities considering election pilots.

In the 2009 legislative session, election integrity advocates were able to amend the IRV pilot program to include a requirement for a public hearing before a community could participate in the pilot - a big win for election integrity advocates, because so far IRV has been a less than transparent program. And in 2009 - only one community used IRV needlessly because they had first-round winners in every contest.

I am used to it now, but it still amazes me that Rob Richie and the "Knights of the IRV Table" still feel the need to attack election integrity activists like Joyce McCloy - it must mean we are turning the tables on them! Although they are getting a few more communities to consider using IRV, they aren't going down the referendum route and going directly to municipal boards, in some cases traveling with elected officials and hanging out in their motel rooms to better indoctrinate them on the many virtues of IRV. This helps keep them from doing research that might show them that IRV isn't as popular as they claim it is or does all they say it will do.

But some municipal officials are taking note of the work of election integrity advocates when they speak out against IRV at public hearings. The fact is that the more IRV is talked about at public hearings, and the more a community has a chance to find out about it from BOTH sides, the less likely a community will use it.

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

2010-05-31T11:31:00.009-04:00

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!

2010-05-29T11:40:00.019-04:00

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!

2010-05-26T16:32:00.015-04:00

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?

2010-05-25T12:54:00.004-04:00

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!

2010-05-24T23:34:00.013-04:00

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!

2010-05-12T02:53:00.004-04:00

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.

The Instant Runoff Virus hits play elections!

2009-09-13T07:28:00.004-04:00

IRV can't even ensure a majority winner in a play election!

Was taking a look at some IRV articles on line, and found yet another shining example of how IRV doesn't ensure a majority winner in a single election - and not even a real one!

The Lyndale Neighborhood Association hosted a demonstration RCV election presumably organized by FairVoteMN.

Lyndale Neighborhood Association hosted a demonstration Ranked Choice Voting election at its annual meeting on June 22nd to educate residents about the way they’ll vote in the upcoming November elections in Minneapolis.

Contestants were desserts brought by neighborhood residents. The ballot line- up included:

Salted Nut Bars
Sweet Potato Pie
Caramel Pecan bars
Scones & Cream
Bundt cake

After sampling the candidates, guests filled out a ranked ballot, marking their first choice, and second and third choices if they wished. By ranking candidates in preference order, voters know their vote will continue to count if there is a runoff and their favorite candidate is eliminated in round one. A candidate needs 50% + 1 vote to win in a single-winner election. If no candidate receives a majority of votes outright, a runoff is triggered. The candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated and votes for that candidate are redistributed to the remaining candidates based on the second preferences on those voters’ ballots. This process is repeated until one candidate has a majority of votes.

Results of the Lyndale dessert election

A total of 29 ballots were cast. One voter marked two candidates for first choice, invalidating the ballot. As in any election, you can only vote for one candidate at a time. With Ranked Choice, you may vote for one candidate for 1st choice, one for 2nd choice and one for 3rd choice.

28 votes cast in the first round, and one guy turns in a ballot with no choices made. But with 28 votes cast, the threshold for winning on the first round is half of 28 plus one vote - or 15 votes. No one had 15 votes at the end of the 1st round, so it went to IRV.

It was a competitive election and no candidate received the majority (50 % + 1) of votes needed to win, triggering an “instant” runoff. Bundt Cake was the most popular, receiving 10 votes.

The candidate in last place, Sweet Potato Pie, was eliminated and that voter’s ballot was reallocated to the voter's second choice on the ballot, Caramel Pecan Bars. No candidate still had a majority of a votes.

In the next round, Scones & Cream was eliminated and votes for that candidate were redistributed to those voters' next preferences indicated on each ballot.

Another round was needed to determine the winner. In round 4, Caramel Pecan Bars was eliminated and those votes were redistributed to next preferences on each ballot. Five of those ballots did not have additional preferences marked and were exhausted.

Bundt Cake, the front runner in round 1, won a majority of votes cast in Round 4!

Demonstration elections are an excellent way to teach voters about Ranked Choice Voting and to get them ready to vote 1-2-3 in November.

Contact us if your neigbhorhood or organization would like to conduct a mock election. You provide the candidates and we can provide and count the ballots! We can also provide a speaker to explain how Ranked Choice Voting works. Contact info@fairvotemn.org

Now let's do a real analysis of the election. Bundt cake had 10 votes at the end of the 1st round. There were still 28 votes at the end of the 2nd round, but no one had reached the threshold of 15, so they went to the third round. Bundt cake picked up no votes in this round.

After the 3rd round, still no majority winner of 15 votes, so they went to the 4th round. Bundt cake picked up 3 votes for a total of 13 votes at the end of round 3 - but still not enough votes to reach the threshold of 15 and win the election.

Funny thing happened in the 4th round - the turnout dropped! 5 people just didn't give a damn anymore - they must have thought this was a silly game (I agree with them). So instead of 28 votes, they had 23 to deal with. Half of 23 is 11.5, and you round up to the next highest number which is 12. So bundt cake still had 13 votes which wasn't enough votes to win the contest at the end of round 3 - but 13 votes was enough to win the race at the end of round 4 without picking up a single extra vote - because the threshold changed simply because 5 people dropped out of the election!

In other words, the bizarre and complicated rules of IRV allow someone to win by changing the threshold at the end of the election - dropping the threshold from 15 to 12 to avoid having a real runoff election.

Bundt cake won the race because of a manufactured majority made possible by Instant Runoff Voodoo! Strangely enough, there is no indication if the good people of the Lyndale Neighbohood Association questioned the results of the race!

I wonder if they understood they were being conned by Instant Runoff Voodoo?

But perhaps the real question is why would anyone thinking that voting for food is a good example for use in Instant Runoff Voting? It's not like anyone is really voting for the dessert that will be served at all functions from now on. This vote has no real-world consequences other than to make people feel comfortable with IRV.

The mere fact that this community association accepted the results of the election and didn't object to the threshold lowering shows that people don't understand it well enough to use it on Election Day. I only hope that they pay attention while the votes are counted and ask questions when they don't understand something and don't accept whatever FairyTaleVote tells them as the Gospel.

Would food allergies and other physical health issues effect just the voting, or would it also effect the selection of deserts to be tasted? That is another way that such silly examples of desert and entre sampling and beer tasting are very lame.

At my local Flying Saucer, they have real runoffs for beer tasting. They determine a winner like you do with sports teams - head to head contests between two beers, with the winner advancing to the next round. Finally you have two beers going head to head (no pun intended) to get a winner. Having to drink several beers and rank them makes no sense. Will your order of ranking be effected by the order in which you taste the beers - will it change if you go from dark to lite (or strong to weak) vs going the other way?

IRV on the ballot AGAIN - and on the RUN - in Aspen!

2009-07-22T06:39:00.007-04:00

Months after FairVote's Rob Ritchie and other IRV advocates crowed about how well IRV worked in various elections, IRV is on the run in Aspen. Let this be a lesson to all those other communities that are thinking about IRV/RCV - it's not easy for voters to understand, cheap, simple to administer.

Quite simply - it doesn't increase the public confidence in the election process.

Aspen voters to vote on how they vote — again

Carolyn SackariasonThe Aspen Times
Aspen, CO Colorado
Wednesday, July 22, 2009

ASPEN — Aspen voters will be asked this November if they liked the way they voted this past May for mayor and City Council members, which involved Instant Runoff Voting — or if there should be a different kind of election all together.

The Aspen City Council on Tuesday agreed to put an advisory question to voters on the fall ballot on whether the IRV election method — a system never tried before in Aspen until this past May — should be scrapped or kept in place.

If the majority of voters want to do away with IRV, the council will have to explore alternatives, which could include going back to the previous method of the mayor getting 50 percent plus one of the vote, and council members getting 45 percent plus one of the vote. If candidates don't reach that threshold, a runoff election would be held in June as it's been done in the past. Another option could be winner take all, with no majority needed, which was done many years ago in Aspen municipal elections.

Some council members said they didn't have enough confidence in, or an understanding of, the IRV process. As a result, it has opened the city up for liability and voter confusion.

While listening to the nuances of the complex IRV system and the problems associated with tabulating votes, Councilman Steve Skadron questioned whether he understood the process well enough to make an informed decision on choosing the best tabulation method. And if he didn't understand, did the voters? he asked rhetorically.

“This is a level of detail here that I am not connecting,” Skadron said, adding that because different IRV tabulation methods can produce different outcomes, there is a level of subjectivity in analyzing the results. “I'm not confident in this system.”

That's despite City Clerk Kathryn Koch and the city's special counsel, Jim True, telling the council that the IRV method used this past May worked exactly as it was designed to, and closely mimicked the runoff system that voters had been accustomed to. Koch and True, who spent hundreds of hours researching and devising Aspen's system, recommended IRV be used in the 2011 municipal election.

However, True said public education could be improved upon because many voters didn't know how to rank their candidates, or didn't rank all of them, thus reducing their chances to participate in an instant runoff.

“A lot of lessons were learned on those types of issues,” True told the council. “They will only be improved upon.”

Other council members said they think a runoff election with fewer candidates in June after the May vote gives voters a chance to learn more about their choices and the issues confronting the city.

“I've been anti-IRV for a long time,” said Councilman Torre. “The extra month of campaigning gives the voter a chance to figure out the make-up and representation on the board.”

Councilman Dwayne Romero agreed, saying the day after the May 5 election, he had an empty feeling because the results were final and there wasn't enough discourse among candidates to fully understand them or their positions. Another month of campaigning would have satisfied that, he added.

“A lot of people have come up to me and said they also missed out on that discourse,” Romero said.

The majority of Aspen residents in November 2007 voted to adopt the IRV election method in an effort to save time, money and energy that comes with a second election a month after the municipal vote was counted.

Aspen resident Don Davidson said he doesn't think IRV worked as it was intended to, nor did he have a chance to fully grasp candidates' positions.

“A lot of people, including myself, didn't understand the intricacies of IRV when we were voting for it,” he said. “And I wasn't able to get enough information on the candidates ... I viewed the [May election] as a primary and [another month] to have the issues discussed more in-depth.”

After a specific IRV method — the first of its kind in the United States because it incorporated multiple candidates for multiple seats — was chosen by an election committee made up of city staff and citizens, the council adopted it.

But IRV critics and City Hall observers decried the process in which IRV was administered and the lack of a full-blown audit of the results.

Election commissioner Elizabeth Milias said the election commission that oversaw the IRV process, which included local attorney Chris Bryan, didn't certify the May 5 results because they didn't have confidence in the security and stewardship of the ballots, as well as the auditing and testing of the tabulation system.

“It was squirrely at best,” Milias said.

Their questions and criticisms have raised enough doubt among some council members that they want voters to decide whether IRV should continue as the official election method in Aspen.

“I think the voters should have a crack at voting on this again,” said Mayor Mick Ireland.

True and Koch will craft draft ballot language and bring it back to the council for consideration. The deadline to place a measure on the November ballot is Aug. 24.

If the majority of Aspen residents decide to do away with IRV, the council will have to choose an alternate election system and present that to voters, which would require a change to the city charter. That could occur in the November 2010 election.

Torre and Ireland voiced support for moving the municipal election to June, when more residents are back in town from their offseason excursions. That also would require a public vote. Ireland noted that the mayor's seat should be a four-year term instead of two, which also could be put to voters in the future.

csack@aspentimes.com

Why not change the charter to have municipal elections occur during June with runoffs in July? It seems that more people are in Aspen during that time of the year? Or take place in November with December runoffs?

It seems like the cure to low voter turnout is to hold elections when more people want to vote or usually vote.

IRV advocates are a bunch of bitchy little girls!

2009-07-07T23:24:00.009-04:00

I guess if Rob Richie can compare IRV to American Idol, I can compare IRV advocates to "Burn Notice".

"Burn Notice", airing on the USA Network, stars Jeffrey Donovan, Gabrielle Anwar, and Bruce Campbell. Bruce Campbell has been one of my favorite actors since playing Ashley J. "Ash" Williams in the cult classic "Army of Darkness". On "Burn Notice", Campbell portrays Sam Axe, a former Navy SEAL now working as an unlicensed private investigator and sometime mercenary with his old friend Michael Westen, the show's main character.

You can see what a charming character Sam is in the opening intro to the show on USA (can't find a clip on youtube or USA for it). Sam is drinking a beer and complaining about spies: "You know spies. Bunch of bitchy little girls" Which could also describe how some IRV advocates have been acting lately, based on their latest posts.

When Brad Freidman wrote last month that Instant Runoff Voting was a virus attacking Los Angeles, I blogged that this was probably, in the words of Churchill, the "end of the beginning" for IRV. And rightly so. Already IRV is under assault in the very places that FairVote has been citing as shining examples of where IRV is in use and works - even if they haven't fully used IRV to both cast AND count votes.

Cary NC is not going to use IRV in their 2009 election. Fayetteville NC is also not going to use IRV this year. And there is a good chance that Hendersonville NC voters won't even need to rank choices this year - so no IRV there either. They would be like Takoma Park - where there either aren't enough choices on the ballot to rank, or they get a majority winner in the first round and don't need to use the complicated and confusing counting method.

There is movement in the communities of Aspen CO, Burlington VT and Pierce County WA to get rid of IRV. And now word is coming that San Francisco is thinking about getting rid of IRV. A different version of IRV called Single Transferable Voting was soundly rejected by voters in a British Columbia referendum.

IRV advocates are not happy about this. From what I am seeing, resources are being re-routed all around the country to do two things:

to fight to keep IRV in places where it has been used and failed; and
to add more places that will use IRV by pointing to alleged successes where it has been used in the past.

I have it on good authority that FairVoteNC has no more paid staff - it's an all volunteer outfit now!

This presents big problems for IRV advocates like Rob Richie of FairVote. They are trying to sell IRV in Los Angeles - which would be the biggest jurisdiction to use IRV. But IRV presents big problems in a place like Los Angeles with a million voters or more. They use inkavote machines that have many problems with them, so LA would most likely have to buy new voting machines. Problem is, there is no federally certified voting systems that do IRV.

LA could go with the same Sequoia machines they use in San Francisco, but that presents problems because those machines probably won't be around much longer under the new Holt paper ballot bill recently introduced in Congress. So buying Sequoia machines now would be a big waste of money that LA can't afford to waste just to do IRV.

Frisco has a couple of official languages they print up ballots for - LA has somewhere around 8 or 10, and lots of literacy issues. From talking with election officials in LA, they really don't want to spend the money on IRV all the time when they might not have a runoff in every office. LA City has their city primary in March, and their general election in May - when there are other county wide elections in November. They could save a lot of money and increase turnout merely by syncing their city elections with the rest of the county and do without IRV.

So IRV advocates like Rob Richie and others are out there doing damage control. But what they write and how they write it makes them sound - in the words of Sam Axe - like a bunch of bitchy little girls.

Rob Richie's latest "huff piece" in the Huffington Post claims that all IRV opponents are special interests that are opposed to electoral reform. This of course implies that all IRV advocates are shining knights on white chargers of electoral reform opposing the black knights of special interest, and that IRV opponents can only win by "cheating" (coming up with loads of special interest money for runoff elections if needed). Of course, Richie's "huff pieces" on IRV don't allow for anyone to comment one way or the other. Perhaps because he doesn't want anyone who reads his stuff to see there is another side to the issue?

Of course Rob has to take the relative high road by calling us "special interests" - he leaves the petty name-calling to others. We are not "special interest" - we are verified voting advocates who work hard to protect election integrity. At "the end of the beginning", all that hard work is starting to pay off by getting more and more people to see how IRV threatens election integrity. And it's starting to get to IRV supporters a little further down the totem pole from Rob Richie. They are calling us "haters", as if to imply that we hate IRV and all other election reforms.

That is not true. I am not a tool of the special interests and I don't "hate" IRV. I am verified voting advocate who "loves" election simple, transparent voting who works hard to protect election integrity.

One thing you can say about verified voting advocates is that we "trust, but verify". Which is what gives IRV advocates fits. We don't automatically assume that IRV is the election reform Rob and others claim that it is, or that it does all the things he claims it does. Hell - I don't automatically trust each and everything that other verified voting activists claim either. And we do the same for Rob Richie - we try to verify the claims Rob and others make. And if we can't verify the claims time and time again, it's hard to be able to trust the people or organizations making the claims.

But IRV advocate Anthony "Doe" Lorenzo really takes the cake. This is where the "bitchy little girl" part comes in. In the electionreform yahoo group, Anthony wrote that everyone who advocates for IRV is a third-party/independent voter who work passionately for electoral reform through IRV and/or proportional representation, and that all IRV opponents in verified voting are Democrats who align themselves with special interests. He also wrote that verified voting advocates who don't like IRV "hate" IRV advocates because they are better organized than verified voting advocates. You can almost imagine himself hyperventilating himself into a hissy fit as he wrote that part.

Then he wrote about why Rob supports IRV - apparently it was because his daddy worked on a campaign for proportional representation in OH back in the early 90s that failed. Anthony claims that in this campaign, Rob and his wife had to sleep on couches in other people's houses. Apparently, these and other negative experiences so scarred Rob Richie and turned him into the "one trick pony" advocate who works IRV into every single thing he writes - including obituaries for John Gideon. Rob's carrying on his daddy's work! While that might be a wonderful story for some people, I still remember that we are in Iraq because George W. Bush wanted to finish what his daddy started in the early 90s during the first Iraq War. Sounds like "daddy issues" to me. And I thought only the women I dated in my late 20's had those problems! ;-)

So it makes me wonder is Rob Richie's passion for IRV and the whole FairyTaleVote agenda is because he really feels it's an election reform, or is it because Rob has "daddy issues" and needs to avenge his father's failure to get proportional representation in Cincinatti in 1991 (apparently it failed in 2008 also). If something isn't a real election reform, having a second generation family member doing it doesn't make it any more worthwhile. I don't hate IRV supporters. But reading these written hissy fits and being called names on line makes me pity them all the more.

It can't be easy getting your asses kicked by an all volunteer group of IRV opponents - so call us "special interests" and even "haters" and have a good cry if it makes you feel better!

Avoiding the Instant Runoff Virus in the Virginia Gubenatorial Primary

2009-06-08T10:41:00.007-04:00

I read David Swanson's blog on the VA Gubenatorial primary over at DailyKos. He mentioned that it's essentially a three way race, and asked how to deal with that.

This dilemma could also be solved, in a way, with Instant Runoff Voting (IRV). Back when Deeds was trailing, Rob Richie was arguing that both McAuliffe and Moran supporters would choose Deeds as their second choice and thus give him the victory if IRV were used. But so might supporters of Deeds favor Moran as their second choice. In primaries conducted on paper and counted locally (as in a recent Charlottesville City Council Democratic primary at a single polling place that used IRV) the integrity of an election can be protected while considering second choices and ensuring majority support for a winner. But in a state-wide race, votes could only be counted at a central location if IRV were used. If you can't ensure the results by having them counted publicly where they are cast, what good is improving the method of calculation?

There is a better way that takes into consideration the weaknesses of winner-take-all. We should figure out who the best winner would be and back that candidate. Claims about viability do not in this case even enter into it. The race is a three-way tie.

I did not know that the Charlottesville firehouse primary votes were counted in the single location where cast. But David Swanson hits on a big problem with IRV - you will need central counting for anything other than an IRV race that excompasses only a single precinct polling place. He recognizes that counting votes were cast is crucial to election integrity, and that central counting is problematic.

IRV seems to be a "we can't get people really interested in the political process, so let's throw in the towel". Swanson isn't buying into that strategy. He seems to recognize that the way to elect the best candidate in the primary is to motivate people to get out and vote for the best candidate. It's about what it will take to inspire more people to get out and vote, not about figuring out who is the more viable candidate or running ENRON accounting tricks with IRV.

One other consideration, beyond who's best to win the primary, is who's most likely to win the general election if nominated. But I've heard passionate declarations that only Deeds and only Moran and only McAuliffe can win the general election. It comes down to whether you buy the conventional wisdom that the best way for Democrats to win is to steal Republican votes, or you accept the alternative view that Democrats have a better chance if they inspire more people to vote and allow the Republicans to keep their voters. Given that huge numbers of Virginians registered to vote last year precisely in order to vote for Obama for president, the inspiring-more-people approach has greater potential than usual. Can first-time voters in 2008 be persuaded to vote in a general election in 2009? What about in a primary?

Obama or DNC Chair Tom Kaine haven't done anything to build the Democratic Party so that they can take advantage of the "inspiring-more-people" approach for the 2009 primary election. The "Obama For America" groups have morphed into "Organizing For America" that is part of the DNC. So far they appear to only be trying to organize people to support specific Obama policies and not party buiding. That is a mistake, and I feel that will come back to bite them in the ass in the 2009 and 2010 elections.

But even Swanson recognizes that IRV is not the answer to what ails lower voter interest in the political process. It will take plenty of good old-fashioned hard work to get people out there to vote.

Instant Runoff Virus hides campaign cash!

2009-06-06T21:12:00.005-04:00

Well I have to admit that I was wrong about Minneapolis doing proper due-diligence on IRV before they pushed it. Here's a story where even IRV supporters say that they made a mistake. So if there is any effect of big money in this election - we won't know about it until late October - just before voters head to the polls.

http://www.startribune.com/local/47110062.html?elr=KArks:DCiUBcy7hUiD3aPc:_Yyc:aU7DYaGEP7vDEh7P:DiUs

Run-off voting delays finance disclosure

Voters for Minneapolis City Council won't find out who's contributing what until November.

By STEVE BRANDT, Star Tribune

Last update: June 6, 2009 - 7:37 PM

Minneapolis elections are likely to unfold this year with less campaign finance disclosure than voters have seen in decades.

That's because the city's planned instant-runoff voting method doesn't use a primary election. That means candidates won't have to file the usual pre-primary report around Labor Day showing who has contributed to their campaigns.

So most election-year contributions won't be disclosed until late October, just before voters head to the polls.

"This is probably a big 'oops' for everybody who was pushing on instant-runoff voting because what you're going to lose is the information of knowing who the political contributors are," said David Schultz, who teaches government ethics and election law at Hamline University.

"That's valuable information because it tells you something about who's trying to influence the campaign, but more importantly contributors might tell you where candidates stand on the issues. You lose valuable clues or cues."

Candidates have been required to disclose their campaign contributors in Minneapolis since the early 1970s, according to Lyall Schwarzkopf, a retired city clerk. The law has required such reports be filed 10 days before the primary and general elections.

Former Council Member Tony Scallon said early reports can provide grist for campaign debates. He recalled a campaign in which he highlighted how much bar owners seeking to defeat Scallon were giving his opponent's campaign, and his opponent called attention to developer contributions to Scallon.

"I think it's important to have as early a read as possible on where the candidates are coming from, where their war chests are coming from," said Pat Scott, another former council member.

Council Member Cam Gordon, an instant-runoff supporter, called the reduced reporting "very unfortunate. It's something that I didn't anticipate." Gordon said that he already has been laying groundwork to propose more frequent reporting of campaign spending and that smaller contributions be reported.

"Having a report in September would be a great thing for voters so they can see who's donating," he said. But the council's Election Committee chair, Elizabeth Glidden, said so far she doesn't have a strong opinion about restoring a mid-election report.

Like other council members, she's expecting a Minnesota Supreme Court ruling soon on a constitutional challenge to instant-runoff voting, in which voters rank up to three candidates for a seat in the order they prefer them. The second and third choices come into play only if the leading candidate fails to reach a majority in a race for a single seat, or the required fraction of votes in multi-seat races.

Meanwhile, the city is developing backup plans to return to traditional elections in case the new method is struck down.

The opinion that without a primary no pre-primary reports are legally required came from the Hennepin County attorney's office because Minneapolis campaign reports are filed with the county. But County Attorney Mike Freeman said although that's the law, he personally thinks more disclosure would be better.

Now this is funny in a way. Because the IRV advocates tell us that IRV removes the effect of big money from campaigns. At least that is what they want us to believe. Here is yet another example of how IRV is supposed to do one thing that benefits the voters (makes big money less effective) and yet does something entirely different (hides campaign cash and makes campaign finance less transparent and more opaque).

So now there is even less information for voters to use to determine who they should vote for first, second and third - compounding the original problems with IRV.

When does IRV go from being a mere virus to become an election pandemic? Then it would be "Instant Runoff Pandemic" - nah, "Instant Runoff Virus" rolls off the tongue better.

Think Hoboken is "hot" now? The voters will be steaming if they catch the Instant Runoff Virus!

2009-06-06T08:25:00.005-04:00

Back in the mid 80's, I used to work in NYC as a photographer's assistant. My college room-mate Victor Ongkingco introduced me to all the charming places to go eating and drinking in NJ - and we tended to end up in Hoboken at the end of the night. Parking was a pain, but I always enjoyed visiting the place and I developed quite a fondness for one bar (which is no longer there) where I had my first wheat beer.

Hoboken showed up in the news the other day, when an article in the Hudson Reporter claimed that the Hoboken City Council was going to be considering IRV. I thought they must be joking of course. IRV is hardly a "new idea" - maybe just new for Hoboken or NJ in general?

And unlike the merde that FairyTaleVote is pushing in NC - that IRV gives better pluralities - they are still pushing the story that you can keep counting IRV ballots until someone gets a majority. But at least the reporter admits that it could be confusing.

Turns out they weren't really voting to institute IRV in their town. I went to the Hoboken City Council website, and found that there was merely one of many resolutions on the agenda asking the NJ legislature to pass a bill creating an IRV study commission. The Hoboken resolution merely asked the legislature to pass the bill and expedite their study so that Hoboken could possibly rush to do IRV for their November 2009 general elections. Of course the rationale for using IRV was a slightly different variation of the usual Fairytale vote propaganda. Here is the resolution with my comments under each relevant section:

A RESOLUTION TO CUT AN ESTIMATED $75,000 IN TAXPAYER EXPENSE WHILE INCREASING VOTER PARTICIPATION THROUGH USE OF INSTANT RUNOFF VOTING (IRV)

WHEREAS, Hoboken runoff elections cost the taxpayers of the City an estimated $75,000 to $100,000 every two (2) years; and

TELESCA COMMENTS: IRV advocates claim that IRV saves money if you buy the simple assumption that one election is cheaper than two. That is not true if you factor in all the costs of the more complicated IRV method: voter and candidate education, pollworker and election administrator training, documentation, and voting system upgrade or replacement. And there are no voting systems that are federally certified to handle IRV tabulations.

You can see the high cost of IRV both from governmental studies done in jurisdictions considering IRV, and from the jurisdictions already doing it.

The Maryland State Legislature considered doing IRV three times - in 2001, 2006 and 2008 - and did fiscal studies in 2006 and 2008.
http://mlis.state.md.us/2008rs/fnotes/bil_0002/hb1502.pdf
http://mlis.state.md.us/2006rs/fnotes/bil_0002/sb0292.pdf

Their costs for voter education alone were estimated to be $0.48 per registered voter - the cost of a 1st class stamp. Think that's enough? San Francisco has spent $1.87 per registered voter per year in the IRV elections they have done since 2004 - and a recent San Francisco civil grand jury report indicates that might not be enough, because voters still don't know enough about IRV after 4 IRV elections.
http://www.sfgov.org/site/uploadedfiles/courts/divisions/Civil_Grand_Jury/year-of-five-elections-for-sf.pdf

That's just the cost of voter education. The same MD fiscal studies estimated that it would cost an additional $3.50 per registered voter to implement IRV in 2006 when they were using paperless DRE touchscreen voting machines. In 2008, they estimated it would cost an additional $3.08 per registered voter if they switched over to using op-scan paper ballots. But the 2008 study didn't include the cost of federally certified IRV voting machines and software that didn’t exist then and still does not exist!

Actual costs of implementation in places that have used it is even scarier! Pierce County, WA used IRV in 2008. It cost them $2 million to implement an uncertified system for 375,589 votes - or $5.33 per registered voter! That is on top of the regular costs of their election system. And in two of the three races that used IRV to decided the "winner", the "winner" didn't get a majority of the first column votes cast! Now 2 out of 3 voters in Pierce County want to ditch IRV after their first election!
www.aocweb.org/aoc/Portals/0/Content_Managers/feb0909govcommrev.pdf

WHEREAS, multiple elections annually foster the disenfranchisement of voters, reducing voter turnout and public confidence in the process; and

TELESCA COMMENTS: I don’t know of any formal studies that show traditional elections and runoffs reduce voter turnout and public confidence in elections.

As a precinct chair and an officer in my county’s Get Out The Vote program, I do know that voter turnout in runoff elections can be lower than for the initial election. But that could be due to many factors including lower voter interest, weather, burnout, or just not liking any of the other candidates.

San Francisco first used IRV in 2004. They have used IRV in every subsequent election since then. From 2004 to 2007, voter turnout has dropped along with the number of registered voters, so IRV does not increase voter turnout. And the percentage of people who showed up at the polls who didn’t know they were supposed to rank their choices increased from roughly 33% in 2004 to almost 50% in 2005.

One problem with IRV is that it very rarely ensures an authentic majority winner in a single election. In the majority of elections where there is no winner in the first column and IRV is used to tabulate votes in subsequent columns, the winner rarely wins by a majority of number of 1st column ballots. A winner is manufactured using IRV vote tabulation methods that seem more like ENRON accounting methods.

There is a movement across the country not to trust the results of “black box” elections. IRV is such a complex tabulation method that few people understand it – including election administrators. If trained election administrators don’t understand it, what chance does the average voter have of understanding and trusting it? Many verified voting and election integrity advocates feel IRV is a step backwards, not forwards.

WHEREAS, the Council is committed to the democratic process and wishes to encourage voter participation while simultaneously reducing the cost to the taxpayers; and

TELESCA COMMENTS: There is always going to be a trade-off between voter participation and election costs. You could cut costs by having one place in a municipality to cast your vote in person in order to reduce costs, but you would end up disenfranchising voters who live further from the location. Perhaps you really can't do both. Maybe try finding a savings someplace else?

WHEREAS, Instant Runoff Voting has proven to be successful nationwide, in such diverse places as Aspen, Colorado, San Francisco, California, and the States of Louisiana and South Carolina;

TELESCA COMMENTS: This clause is somewhat misleading. IRV has been used in Aspen and San Francisco, but it could hardly be called successful. They voted to use IRV in elections without knowing how they would implement it. As such, they were forced to use the method under threat of lawsuits from IRV advocacy organizations like FairVote.

Costs have gone up, and election transparency has done down. Aspen had to hire an outside consulting company to run their complicated IRV elections – which cost more than holding a regular runoff election. And there are almost daily reports coming from Aspen about election irregularities – and this is from an election that took place in early May. It was not certified by the Aspen Election Commission because they wouldn’t sign off on a method they didn’t understand.

South Carolina and Louisiana passed laws to allow for the use of IRV for overseas absentee by mail voters, but they do not use IRV for any other elections.

North Carolina passed a law creating an IRV pilot program for 2007-2008, and extending it from 2009 to 2011 (inclusive). Even after a full-court press by the State Board of Elections and many IRV advocacy groups like FairVote, they could only get two communities to use IRV in 2007 – Hendersonville and Cary.

Even before Cary voted in May 2007 to pilot IRV, the State Board knew it was too risky to use in 2008 elections because state law and federal regulations require using only certified voting systems to tabulate IRV.

Only one NC community – Cary - needed IRV to tabulate votes beyond the first column. Due to my work in verified voting, I was appointed an official observer to the IRV pilot by the Chair of the Wake County Democratic Party. IRV did not do well in Cary.

The 2007 Cary IRV pilot program was largely managed by IRV advocacy groups, with no advance guidelines. Some voter education volunteers admit deviating from Election Board instructions to create a more positive outcome on the exit poll surveys — also conducted by IRV advocates.

The Wake Board of Elections couldn’t follow simple IRV hand tabulation procedures. Ballots were mis-sorted, simple calculator mistakes were made and a non-public recount turned up missing votes. The winner did not receive the 50 percent plus one vote majority advocates claimed IRV would ensure in a single election. He got 1401 out of 3022 first-column votes.

There has been no analysis of the 2007 pilot. The proffered reason given for extending the pilot beyond 2008 was cost savings, even though fiscal studies done by other jurisdictions show IRV elections cost more than traditional election methods.

The original IRV pilot extension bill had the same flaws as the first pilot program. Election integrity groups requested an improvement which required “… the pilot program shall be conducted according to … standards consistent with general election law …” Unfortunately, this legislative requirement has not been met.

After passage of the pilot, election integrity advocates (including myself) pointed out how IRV conflicts with general election law not written with IRV in mind, and recommended ways to make IRV comply with general election law. The State Board ignored those recommendations and approved IRV guidelines that conflict with general election laws.

North Carolina and other states have laws requiring that votes be counted where cast until the count is completed to prevent ballot tampering. But State Board IRV guidelines call for partial ballot counting at polling places, then moving the ballots to a central location for further counting. The federal Help America Vote Act requires voters be notified of over-votes before a ballot is cast. Our voting system can’t notify voters of second and third column over-votes on IRV ballots.

From early 2007 through January 2009, State Board members and staff claimed we needed federally certified software to automate IRV tabulations. The State Board recently developed automated procedures they now claim need no federal certification. Those procedures were developed with no input from election equipment vendor ES&S. We still do not know if the new IRV procedures violate any contracts, warranties or other agreements with ES&S? Will NC voters be required to foot the bill in the event of election problems?

Very few NC communities considered taking part in the 2009 IRV pilot. Cary – the only NC municipality that used IRV to tabulate an election winner in 2007 – voted not to participate in the 2009 IRV pilot. The consensus of the Town Council was that IRV didn’t work as advertised in 2007, and they didn’t want to be an election lab rat again. Don Frantz – the most vocal opponent for IRV on the Cary Town Council – was the elected with the method. He didn’t like it in 2007 and he doesn’t like it now. Councilperson Julie Robison – who voted to participate in the IRV pilot in 2007 – doesn’t support the IRV election method because she doesn’t trust the tabulation procedures. On April 30, 2009 – Cary voted to stick with traditional majority non-partisan majority elections with runoffs if needed because they are more transparent than IRV.

NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, by the Council of the City of Hoboken, County of Hudson, State of New Jersey, that it fully supports Senate Joint Resolution No. 43, sponsored by Senator Bill Baroni of District 14, creating a commission to study instant runoff voting and the implications of IRV within the State of New Jersey and to encourage the commission to act promptly so that the City can introduce a referendum for voter consideration establishing IRV during the next general election on November 3, 2009.

TELESCA COMMENTS: It appears according to SJR 41 that they will actually study IRV - something that was not done in North Carolina before the pilot passed in 2006. If they don't rush the study, they will find out more information about IRV than they ever wanted to know – including all the extra costs and perhaps even the many ways that IRV conflicts with existing elections laws in NJ. It will take a while – possibly years – to resolve just the conflicts in their election laws if they decide to use it.

Based on the experience of other jurisdictions that are using IRV, NJ should not rush into using the method until they can take the time to weigh all the evidence. Or heaven forbid, be required to use it and then realize just how problematic it will be.

From the way the resolution is written, Hoboken wants to rush the actions of the state IRV Study Commission so they can have a special referendum on IRV sometime this summer enabling them to use IRV during their November 2009 general election? That is not a good idea.

Does it make sense to go to the trouble and expense of holding a low-turnout special referendum on IRV just to use IRV in November and supposedly save money not having to hold a runoff election? That’s like robbing Peter to pay Paul. Furthermore, the turnout in special elections for IRV tend to have even less turnout – and therefore are less democratic – than even the runoff elections they are using to replace. That is what happened in Aspen, CO.

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that a certified copy of this resolution be transmitted by the City Clerk to Senator Baroni and our 33rd Legislative District Representatives.
Meeting Date: June 3, 2009

A friend of mine attended this meeting and told me that - unfortunately - the resolution passed: 6 voting yes, 2 voting no and 1 abstention. There was no discussion of how IRV might effect election integrity. But that is to be expected. Cost cutting at all levels of government tends to be the biggest concern on elected leader's minds these days.

But I am really sure that this IRV study bill will go anywhere. Doesn't their legislature have a research staff that can study this issue for them and make a report? Or is this gonna turn into a Rob Richie "dog and pony" show (or is it "chili cook offs" and "ice cream socials") where FairyTaleVote will control the agenda for the meeting?

Rest assured that election integrity and verified voting activists will be paying attention to what goes on in the Garden State. My aunt lives in NE Philly not too far from Trenton, and I got plenty of places to stay near Hoboken - from a futon in Tribeca to a very nice couch in Belleville.

NJ residents are practical and pragmatic. If they can joke about being able to see the air they breathe, they will want to see an actual majority they are being promised. There is a good chance they won't buy into the hype once they find out how bad the Instant Runoff Virus really is!

Instant Runoff Virus errors found in Aspen vote totals

2009-06-05T10:38:00.001-04:00

They incorrectly used Cambridge voting rules and software in Aspen. This is one of the main reasons why you can't successfully pull off voting on the cheap with IRV using uncertified software without making sure that all the rules are followed.

It took two weeks to detect these problems. But what about the fact that TrueBallot was allowed to use the wrong software for the job? How come no one in Aspen made sure the correct software was being used before hand?

They only had 2544 ballots to recount. If this happened in a larger county with over 60 times the number of ballots - like Wake County with over 150K ballots in the May 2008 primary election - it would have taken 60 times two weeks - or 120 weeks - or 2.5 years to do the same sort of audit.

But it is interesting that here in Wake County, they did the IRV "audit" which amounted to a non-public recounting of approximately 3000 ballots in one day.

That is why IRV is too complex to be practical for use in all but the smallest elections, where you can either spend two weeks trying to make things appear as though they worked out, or you can just do it in your locked office.

But even the smallest local races deserve just as much election integrity as larger races. Even more so, because our local races are the ones where we have the most potential to interact with our elected leaders. Yet these are precisely the elections most vulnerable to the "Instant Runoff Virus".
What about the Council races - including the one where they had two candidates left and no one crossed the threshold? Where did they pull the votes for the winning candidate from?

Chris Telesca

Last-minute note - Just got this from Marilyn Marks:

the “recount” was not an official recount, and it is uncertain as to whether it will be certified. Seems like a political stunt for the mayor.

But it was not a hand count. Done with the True Ballot digital data and software.

The data was not found (?) or disclosed until after the period for recount had expired.

So, more votes would not necessarily have made for a longer counting process.

Interesting that they went to the trouble to just sort through the data and software only after the period for the recount had expired. Had the race not been certified, someone could have challenged the results of the race and demanded a fill hand-to-eye recount of all the ballots.

That would have been fun - because unless you can set up a hand-sort that can do an accurate sort and the results can agree - you don't have a way to really audit the race.

http://www.aspentimes.com/article/20090529/NEWS/905299981/1077&ParentProfile=1058

Ireland wins Aspen mayoral race again
Error found in instant runoff tally, giving opponent Marks 16 fewer votes

Carolyn Sackariason
The Aspen Times
Aspen, CO Colorado,

ASPEN — Due to a computer software error, it turns out Mick Ireland won the Aspen mayoral seat on May 5 by a larger margin than originally reported.

City staff recently learned of the error in the tabulation of the final-round vote totals for mayor. However, the error had no effect on the outcome of the race, according to city officials.

Instead of Ireland defeating opponent Marilyn Marks by a vote of 1,273 to 1,140 (52.8 percent to 47.2 percent) as earlier reported, he actually won by a margin of 1,301 to 1,124 (53.6 percent to 46.4 percent).

In the mayor’s race, the threshold necessary to be sure of a victory was 1,273, which is 50 percent plus one of the 2,544 ballots cast. When Ireland reached 1,273 after LJ Erspamer was eliminated in the final round of counting, he was guaranteed to win.

The software stopped counting any additional votes for him. However, any ballots ranking Marks after Ireland were added to her final round totals.

Ireland ultimately received 28 votes beyond the threshold of 1,273. Sixteen of them had been counted for Marks, and 12 had been deemed “exhausted” because they did not rank Marks.

“City staff has been working to audit the instant runoff process, and the tabulation error was recently discovered by TrueBallot, the company hired by the city to perform the election,” said City Clerk Kathryn Koch. “The error arose because the voting software was originally written to support the ‘ranked choice’ form of elections used in Cambridge, Mass. Following Cambridge rules, the software prevented a candidate who had reached the winning threshold from receiving any more votes.”

Vote totals in all other rounds of the mayor’s instant runoff voting tally and in all rounds of the two council tallies were unchanged. The error did not occur in either of the council tallies.

“The fact that this error was detectable using election data we made available to the public validates our approach to election transparency and integrity,” Koch said.

Two days after the election, city officials and members of the public conducted an audit that involved randomly selecting 10 percent of the ballots and double-checking that the rankings corresponded to the electronic records.

The second step was to manually verify that every ranking was tallied correctly for mayor and council, which was conducted by TrueBallot.

Marks, who has been a critic of instant runoff voting well before it was implemented, said she thinks the testing of the system was inadequate leading up to the election.

“I am thrilled that there is some post-election auditing going on,” she said. “This demonstrated that it needed to be done.

“I hope that the results they’ve found will encourage them to do further work and tests.”

TrueBallot did the manual verification as part of their standard post-election services.

“We were able to audit and document this election more completely than any other public election that we have held,” Koch said, adding members of the public can view the data files that rank the candidates, as well as other election data public like TrueBallot’s 72-page spreadsheet that provides analysis of the results.

The election results are summarized on the city’s website at www.aspenpitkin.com/depts/38/.

The Aspen City Council has committed to reviewing instant runoff voting and its procedures at a public meeting to be scheduled sometime this summer.

Koch said she decided to make the error public by distributing a press release since the election data is available for public review. She added that to her knowledge, there are no other discrepancies with the instant runoff voting system or the election results.

“I’m confident we got the most correct answer,” she said.

csack@aspentimes.com

Minneapolis gets ready to return to primary elections in case they lose their IRV suit!

2009-06-02T23:44:00.004-04:00

Minneapolis is one of those places that IRV advocates point to as a place where IRV was chosen by voters in landslide referendum wins.

But it's not popular with everyone. A local election group took the city to court challenging the constitutionality of IRV. IRV advocates are confident they will win in court. But not everyone is so confident. So Minneapolis is getting ready to let them do runoff elections in case they lose in court.

Return of primary requested, just in case
The City Council unanimously approved a measure that puts the city on track to make a September primary election possible, just in case Minneapolis needs one.

Currently, there’s expected to be no primary. That’s because this year’s municipal election is set to use ranked-choice, or instant-runoff, voting.
RCV lets voters rank their top three candidates in each race. In single-seat elections, any candidate wins by getting 50 percent of the votes plus one right off the bat; if no one reaches that threshold, second- and third-choice votes could get weighed. The process eliminates the need for
a primary.

While voters approved RCV for use in this year’s election back in 2006, a lawsuit has thrown a potential wrench in the city’s plans. The Minnesota Voters Alliance, a citizens’ group, is questioning RCV’s constitutionality, arguing the system doesn’t equate to one person, one vote.

The case has traveled to the state Supreme Court, where arguments will be heard May 13. A ruling is expected in early June, according to city documents.

It’s important for the city to get as quick an answer as possible — if the court ruled against RCV, the city would need to bring back a primary, something that’s easier said than done. Currently there is no language in the city’s charter directing how to hold a primary that Minneapolis voters are used to; that was eliminated along with the 2006 approval of RCV.
That’s why the City Council is requesting to re-amend the charter. In other words, were the Supreme Court to deliver an unfavorable ruling, Minneapolis would be prepared.

On June 9, the city’s Intergovernmental Relations Committee also will weigh whether it should be able to reinstate a primary for another reason: if RCV turns out to be just plain too difficult.

Minneapolis is set to make history by being the first municipality in the world to hand-count a ranked-choice multiple-seat election, elections Director Cynthia Reichert has said. That process was tested May 6-7 by elections staff. An official report has yet to be given on the experience, but Council Member Paul Ostrow (4th Ward) has some concerns.
“What I’ve heard is that hand-counting of the at-large seats is extraordinarily challenging,” he said.

But other council members already have said they don’t feel comfortable making that a reason to altogether abandon the new system. Council Member Cam Gordon (2nd Ward) said he would only support a primary if RCV were found to be unconstitutional.

Extraordinarily challenging? You ain't seen nothing yet - they say it could take weeks to count!

We figured out here in NC that if we had one statewide race that went to IRV in our 2008 May primary, it would have taken 7 weeks to count. And that counting could only start AFTER the State Board of Elections certified who came in second out of 4 candidates - since NC did top-two IRV in the 2007 election pilot.

In other words, they'd still be hand tabulating IRV ballots well after the late June primary runoff election already gave the results the night of the election. Some savings of time there!

The end of the beginning: Bradblog calls IRV an "election virus"!

2009-06-02T19:20:00.010-04:00

Joyce McCloy just called me up and asked me if I was sitting down and had some beer handy. I said I was outside finishing up the last bit of painting I have to do before getting my new roof installed.

She told me something BIG had happened - and she was right! Brad Friedman, who blogs at BradBlog.com, just published a piece on IRV. And it was devastating!

Blogged by Brad Friedman on 6/2/2009 1:38PM

'Instant Runoff Voting' (IRV) Election Virus Spreads to Los Angeles County

Joins 'Internet Voting' and 'Vote-by-Mail' schemes as the latest bad ideas poised to further cripple American democracy

PLUS: IRV count fails in Aspen's first instant runoff election...

Gautum Dutta, of the Democratic-leaning Asian American Action Fund blog notes a recent L.A. County Board of Supervisors meeting which "discussed a study on the cost of special elections and Instant Runoff Voting (IRV)" [emphasis added]...

While speaking to the Board of Supervisors, Registrar Recorder/County Clerk Dean Logan testified how low voter turnout and high costs have plagued our special elections. Logan urged the County to seriously consider anything that would reduce voter fatigue and save money.
In the past two years alone, $9.3 million of taxpayer dollars have been spent on special elections. Of that amount, over $3.6 million dollars were spent on special runoff elections (counting the upcoming July 14 runoff in CA’s 32nd Congressional District).

If IRV had been used instead of special runoff elections, taxpayers could have saved up to $3.6 million.

Note to Messrs. Dutta and Logan: Taxpayers could save even more money if we simply allow you two to just decide for us who gets elected!

As Logan, chief election official of the nation's largest voting jurisdiction (larger than 43 states combined) has had more than enough problems with the current voting system which can't even add one plus one plus one accurately, such that it is virtually impossible for anybody to verify the accuracy of results, the last thing this county needs is to complicate the math even further by confusing matters with IRV's complicate scheme of ranked choice voting where voters are asked to select a first and second place choices, etc.

For that matter, unless, and until, we can simplify our election procedures such that any and all citizens are able to oversee and verify the accuracy of their election results, no jurisdiction in this country should employ schemes like IRV, no matter how well-meaning supporters of it may be in hoping to allow a broader range of candidates and parties to have a shot at winning an election.

Along with the emerging nightmares of Internet Voting and Vote-by-Mail, IRV is yet another one of the horrible wack-a-mole schemes being endlessly advanced by advocates and profiteers who put winning elections and making money off them, over the idea of transparent, verifiable, secure democracy and self-governance expressed of the people, by the people and for the people.

Addendum... From last Friday's Aspen Daily News:

More than three weeks after Aspen’s first-ever instant-runoff election, city officials announced an error in the tabulation of the final-round vote totals for mayor. ... The error did not surface in either of the council tallies or in any other rounds of the mayoral instant runoff voting tally, officials said. ... Accuracy tests were publicly conducted before the election but they did not catch the problem that ultimately occurred.

http://www.bradblog.com/?p=7198

I feel good about this latest development. We have IRV on the run in NC. Only two communities wanted to pilot IRV in NC in 2007. None in 2008 (but our State Board of Elections knew IRV wouldn't be used in 2008) and only one community voted to pilot IRV. The only NC community that used IRV to tabulate votes for a winner beyond the 1st column turned it down flat and voted to continue using traditional non-partisan majority elections with runoff if needed. Next year there will be a big Senate election in NC and I know the SBOE won't want to risk using IRV in violation of state election law and federal regulation during a big federal election. So IRV is on the way out in NC.

And thanks to verified voting bloggers, we've kept people aware of the problems with IRV, and shown how it's a danger to election integrity. And we've done it in the face of people who call us all sorts of names (liar comes to mind - I'm still waiting for my appology Elena!), and been called a "Republican" by the Democratic Chair of my county Board of Elections (I am a die-hard Dem who is an officer in my county's Progressive Democrats club). At times it's felt like Joyce and I (and a few others) have been going it alone.

But we are seeing people wake up to the dangers IRV poses to election integrity and to democracy itself. in places like Aspen, Burlington, Pierce County even while Rob Richie and Co. (aka FairyTaleVote) crow about how well IRV elections work. Now that a visible progressive like Brad has called IRV an election "virus", I feel I am not standing alone against the really bad idea that is IRV.

But I was stuck by the symbolism of this posting today - and finding out about it at the same time as I finished painting the last of the roof trim prior to getting the roofers over. Just like my home-improvement work, I saw this posting by Brad in the words of Sir Winston Churchill:

Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning!

What happened to ncvotes123 sites?

2009-05-27T14:47:00.009-04:00

FairVote and other pro-IRV groups used to host a site that either went by ncvotes123.com or ncvotes123org.

When you go to ncvotes123.com, you get directed to the following site: http://sites.securepaynet.net/redirect_0.html

The page cannot be found
The page you are looking for might have been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable.

Please try the following:

Make sure that the Web site address displayed in the address bar of your browser is spelled and formatted correctly.
If you reached this page by clicking a link, contact the Web site administrator to alert them that the link is incorrectly formatted.
Click the Back button to try another link.

HTTP Error 404 - File or directory not found.
Internet Information Services (IIS)

Technical Information (for support personnel)

Go to Microsoft Product Support Services and perform a title search for the words HTTP and 404.
Open IIS Help, which is accessible in IIS Manager (inetmgr), and search for topics titled Web Site Setup, Common Administrative Tasks, and About Custom Error Messages.

If you go to ncvotes123.org, you get redirected to this site:

This site is currently unavailable.

If you are the owner of this site, please contact us at 1-480-505-8855 at your earliest convenience.

Does this mean that FairVote and other IRV advocates have thrown in the towel? I hope so - I have some home-improvement work to get caught up on.

But I somehow doubt it - eternal vigilance is the price of liberty!

IRV does no better than plurality or traditional elections and runoffs in Aspen

2009-05-27T09:55:00.004-04:00

It is interesting to see how IRV advocates are touting any community - no matter the size or the results of the election - that uses IRV as a success for the complex and confusing method. I made some comments in an article on IRV coming under fire in the Aspen Times, and some IRV advocate who has drunk the FairyTaleVote kool-aid responded that IRV worked well in Aspen. He told me to look up the history of IRV elections and see why IRV was needed.

Well I did look up IRV, but I saw that IRV was not needed. Why? Because I saw from an analysis of Aspen elections by a writer from the Aspen Times, and it pretty much confirmed what I already know about IRV - that it isn't a more democratic election method.

Aspen voters have used plurality elections, majority elections with runoffs, and now IRV. But as history has shown, the leader in the May general election won in the June runoff. In the recent IRV election, the leader in the first round wins the eventual runoff. In IRV, the first round lead is rarely overcome by other trailing candidates.

So majority elections with runoffs and IRV all deliver wins to the person who has the plurality lead in the first election or round, why use IRV?

Some say that IRV saves money over a traditional election and runoff. That is only true if you accept the rather simplistic argument that one election is cheaper than two and don't honestly and accurately account for all the costs of doing an IRV election - including the cost of election integrity.

Are runoff results predetermined?

Leader in first go-round consistently wins the runoff

By Carolyn Sackariason – The Aspen Times
May 10, 2007

ASPEN — If history does repeat itself, then the results of the upcoming city runoff election are already a done deal.

Since Aspen instituted runoffs in 2001, the majority of voters have selected the same candidates in both elections.

"The runoff positions have not changed the May positions," said City Clerk Kathryn Koch.

There have been three runoff city elections in the past eight years, all of which have generated the same outcomes of the prior votes. In 2001, Helen Klanderud got 850 votes in the mayoral election, and Rachel Richards received 658. In the runoff, Klanderud won.

In May 2003, Torre got 566 votes in the race for City Council, and Tony Hershey received 542. Torre won the runoff. In May 2005, Jack Johnson received 823 votes for council, and Dee Malone got 671 votes. Johnson won in the runoff.

Where it began

The impetus for runoffs was born out of the 1999 mayoral race between Richards and Klanderud - with Richards winning by 14 votes. Some felt it wasn't a clear enough mandate, so City Council posed a charter amendment to the voters in the fall of 2000. Voters approved runoff elections by a margin of 3-to-1, Koch said.

Before the charter amendment, whoever had the most votes won. It was a called a "plurality" election. The runoff system is part of a "majority" election in which a mayoral candidate must win with 50 percent of the vote, plus one, and City Council candidates must win by 45 percent, plus one vote.

Koch estimates that the runoff elections have cost taxpayers more than $21,000. "That doesn't include man-hours," she added.

What's more, history has shown that fewer people make it to the polls in runoff elections. In May 2001, 2,003 people voted; in the June runoff, it was 1,810. In May 2003, 1,903 people voted; in June, 1,566 cast ballots. May 2005 drew 2,318 voters, and the next month attracted 986.

'It helps'

Toni Kronberg is the only current candidate who supports runoff elections - she benefited from the majority election Tuesday. She inched into the runoff by placing third with 487 votes. She'll go up against Steve Skadron, who placed second with 862 votes. Dwayne Romero won a City Council seat outright by placing first with 1,126 votes.

"It helps because it ensures that the person gets the majority," Kronberg said, adding that it's difficult for voters to differentiate among candidates, especially in a field of eight like in Tuesday's election.

Kronberg said that because of the runoff, she has a second opportunity to reach more voters with her message. In order for Kronberg to win, she'll have to get most of the 800 votes that went to other candidates.

"Is it a daunting task? I don't think it is," she said. "It's doable."

The other three candidates all support some sort of election reform that would either do away with runoff elections altogether or implement an instant voting system, where voters would note their second and third choices on the ballot.

"This whole runoff thing, I don't see how the community benefits waiting a whole month," Skadron said, adding he only needed 28 votes to win on Tuesday. "My total was almost double [Kronberg's]."

Mayoral candidates Mick Ireland and Tim Semrau will face off June 5 as well. Ireland, who garnered 1,036 votes, needed 57 more votes to beat Semrau, who brought in 747. Ireland favors moving the municipal election to a time when more people are in town, particularly because the economy has shifted in town, and summer attracts high numbers of residents.

"Instant voting is worth looking at and so is having the election at the end of June," Ireland said.

Problems and solutions

Many candidates have complained over the years that low voter turnout hurt their chances because the elections take place in the height of offseason, when people leave town for extended vacations.

A citizen initiative posed a ballot question in 1989 asking to move the municipal election to the general election in November. It passed, 1,041 to 932. But then a little more than a year later, another citizen initiative prompted a special election in July 1990 asking to repeal the earlier vote. It was approved, 342-175, moving the municipal election back to May. City residents never had a chance to vote on municipal matters in November, another offseason month when fewer people are in town.

Councilman Johnson in July 2006 convinced his colleagues to pursue possible changes to the election system, which ultimately would require voter approval. Koch did some initial research on instant voting, finally determining that it would be nearly impossible with multiple candidates vying for more than one seat up for election on a single ballot, as is the case in the council race. As a result, the effort lost momentum.

State Rep. John Kefalas, D-Larimer, introduced a bill to the state Legislature earlier this year that would create a study group to investigate this summer "advanced voting methods," which includes instant voting and other processes that would allow voters to express preferences on multiple candidates. Lawmakers rejected a proposed pilot project, but the study group is still pursuing the endeavor, said Jenny Flanagan, executive director of Colorado Common Cause, a Denver-based nonprofit that supports instant voting.

Flanagan recognizes that there are challenges to instant voting, similar to what Koch has pointed out, but she said she is confident solutions can be found.

Common Cause believes instant voting elects public officials with higher voter turnout and encourages candidates to run campaigns that are less negative.

"Instant runoffs would save municipalities a lot of money, as well as the candidates," she said. "We're hopeful more municipalities pursue advanced voting methods."

But while IRV advocates like to claim that runoffs result in lower turnout, it is interesting to note that more people turned out in the June 2005 runoff (986) than voted in the November 2007 election (837) where IRV passed. And interestingly enough, the IRV vote took place at another time where fewer people are around in Aspen than in the summer months.

Just because someone declares a voting method to be "advanced", it doesn't mean that it is better all around. This article referred to the difficulty voters would have with a slate of 8 candidates. Do you really think that voters ANYWHERE can possibly know enough about all the candidates on a slate to rank them in a meaningful way? That is why Robert's Rules of Order does not recommend IRV (referred to as "Preferential Voting") over traditional elections except for reasons like voting by mail.

Aspen voters went from plurality to a majority election with runoff because they felt that plurality didn't deliver a clear enough mandate. Then they wanted to explore other options (like IRV) because they objected to the higher cost of holding traditional runoff elections with lower turnout. They also considered moving their general election from May to June when more people would be in town. But they later rejected that move.

Interestingly enough, their study commission originally found that it would be too difficult to use IRV to select multiple candidates in an at-large election.

One wonders why Aspen didn't implement easier to understand moves like publicly-financed campaigns, or moving the elections to June, or going back to plurality elections instead of the much more complicated IRV method that their own Election Commission couldn't certify either the method before the election or the results afterwards?

The Town Council of Cary, NC (a community with over 100K registered voters - 20 times as many as Aspen) recently rejected participating in a second IRV pilot election. Cary went from plurality elections to majority general with runoff (if needed) and then decided to participate in the 2007 IRV pilot. In 2009, the Cary Town Council rejected going back to plurality because they liked the idea of majority winners. But they rejected IRV because it was too experimental and didn't deliver performance as promised (mostly that it didn't ensure a majority winner in a single election). They didn't have the complex and convoluted batch multi-member election method to deal with, otherwise I am sure that even Erv Portman would have turned thumbs down to it.

And IRV didn't really save all that much money. True Ballot was paid $7,500 to run the IRV election, while the previous three runoff elections cost $21,000 - or $7,000 per election. Even though the costs of runoff elections didn't include the man-hours, runoffs were $500 less than the cost of doing IRV.

But does the bill for IRV include the cost of election integrity and transparency? I don't think so.

Think IRV was wildly popular in Aspen? Guess again!

2009-05-27T08:52:00.006-04:00

IRV supporters in Aspen like to claim that IRV was wildly popular - winning by a 72% margin. But 72% of how many voters? Turns out to be a pretty freaking small number.

Well, I went onto Google for a look-see, and here is what I found.

Voters approve instant runoff voting

John Colson
November 7, 2007
Aspen, CO Colorado,
ASPEN — Aspen voters decided Tuesday that they were tired of lengthy runoff campaigns and going to the polls twice for the same electoral contest.

Or, as Mayor Mick Ireland quipped when voters overwhelmingly approved instant runoff voting, "They're tired of me showing up at their door," a reference to his well-known campaigning tactic of roaming neighborhoods in search of votes.

City voters also approved the other four ballot questions, by wide margins, in an election that drew only 837 voters to the polls.

Did you see the number of people who voted in this election? Out of 5,167 registered voters in the city, they only got 837 voters showing up at the polls. Aspen has roughly the same number of voters in my subdivision, and 837 is roughly the number of registered Democratic voters in my precinct (my subdivision used to be one precinct - but they split it into two precincts a few years ago.

I can't imagine how anyone could claim that anything was wildly popular if only the registered Democrats in my precinct were able to decide something that everyone else in the subdivision had to live by. Sure - the rest of them didn't show up to vote, but that hardly makes it wildly popular!

That comes to just more than 16 percent of the 5,167 registered voters in the city, according to figures the Pitkin County Clerk's office released. By comparison, in the first round of voting in Aspen's municipal election last spring, the turnout was roughly 44 percent.

Because there were no candidates or hotly contested issues in Tuesday's election, observers accurately predicted a low turnout. Only in the absentee ballots were the tallies even close regarding the individual questions.

One of the biggest winners of the evening was the decision to enact instant runoff voting, which won by a margin of 608 to 186, or 72 percent to 22 percent.

So only 837 voters - only 11.7% of 5167 registered voters - decided that Aspen was going to use IRV. That hardly seems fair, does it? One wonders why communities that decided to put an IRV referendum on the ballot do it during lower-turnout elections when fewer people show up to the polls? In the Fall elections, only 16% of voters turnout. In the Spring 2007 elections, 44% turned out.

And according to analysis of elections and runoffs in Aspen, the lowest reported turnout in a June runoff election was 986 votes - or 149 more than voted on the IRV issue. How can IRV supported claim that IRV is the answer to low-turnout runoffs then scheme to put IRV on the ballot at a time when they know there will be low turnout?

Why do IRV backers put IRV on the ballot during lower-turnout elections - what are they afraid of?

Identified as ballot question 2E, instant runoff voting was ahead from very early on election night, beginning with absentee and early voting tallies, as were the other four questions.

Voter Doug Allen said he favored instant runoffs, which gives voters the option of ranking candidates in order of preference - first, second, third, etc. First choices are tabulated, and if a candidate receives the majority of first choices, or 50 percent plus one vote, he or she is elected. If no one receives the majority of votes on the first count, a series of runoffs are simulated using each voter's preferences, indicated on the ballot.

"It gets it all over with much more expediently," Allen said.

Several voters noted the expense of having a second round of elections - both for the city and candidates, who must muster a follow-up campaign - as sufficient reason to change the system.

Runoffs are "a drain for people after they've already gone through one campaign," said Karen Day-Greenwood. "It's so hard on everybody and expensive."

Voters amended the city charter in November 2000 to institute runoff voting and the first runoff took place in June 2001, when voters chose Helen Klanderud over Rachel Richards for mayor after neither candidate received 50 percent of the votes cast, plus one, in the first go-round.

One voter Tuesday said she voted against 2E, swayed by this year's mayoral race between Mick Ireland and Tim Semrau. Ireland ultimately won the post in the June runoff after the candidates spent an additional month stumping for votes and clarifying their stances on the issues, while voters mulled over their choice for mayor.

"I guess it doesn't hurt to have a second thought about it," she said.

John Colson's e-mail address is jcolson@aspentimes.com

Then there's the "expediency" thing that IRV backers tout. They claim it's easier for voters to go to the polls only one time with IRV rather than going for a partisan primary (and potential runoff) and general election (and potential runoff), or even for non-partisan elections with potential runoffs. They do make a good case saying that runoffs don't usually have a turnout as high as the election which came before the runoff. And they do claim that primaries are for party activists and not the general public, and that voter turnout is lower for primaries than for general elections.

But the whole thing about expediency bothers me. I grew up with a grandfather who was a skilled craftsman - a carpenter and a contractor. My grandfather and his brothers built houses and churches in the Scranton, PA area. And his father was a stonemason back in Italy, where other family members were makes of rope as well. All skilled trades back in the old country. I grew up with a work ethic where if something was worth doing, it was worth doing right. And expediency bothered my grandfather, because it usually means people cut corners and accept a thing that might not done correctly just so they can get it done faster.

It used to be back in the day of buying name-brand merchandise from local stores, the things I bought worked right out of the box - and for many years after. So I didn't mind on those rare occasions when I had to take something back to the store and get a refund or exchange because it didn't work right out of the box (very rarely) or it stopped working at some point.

However, so much junk today is being made by slave labor in China and other countries. It gets a name-brand label slapped on it - and arrives DOA in big box stores. The result is that quality and high standards suffer for world trade, free markets, and for "expediency". Quality dies - and few people object. Mom & Pop stores on Main Street go out of business. Small business owners used to run for local office and sponsor Little League teams because they had a link to the town or city they were based out of. How many managers of "big box" stores run for office? How many Little League teams are sponsored by The Home Depot? I mean - you might as well just pay less for the same junk at Harbor Freight, and pay a few extra bucks for the "warranty" which just means you get to bring it back and swap for a new one forever! Of course, the time you lose not being able to work and go back and forth to the store you won't get back.

The result of this "race to the bottom" is that I get very offended when anyone tries to apply this to our political processes - especially elections. Why? Because it's pretty damned hard to take an election back to the store and get an exchange when the "product" fails to deliver what was promised.

Here are some quotes on "expediency" - see if you feel as I do that "expediency" shouldn't be a factor in deciding what election method to use:

“Cowardice asks the question, 'Is it safe?' Expediency asks the question, 'Is it politic?' But conscience asks the question, 'Is it right?' And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular but because conscience tells one it is right.” - Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

“When virtue is lost, benevolence appears, when benevolence is lost right conduct appears, when right conduct is lost, expedience appears. Expediency is the mere shadow of right and truth; it is the beginning of disorder.” - Lao Tzu, 6th Century B.C. Chinese philosopher

“Where principle is involved, be deaf to expediency.” - James Webb, Senator from VA

“There's an enduring American compulsion to be on the side of the angels. Expediency alone has never been an adequate American reason for doing anything. When actions are judged, they go before the bar of God, where Mom and the Flag closely flank His presence.” - Jonathan Raban, British novelist

The more complicated you make an election, the less likely people are going to be able to understand what went wrong before the election is "certified" by someone who really doesn't know what happened and is only signing off because they don't want to admit they don't understand. Do we really want to out-source our elections to black-box consultants who tell us everything worked well when we really don't have the time or enough information to know for ourselves?

American Idol is like IRV - which is like Fizzbin!

2009-05-27T07:25:00.002-04:00

After I got done with my recent posting slamming Rob Richie for comparing American Idol to IRV (on how AT&T possibly gamed the American Idol elections), I noticed that Joyce McCloy created an amusing post using a clip from "Star Trek" on the game of "fizzbin" - an game that Kirk pulled out of his "Asspen" to provide a distraction. Here is a good description of the game from the wiki article:

Fizzbin is a fictional card game created by Kirk in the Original Series episode "A Piece of the Action". While being held hostage on Sigma Iotia II with Spock and McCoy, he spontaneously invented a confusing card game to distract the henchmen guarding them.

The rules were intentionally very complex. Each player gets six cards, except for the player on the dealer's right, who gets seven. The second card is turned up, except on Tuesdays. Kirk dealt the henchman two jacks, which are a "half-fizzbin." When the henchman said he needs another jack, Kirk warned that a third jack is a "shralk" and is grounds for disqualification. With two jacks, one wants a king and a deuce, except at night, when one wants a queen and a four.

At this point, Kirk dealt a third jack, but to keep the ruse going, he ignored the disqualification rule he had just made up. He explained that, had a king been dealt instead of a jack, the player would get another card, except when it's dark, in which case he'd have to give it back. The top hand is a "royal fizzbin," but the odds of getting one are "astronomical": when Kirk asked Spock what the odds are, Spock truthfully replied that he had never computed them.

Kirk called the last card a "kronk" and then purposely dealt a card such that it fell on the floor. As the henchman being taught reached down, Spock nerve-pinched him while Kirk and McCoy attacked the other guards, allowing the three to escape.

Once in Deep Space Nine, Quark mentioned the game as a way for him and Odo to while away the time while traveling on a runabout;^[7] whether it had become a real game or if it had been a reference was never explained. Playable versions of the game have been invented, and it featured in the episode "Nantucket Sleighride" of the animated series Starcom.

I admit that when I first started to read the complicated Aspen IRV rules, I felt a lot like the henchmen in the clip when they were trying to understand Kirk's explanation of "fizzbin". Should anyone have to work that hard to understand how to vote, or how the votes are counted?

How American Idol is like IRV!

2009-05-27T06:47:00.004-04:00

In an earlier posting I wrote about a "huff piece" written about IRV elections in Aspen CO by FairyTaleVote's Rob Richie. At the very end of the piece, Rob mentioned the following:

A Timely Quote: How American Idol is like IRV:

"Despite never having been among the bottom-three vote-getters this season, Danny [Gokey] wound up on the short end of 88 million votes Wednesday night, which eliminated him from the competition. With only a million votes separating Kris and Adam this week, Danny's sizable voting bloc could still influence the outcome. Will his supporters throw their weight behind dark-horse-turned-contender Kris? Or will they stay away from the phones? The answer to that question could determine your next American Idol." - Brian Mansfield, in May 14 story for USA Today, "'American Idol': Danny voted off; Kris and Adam are final 2."

Voting on American Idol is not something I take very seriously. I always wondered why anyone in the election reform biz would ever hold up a show like 'American Idol' as an example of good elections. But then again, this is from a group that uses examples of voting for flavors in ice cream socials as a reason why we should use IRV in big-people elections for stuff that matters a whole lot more than what flavor of ice cream you get to eat.

I fell asleep with the TV on (MSNBC) and I awoke this morning to a little something about how AT&A May Have Swayed 'Idol" Results - they are even talking about it on "Morning Joe" where they admit to not understanding exactly how this could happen. Wonder how they feel about IRV? ;-)

So I googled "AT&T tainted American Idol vote" and ironically I got an article in The Huffington Post (the same place that posted Rob's crowing about IRV) "AT&T May Have Swayed 'Idol' Results":

New York Times:

AT&T, one of the biggest corporate sponsors of "American Idol," might have influenced the outcome of this year's competition by providing phones for free text-messaging services and lessons in casting blocks of votes at parties organized by fans of Kris Allen, the Arkansas singer who was the winner of the show last week

So I went to the article in the NY Times:

May 27, 2009
AT&T May Have Swayed ‘Idol’ Results
By EDWARD WYATT

LOS ANGELES — AT&T, one of the biggest corporate sponsors of “American Idol,” might have influenced the outcome of this year’s competition by providing phones for free text-messaging services and lessons in casting blocks of votes at parties organized by fans of Kris Allen, the Arkansas singer who was the winner of the show last week.

Representatives of AT&T, whose mobile phone network is the only one that can be used to cast “American Idol” votes via text message, provided the free text-messaging services at two parties in Arkansas after the final performance episode of “American Idol” last week, according to the company and people at the events.

There appear to have been no similar efforts to provide free texting services to supporters of Adam Lambert, who finished as the runner-up to Mr. Allen.

Since then, angry supporters of Mr. Lambert have flooded online chat boards with messages claiming irregularities in the competition’s voting.

Officials of Fox Broadcasting declined to discuss the situation. In a statement issued Tuesday, a spokesman for AT&T said, “In Arkansas, we were invited to attend the local watch parties organized by the community. A few local employees brought a small number of demo phones with them and provided texting tutorials to those who were interested.”

Details of the voting support were first reported last week in an article in The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

Representatives of AT&T helped fans of Mr. Allen at the two Arkansas events by providing instructions on how to send 10 or more text messages at the press of a single button, known as power texts. Power texts have an exponentially greater effect on voting than do single text messages or calls to the show’s toll-free phone lines. The efforts appear to run afoul of “American Idol” voting rules in two ways. The show broadcasts an on-screen statement at the end of each episode warning that blocks of votes cast using “technical enhancements” that unfairly influence the outcome of voting can be thrown out.

And the show regularly states that text voting is open only to AT&T subscribers and is subject to normal rates.

So American Idol voting was capable of being influenced by a group that engaged in voter education, and that controls both the counting and casting of votes.

I guess Rob was right - American Idol is like IRV. Timely indeed!

Has the Aspen Election Commission certified the May IRV elections?

2009-05-23T15:24:00.003-04:00

And if not - why not?

For Mayor - http://www.aspenpitkin.com/pdfs/depts/38/Aspen%20Mayor%20Round5.htm
CANDIDATE THIS ROUND TOTAL STATUS
Mick Ireland (4) 0 1273 ELECTED -- 4th round

For Council Seat 1 - ttp://www.aspenpitkin.com/pdfs/depts/38/Aspen Council Seat 1 Round4.htm
ROUND 4 -- Jack Johnson (2) has been DEFEATED -- transferring all votes.
CANDIDATE THIS ROUND TOTAL STATUS
Derek Johnson (8) +40 1273 ELECTED -- 4th round

For Council Seat 2 - http://www.aspenpitkin.com/pdfs/depts/38/Aspen%20Council%20Seat%202%20Round3.htm
ROUND 3 -- Michael Behrendt (5) has been DEFEATED -- transferring all votes.
CANDIDATE THIS ROUND TOTAL STATUS
Torre (4) +200 1273 ELECTED -- 3rd round

Votes aren't the only things being pulled out of someone's "Asspen"!

2009-05-23T15:04:00.003-04:00

Rob Richie wrote a "huff piece" for the Huff Post about IRV. As usual, he put a positive spin on the Aspen IRV election (which I don't think has even been certified yet). And he got stuff wrong.

In a Nutshell
Instant runoff voting is a ranked choice voting system that allows voters to rank candidates in order of preference. Recommended by Robert's Rules of Order for postal elections and used in a rapidly growing number of elections here and abroad, it represents a major improvement over the usual plurality-based and two-round systems of voting. It protects majority rule, eliminates the need for costly extra elections and all but eradicates the potential chaos of "spoiler" candidacies. But beyond its clearly established benefits, we are seeing anecdotal evidence that suggests that IRV has a positive effect on the influence of big money on elections, and mitigating the temptation for campaigns to "go negative."

It used to be that FairVote claimed that Robert’s Rules of Order recommended IRV over all other election methods – now it’s just for postal elections. But I am not sure that IRV is being used in a rapidly growing number of elections here and abroad. Those governments that already have a parliament use IRV/RCV or STV. I don't think that any new overseas governments are clammoring to use IRV. In fact, 61% of British Columbia voters recently gave STV (a version of IRV) a crushing defeat - in the second defeat for ranked choice voting in BC.

I am sure FairVote is spending a lot of money trying to push IRV in communities all around the country and the world. But here in NC, IRV is failing to catch on.

In 2007, only 2 out of over 500 municipalities chose to take part in an IRV pilot program. Only one election went to IRV, and that was a disaster! There were no IRV elections in NC in 2008 (probably because our own State Board of Elections felt IRV was too risky to use in the 2008 federal elections with the expected heavy turnout). A bill to allow the Wilmington City Council to have the option to have IRV elections was pulled at the request of the City Council when the language of the bill would have REQUIRED the use of IRV. And even though an IRV pilot program extension bill was passed in 2008, that bill required guidelines that our State Board of Elections could not meet (IRV conflicts with general election laws) so that only one community opted to participate in the 2009 pilot.

That one single community out of over 500 in North Carolina was Hendersonville. They participated in the 2007 pilot only in the front end of the election (the ranking of candidates). As the election in Hendersonville went the same way as two IRV elections in Takoma Park (they had a first round majority and didn’t need IRV to determine the winner by tabulating subsequent rounds), Hendersonville really had no rational basis for assuming that IRV elections would go smoothly. In fact, since they use a largely untested and certainly uncertified workaround for tabulation of the DRE votes on Excel spreadsheets, the IRV method using DRE machines is an untested one. One City Council member claimed that there was a paper trail for the IRV vote, but there has never to the best of my knowledge been a testing of doing a full-scale recount of IRV votes using the thermal paper trail created by DRE machines.

In all well-intentioned attempts to reform our electoral system, the primary goal is fairness: finding mechanisms allowing all eligible voters to have a better chance to participate and be represented. When those criteria are satisfied, we think that government becomes more accountable and more honestly reflects the will of the voters. But sometimes we can be pleasantly surprised when a change designed to improve the political system in a broad sense also turns out to have other desirable effects beyond the initial intentions.

I am not really sure that all attempts to reform our electoral system are well intentioned and have fairness in mind. I am certainly not sure that those are the intentions of FairVote. And I certainly don’t think that IRV elections satisfy those criteria.

I do not believe that IRV is a fair electoral system because it is too complex not only in the front-end voting part of the election, but especially in the back-end of the counting. Candidates in Cary, NC admit to being confused on how to deal with campaigning in IRV elections. Voters in Cary and in Hendersonville were also complaining about the cofusion.

You must have a simple and easy to understand method for counting votes and explaining how the winners will be determined. IRV in almost any form is “black box” voting – hard to explain, hard to understand for educated people and “just trust us – we’re well-intentioned reformers” for everyone else.

This is exactly what we're seeing with the growing implementation of instant runoff voting (IRV) in municipalities across the country. With IRV, voters have one vote, but are allowed to indicate their backup choices in the event that their favorite candidate lacks enough support to win. After voters rank candidates on a ranked choice ballot, the first-choice rankings are tabulated. If no candidate wins a majority (50% plus one), a series of "instant runoffs" take place. The weakest candidates are eliminated and ballots for that candidate are added to the totals of the remaining candidates until one candidate earns more than half the votes. The winner is the majority, consensus choice. (Minnesota Public Radio recently did a charming video demonstration of IRV in action using Post-It notes, which you can watch here.)

One candidate earns more than half of what votes? The total number of votes cast in the first column of each race, or more than half the votes of the last two candidates standing?

A successful IRV election was held in Aspen, Colorado last week (the city's first IRV election), in which incumbent mayor Mick Ireland defeated three challengers in a contest with a record-breaking turnout; 45% versus the usual 37-38%. Analysis of the election by TrueBallot showed that every single vote cast for mayor was valid, meaning 100% of those who opted to vote for mayor had their vote count. There were more voter errors in the novel use of IRV to elect two at-large city council seats, but still less than 1% of those at the polls.

Who says it was successful? The election hasn't even been certified yet! Comments by many people suggest that the reason for the turnout was that people wanted a change in administration. Ireland was pushing IRV because of the advantage it gives incumbents. Ireland and other pro-IRV candidates got themselves on the IRV commission to figure out how to run IRV in Aspen. Were other candidates on this commission? If not - why not?

Also notable were the fundraising figures. Challenger Marilyn Marks outspent Ireland, breaking Aspen records with almost $40,000 in funds. Ireland mustered less than half of Marks' total, with less than $18,000 raised. Despite this disparity in resources, Ireland emerged victorious. The biggest spender in the city council race also was defeated in an election in which the two incumbents were upended.

Where did Rob Richie get these figures from – did he pull them from his "Asspen"? According to the public spending reports, Ireland had spent $14,513 up to 4/29/09 vs. $10,149 by Marks during the same period. The final reports won’t be out until June, so where did Rob Richie get his “almost $40,000 in funds” figure from? Did he make that up?

We knew IRV helped level the campaign finance playing field when avoiding costly runoffs, as would have happened previously in Aspen. We didn't anticipate an impact within single elections, but here's why there might be a connection. In a typical campaign, campaign money is often spent attacking one's major opponent through ads. That tactic assumes the "zero sum" logic of a two-person race in which every vote lost by an opponent helps you by default. But with IRV, voters are more likely to have more than two choices. Candidates have a greater motivation to make an affirmative case to earn support because negative attacks may hurt another candidate without helping you.

There "might be a connection"? This is quite a stretch! How much would a runoff election cost in Aspen's 4 precincts (5 including ABM and in-person Early Voting)? Would it have cost the $7,500 paid to True Ballot to run the election - including the fix of that pesky "inverse" problem that declared the lowest vote-getter in a pre-election test to be the "winner"?

That is not what folks in Aspen say about the campaigns. Most everyone agrees that the lack of the run-off and having 9 candidates in the field allowed the candidates to run “motherhood and apple-pie campaigns.” There was no real substance to the answers, and positions. They were able to run popularity contests without having to take positions. There was too much noise to pick out a real message. That is one of the big problems with IRV!

One of the reasons why Robert’s Rules of Order favor traditional election and runoffs over preferential voting is the real lack of choices. In Aspen and elsewhere, the month of run off among only 6 candidates (4 council and 2 mayor) would have allowed for real issues to be debated and discussed. From my own experience in the 2008 primary campaigns in NC, with so many candidates running, no one got a real chance to tell other voters what the real differences were between the candidates. Both of the runoff candidates for Labor Commissioner – John Brooks and Mary Fant Donnan (disclosure – I know John Brooks and supported him in the runoff) – felt that the runoff gave them a chance to explain the differences between each other but also between them and the current Republican Labor Commissioner Cherie Berry. Had we had IRV in that primary election, I doubt few voters would have been able to make responsible and informed choices in the Labor Commissioner race that had a 33% falloff from the Presidential and other top-ticket races.

I am convinced that in the future, if there are more IRV elections, candidates will hire math consultants to learn how to game the system, and run campaigns for a month that focus on popularity (lots of bbq’s and pizza parties) and not on ideas and substance. Is that really how we want to elect our officials?

Because voters get the option to rank their preferences, candidates also have a new incentive to make their case to backers of other candidates. Negative attacks perceived to be unfair are particularly counter-productive if the candidate on the receiving end loses early in the counting and that candidate's backers punish the attacker by ranking other candidates higher on their ballot. Attacks will still be leveled at opponents in IRV elections, particularly when there is a clear frontrunner as was the case in Aspen, but overall IRV encourages more positive, substantive campaigns in which candidates try to earn first-choice support from opponents while remaining attractive to other candidates' supporters. The Aspen Times weighed in after the election, writing, "[We] have been impressed with the professionalism displayed...[C]andidates have treated each other respectfully during these stressful times."

That is not what some observers who chose to remain anonymous have claimed about the Aspen elections. Some supporters of Marks were threatened by people in the Ireland campaign.

Let's take a look at another example. Earlier this year in Burlington, Vermont, the Progressive Party's Bob Kiss was re-elected as mayor, vaulting from second place after the first count in an IRV election to win with 51% against Republican state legislator Kurt Wright. Just as in his initial upset win in 2006, when he was outspent by approximately four to one by a Democratic state senator, Kiss was heavily outspent by his three main opponents. All three wielded larger war chests, including Wright who spent twice as much as Kiss.

So what? Progressive candidates have won election for Mayor since the 70s or 80s WITHOUT IRV. IRV was not necessary for Progressives to win elections in Burlington, VT.

But once again money seemed to mean less when negative attacks aren't useful. Burlington's candidates participated in forums across the city, and, in part due to IRV, spent little time debasing each other. The positive, substantive tenor of the campaign even won IRV some new converts of past skeptics such as Democratic city councilor Bill Keogh who told the Burlington Free Press, "This campaign has been very, very good," and that the four leading candidates had been "as forthright as they can be with their views. This is the most respectful and informative campaign in Burlington in a long time."

Other observers have found that IRV tends to drive the negative campaigning underground.

Obviously, in the Aspen and Burlington cases the mayoral victors had the benefit of incumbency despite their deficits in cash. But they also showcase a trend that is emerging in IRV races across the country. Similar results have been seen in San Francisco, which has used IRV for city elections every November since 2004. Numerous highly competitive races have gone to candidates who were outspent, including several neighborhood-based candidates targeted by downtown business in the 2008 elections. The editor of the San Francisco Bay Guardian in 2008 wrote that in the highly contested open seat race for District 9 on the Board of Supervisors:

Not really sure these examples are accurate – since Richie got his numbers wrong in the Ireland v. Marks race.

"[The winner] will probably be the one who gets the most second-place [rankings]. So it's in everyone's interest not to go negative. If Sanchez, say, started to attack Quezada, the Quezada backers would get mad and leave Sanchez off their ballots -- and that would hurt Sanchez when the second-place votes are counted. So everyone has been pretty well behaved in [District 9]. I've heard a few whispers here and there, and a few people have tossed off a few nasty comments, but overall the candidates and their supporters recognize that it's better to stay positive."

So that results in bland campaigns that have little focus on issues and the differences between candidates. That is not very democratic!

Indeed, the winner was in fact one of those candidates that embraced the idea of forging alliances over burning bridges. One result of this is that with every member now elected through IRV, the city's Board is far more diverse and community-based than ever in its history. Its 11 members include three Asians, two Latinos, one African-American and one Iranian-American.

Does this have more to do with who runs for office in those communities vs. who votes for them? If IRV is supposed to bring diversity – why doesn’t Takoma Park MD (home of FairVote) have a diverse elected government?

This is not a definitive, scientific case study proving beyond a doubt that IRV will always negate the advantages of money or unfailingly produce smiley-faced campaigns. But what is certain is that because candidates must appeal beyond their die-hard supporters in order to rank highly on as many ballots as possible, the efficacy of negativity becomes at best highly questionable, while reasoned, substantive debate and coalition-building become far more attractive. And when discussion is valued over destruction, the relentless raising and spending of campaign funds can be less decisive.

It it not very scientific or accurate. But if you have read as much of this pro-IRV drivel as I have, you would not wonder why I call this organization “FairyTaleVote”.

In our view, IRV is already a significant improvement simply on its technical merits alone. But if it can also produce such positive byproducts -- even only occasionally -- it only serves to make a good idea even better.

Many people would not agree that IRV is a significant improvement based on technical merits alone. Many people feel that IRV threatens election integrity and verified voting. And now what do we make out of Rob Richie’s claims of “gee whiz” Pollyanna election wonderfulness when he pulls numbers out of his "Asspen" to cast the incumbent mayor as a little guy who got elected over big-spending people who, by default, must be evil?

"Street Football" or how they crossed the threshold by pulling votes out of their "Asspen"!

2009-05-20T11:35:00.009-04:00

Joyce McCloy, Kathy Dopp, and the folks at RangeVoting have posted a link to an open letter to Fair(yTale)Vote's Rob Richie in response to Rob's puff piece at the Huffington Post entitled "Good Things Come to Those Who Rank: Campaign Finance, Political Dialogue, and Instant Runoff Voting" (does that make it a "huff piece"?) from Marilyn Marks - one of the candidates in the recent Aspen Co IRV race.

Her letter to Richie is devastating to say the least. You have GOT to read it! There are links in the letter to a site which reported there was some sort of arts related issue on the ballot, and many people simply FORGOT to vote on it (I am guessing) due to the more complex IRV races. Her letter also contained a link to a report by her nephew, who goes to NCSU right here in Raleigh.

And while many people realize that all three winners in the races finished with the exact same totals - 1273 votes - few folks seem to understand how this happened.

Richie rightly claims that the process needed more explanation (and a headache remedy or several stiff drinks) in order to be understood. But even when he has explained it, the numbers still don't add up.

There was more than one race where:

1) only two candidates left standing AND

2) all the other ballots were exhausted AND

3) the threshold had not yet been crossed.

And yet they still declared a winner! Know how they did it? Instead of holding a traditional runoff election because they had no clear winner, it appears as though they took a look at the subsequent rankings for the ballots belonging to the second place finisher at that point, and saw if there were any votes for the first place finisher - then added just enough votes to cross the threshold.

They stopped counting as soon as they got 1273 - which is why the winners in three different races have exactly the same number of winning votes. IRV advocate Terry Boricious claims that is Cambridge IRV rules, but it seems more like "street football" (comedy routine by Bill Cosby, where he who brings the football makes the rules). I say this is pulling votes out of your "Asspen" (funny "South Park" episode which you can watch here). If you have seen the episode - do you recognize any link between the timeshare organization that seems to control everything and the folks and organizations pushing IRV? ;-)

How can this possibly be a smooth election where IRV proved anything other than how complicated it is in the first place?

Aspen IRV makes my head hurt!

2009-05-18T11:36:00.003-04:00

Greetings! I have been communicating back and forth with various verified voting advocates about the Aspen IRV fiasco. People have read my comments and told me I should turn them into blogs, and they have been wondering why I haven't done so yet.

That's because so much stuff is coming out about the Aspen IRV election almost daily that makes the stuff I wrote yesterday out of date! And I also have to try and wrap my head about the confusing "novel" way that Aspen ran their election. Excuse me - that was a mistake - Aspen paid a small private company to administer the IRV election using an uncertified system.

So have no fear - I will get around to writing a devastating blog (or two or three) on Aspen IRV that will tickle your funny bone and make you cry wondering how anyone is buying into this voodoo voting method!

Chris Telesca

Public Hearings are a good thing - so why are IRV advocates afraid of them?

2009-05-18T10:41:00.008-04:00

Back in 2007, the only two communities to participate in the IRV pilot program in North Carolina did not have full public hearings before taking the vote. Four NC communities that did hold public hearings voted not to participate in the IRV pilot.

There were no IRV pilots in 2008 because the NC State Board of Elections knew as early as March 2007 that IRV was too risky to use in the 20008 federal elections with expected heavy turnout.

IRV advocates pushed an extension of the 2007-2008 pilot after the 2008 primary runoff election in June 2008. The pilot was extended from 2009-2011 (inclusive), but IRV advocates didn't get the same blank check they had in 2007-2008. A voter and candidate education as well as guidelines consistent with general election laws were required.

Verified voting activists worked with the NC SBOE suggested ways to make IRV comply with general election laws, but the NC SBOE passed guidelines that were in conflict with those laws.

IRV advocates were really pushing to get both Hendersonville and Cary to participate in the IRV pilot this year. They were especially pushing for Cary to take part. Cary was their shining example of how they claim IRV worked. They made pushing IRV for Cary in 2009 a national priority.

But this time IRV advocates wouldn't have ex parte meetings with the town council members for 6 weeks before any council meetings. For one thing, there were two Cary Town Council members who were not big fans of IRV. Don Frantz (the only official elected in our state using the IRV method to tabulate votes) and Julie Robison (who originally supported IRV until she observed the 2007 counting procedure). Several other members of the Town Council didn't want Cary to be a lab rat for IRV again.

So instead of 6 weeks of ex parte access to the Town Council like in 2007, the Cary Town Council was going to consider whether or not to take part in the IRV pilot in 2009, stay with the old non-partisan election and possible runoff, or switch to a non-partisan plurality election. That is where things got really interesting.

At the first meeting on March 12, 2009, I found out that there is a legal requirement for public hearings to change between proven legal election methods - but not to take part in election pilots of unproven (and risky) election methods like IRV. I was flabbergasted!

I wrote the following e-mail to several NC legislators who I knew were interested in election integrity:

Dear Represenatives:

I am hoping that you will put your heads together to create and support making changes this year to the IRV pilot extension bill that got passed last summer. Specifically, I would ask that you require any municipal governing body considering IRV to require:

1. advance notification of a public hearing where the public may comment prior to taking any vote to participate in the IRV or any other election pilot

2. requirement to verify the accuracy of information presented by or through the County Board of Election or the municipal clerk or information officer so that pro-IRV propaganda from IRV advocacy groups is not presented as factual information.

I attended a meeting of the Cary Town Council on March 12, 2009, and found out that while public hearings are required by law for any community considering changing election methods (plurality or majority with or without primaries or runoff elections), there are no such requirements for public hearings prior to a municipal government considering taking part in the IRV pilot project.

I talked briefly to the Hendersonville City Manager and Attorney last week, and found out that there was no advance announcement of IRV on the agenda for the March 2009 Council meeting where they voted to ask to participate in the IRV pilot for the 2009 election. There certainly was no opportunity for the public to comment on IRV one way or the other. I also found out that neither the City Council nor the City Manager or Attorney were aware of the new requirements of the law to allow for the pilot extension:

* the municipality must take part in and pay for a voter education program and

* the municipality must pay for a professional exit poll to be conducted to gather information on the IRV pilot, and keep accurate accountings of money spent on IRV.

I think that in the interest of transparency and open government, if public hearings are required prior to changing other election methods, they should be required prior to taking any action to participate in any election pilot - including IRV.

There is also an issue of the type and accuracy of information that is being presented to the municipal governing agencies and the public to get them to participate in the IRV pilot. In some cases, unsubstantiated information coming directly from the non-governmental agencies that are pushing IRV is being presented as facts by the county Boards of Election. In the case of the Wake County Board of Election, they accepted the donation of a website for the Cary IRV project that was paid for by FairVote, and the information on this page was provided by FairVote and was not subject to review or approval from the Wake County BOE.

I can provide much more information to support this brief (at least for me) e-mail to you.

Would you please consider submitting legislation to change the IRV pilot bill to require such public hearings? Thank you.

Respectfully,

Chris Telesca

I heard back from NC House Representative Verla Inkso, who along with Senator Ellie Kinnaird are the two Godmothers of Election Integrity in the NC General Assembly. Rep. Insko agreed to introduce HB 932, which required public hearings and documentation of IRV pilot program claims. The bill did not make crossover in the North Carolina General Assembly by May 14th.

I talked to a few legislators and some other people who work down at the General Assembly, and I found out that IRV advocates were bad-mouthing this bill. They were claiming that it would have prevented Hendersonville from taking part in the IRV pilot for 2009, even though Hendersonville already voted to take part in the pilot before the bill would have taken effect.

As you may already know, Cary decided not to participate in the IRV pilot program - there wasn't even enough interest from council member Erv Portman to make a motion to consider it in the very last council meeting on April 30th before the May 6th cut-off date (after which it would have been too late for ANY community to decide to participate in the IRV pilot for 2009). So this bill would only apply to communities deciding to use IRV in the future.

So why are IRV advocates bad-mouthing this election transparency bill? IRV advocates tend to be all about transparency EXCEPT when it applies to IRV! What do IRV advocates have to hide about IRV?

Why don't IRV advocates want communities to announce interest in the IRV pilots, document information used to justify taking part in the pilot, and hold a hearing where the public may comment on IRV?

Is it because they realize that whenever IRV has been put to a public hearing process in NC where there has been transparency and full disclosure, IRV did not get used?

I have talked to several other legislators who wonder why requirements for public hearings and full disclosure of the source of documentation used to justify the pilots ought to apply to ALL election pilots - not just for IRV.

I wonder why IRV advocates are afraid of a little sunshine?

Only one IRV in NC for 2009!

2009-05-09T07:05:00.005-04:00

On April 29, the Cary News published a guest column written by Don Hyatt and myself. They wanted it to be between 500 and 600 words. We submitted a little more than 600 words, and they whittled it down even more.

Here is a link to the published article - http://www.carynews.com/opinion/story/12323.html

In our opinion: IRV too risky

By Chris Telesca and Don Hyatt
The Cary Town Council is considering whether or not to be the subject of another election experiment with Instant Runoff Voting for the October 2009 election. It’s time for Cary and the rest of North Carolina to say “no” to IRV.

Cary has participated in dubious election experiments before. In 2002, hundreds of votes were lost in the nation’s first reported case of touch-screen voting machines failing to report election votes.

Even before Cary voted in May 2007 to pilot IRV, the State Board knew it was too risky to use in 2008 elections because state law and federal regulations require using only certified voting systems to tabulate IRV.

The 2007 Cary IRV pilot program was largely managed by IRV advocacy groups, with no advance guidelines. Some voter education volunteers admit deviating from Election Board instructions to create a more positive outcome on the exit poll surveys — also conducted by IRV advocates.

The Wake Board of Elections couldn’t follow simple IRV hand tabulation procedures. Ballots were mis-sorted, simple calculator mistakes were made and a non-public recount turned up missing votes. The winner did not receive the 50 percent plus one vote majority advocates claimed IRV would ensure in a single election.

There has been no analysis of the 2007 pilot. The proffered reason given for extending the pilot beyond 2008 was cost savings, even though fiscal studies done by other jurisdictions show IRV elections cost more than traditional election methods.

The original IRV pilot extension bill had the same flaws as the first pilot program. Election integrity groups requested an improvement which required “… the pilot program shall be conducted according to … standards consistent with general election law …” Unfortunately, this legislative requirement has not been met.

After passage, election integrity advocates pointed out how IRV conflicts with general election law not written with IRV in mind, and recommended ways to make IRV comply with general election law. The State Board ignored those recommendations and approved IRV guidelines that conflict with general election laws.

North Carolina and other states have laws requiring that votes be counted where cast until the count is completed to prevent ballot tampering. But State Board IRV guidelines call for partial ballot counting at polling places, then moving the ballots to a central location for further counting. The federal Help America Vote Act requires voters be notified of over-votes before a ballot is cast. Our voting system can’t notify voters of second and third column over-votes on IRV ballots.

From early 2007 through January 2009, State Board members and staff claimed we needed federally certified software to automate IRV tabulations. The State Board recently developed automated procedures they now claim need no federal certification. Those procedures were developed with no input from election equipment vendor ES&S. Do the new IRV procedures violate any contracts, warranties or other agreements with ES&S? Will Cary voters be required to foot the bill in the event of election problems?

The Cary Town Council needs to vote “no” on another IRV pilot and keep traditional runoff elections if needed. Our legislature’s Election Oversight Committee should study the 2007 IRV experiment and other IRV elections more fully before allowing any more communities to experiment with America’s right to vote.

Chris Telesca lives in Raleigh. Don Hyatt lives in Cary.

IRV was not on the agenda for the Cary Town Council meeting for April 30, 2009. One of the IRV guidelines required:

CI 1
The governing board of a jurisdiction choosing to participate in the IRV pilot must make that decision no later than two months before the beginning of the filing period for offices in that election.

And since May 6, 2009 was the 60-day cut-off period for the 2009 election filing period beginning July 1, 2009, IRV was essentially dead in Cary for 2009. Only one other NC municipality - Hendersonville - voted to take part in the 2009-2011 IRV pilot extension.

And since IRV is too risky to use in an even-year federal election, I doubt anyone will try and bring it forth for consideration in 2010. With two communities using it in 2007, and only one in 2009, that probably means no one will use it in 2011. I say "probably" because it honestly depends on what happens with the Hendersonville elections. If they don't need to tabulate the votes beyond the 1st column, the pro-IRV crowd will probably say they loved it in Hendersonville. IRV will tank for sure in Hendersonville if they do have to tabulate those other votes, because it will be so complex no one who understands it will like it.

Durham council rejects both plurality and IRV!

2009-04-07T09:37:00.003-04:00

I attended the Durham City Council meeting last night where they were going to discuss changing their electoral system from nonpartisan primary and general election to a nonpartisan plurality.

Now I have written that if a community is going to change, I prefer plurality over IRV for sure. But I will admit that I like more elections rather than fewer - and my understanding of how Durham's system works is the primary and general election functions something like a general election and a runoff. And I favor traditional runoffs - like Roberts Rules of Order favor them - over Preferential Voting (aka IRV/RCV/STV).

Stella Adams - NCDP First Vice Chair - said she had no problems with Plurality elections, but said she didn't like IRV and would sue if Durham tried to impose IRV elections on her. She'll have good company - and lots of help on her lawsuit (guess who?)

Some people did suggest IRV, but those who did pretty much got it wrong. A student from the Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy gave an entertaining presentation about the benefits of IRV - but he got some pretty important details wrong. He left the impression that Cary uses IRV when they do not. Cary participated in the pilot in 2007 and has not decided whether or not to participate in the 2009 pilot. It looks like they won't do it - even with Erv Portman dragging it back out every meeting.

I must confess that I secretly feel that Erv's actions are not that he really believes in IRV as an election method. I feel it's a form political narcissism - IRV is pronounced the same way that his first name (Erv) is pronounced. So for Erv, it's not like looking into a mirror and seeing his own reflection (which got Narcissus into trouble) but like listening to your own name being called over and over and OVER again (like Cary IRV supporters kept pronouncing IRV as one word, not spelling it out).

The Sanford Institute student also got it wrong when he used two other speakers (who signed up right behind him and ceded their time to him so he could speak for longer than 2 minutes - good trick which I must remember for future meetings - but isn't that like giving someone else your vote?) to demonstrate how easy IRV elections are. He claimed that in an election of three candidates where there were a total of 50,000 votes - one candidate got 20,000 votes, another got 18,000 and a third got 12,000. Since no one got 50% plus one vote, IRV would allow the 12,000 first column votes for the loser to to transfer to the top two candidates - 10,000 to the first candidate (giving him a total of 28,000) and 2,000 to the second (for 20,000)- allowing the candidate with 28,000 votes to win with a majority.

Problem with those simple examples is that there is never 100% participation in the subsequent rounds.

In real life IRV elections, not enough voters cast votes in the subsequent columns to give the candidate a real majority of the total first column votes. In Burlington VT - where they
love IRV - 16.5% of the voters didn't go beyond the first column and 37.8% didn't vote beyond the second column. As has happened in damn near ALL the IRV elections across the country. In Cary, Don Frantz won the election with only 1401 votes out of 3022 first-column votes cast - not 50% plus one vote.

Which is probably why some IRV supporters are not claiming IRV ensures majority wins - but better plurality wins. Geeze - talking out of both sides of your mouth!

What's the point of doing IRV if all you are doing is shooting for the better plurality if it always costs more up front and might not be needed?

So I am glad that Durham decided to stick with primaries and general elections. If they had to change things, I'd prefer a simpler plurality election over IRV anyday!

http://www.newsobserver.com/news/story/1475406.html

Durham council lets elections be

Change to plurality system rejected

By Jim Wise, Staff Writer Comment on this story
DURHAM - After 45 minutes of public comment and discussion, Durham's City Council voted to leave its electoral system alone.
In a 7-0 vote that came during halftime of the NCAA championship game, the council rejected a proposal to switch its municipal elections from a nonpartisan primary and general election format to a nonpartisan plurality.
The Durham County Board of Elections had proposed the change as a cost-saving measure, estimating it would save city taxpayers between $170,000 and $185,000 each election year by eliminating one round of voting.
"Money isn't everything," said Mayor Pro Tem Cora Cole-McFadden, who moved to keep the city's elections just as they are.
Citizen comment before the vote was almost unanimously opposed to a change.
"Just vote it down. It's not going to help anybody," said Lavonia Allison, president of the Durham Committee on the Affairs of Black People.
"It's sad to put a price tag on our future," said Carolyn Harris. "Let's think about our freedom."
Board of Elections Chairman Ronald Gregory defended plurality as "a method that is employed successfully" in many other communities. But Mayor Bill Bell said he had heard no wish for a change from citizens.
"I haven't seen any outcry, any groundswell," he said. "In the face of that overwhelming majority [of speaker opposition], I'm comfortable with the motion that's on the floor" to stay with the present method.
While speakers were overwhelmingly against plurality elections, some did suggest Durham consider the "instant-runoff" system, under which voters rank candidates in order of first, second and third preference.
If no candidate wins a majority, a winner is declared by a combination of preference.
Victoria Peterson, a frequent, if unsuccessful, candidate for public office in Durham, added her voice to those opposing plurality elections, but she took her opportunity at the microphone to support merging the city and county governments.
She also called for raising City Council salaries to at least $32,000 a year, which she said would be equivalent to pay for a full-time job.
"It's so unfair to work these individuals so hard, and we only pay them, what?" she said.
Told council members' pay is about $18,000 per year, Peterson said, "That is embarrassing."

jim.wise@newsobserver.com or 932-2004

Why don't they ask people if they would prefer IRV when it costs more than traditional elections and runoffs?

2009-03-16T01:53:00.005-04:00

I am getting so sick of people claiming everyone prefers IRV to traditional elections and runoffs, citing surveys as proof IRV is the greatest thing since sliced white bread!

I just attended a meeting of the Cary Town Council and there were some pretty awful assumptions made about IRV - that it's always cheaper than holding traditional majority elections with runoffs if needed.

From the http://www.townofcary.org/depts/pio/biennialsurvey/html/2008BiennialSurveyReport.htm

The respondents were next asked their support for using the Instant Runoff Voting Method using a 9-point scale from not supportive at all (1) to very supportive (9). The respondents were also informed the use of the method would save Cary taxpayers approximately $28,000 by not having to hold a physical runoff election.

While supporters are claiming that Cary taxpayers saved $28,000 in the 2007 election by using IRV, they cannot honestly make that claim because they didn't keep track of all expenses. IRV was done under the table and off the books. Labor and services were donated by non-profit groups (including pro-bono services from so far un-named PR firm and free websites provided by the main group pimping IRV) and none of it was kept track of.

But even public information officers seem to buy into the very simplistic argument that one election is cheaper than two. Check out the fiscal impact statement at http://www.townofcary.org/agenda/tc09004.htm

Fiscal Impact:

(1) Below are the FY 2010 budget estimates based on each type of election, with and without IRV (all costs include one-stop early, contract costs, etc.). These estimates include the IRV estimates that the Town of Cary would absorb to cover voter education. These estimates assume the maximum number of elections possible with each method of election. Also, these figures include the cost of Cary contracting with Wake and Chatham Counties to conduct its municipal elections, since Cary is in both counties. These numbers reflect the highest possible amount of charges we would incur; actual expenses would more than likely be less as the county pays a portion of the cost of elections when other county issues are on the ballot.

Partisan Primary and Election without IRV (potential of three elections):

$291,920

Partisan Primary and Election with IRV (two elections and IRV education costs):

$208,290

Non-Partisan Plurality without IRV (one election):

$97,306

Non-Partisan Plurality with IRV (one election plus IRV education costs):

$112,409

Non-Partisan Election and Runoff without IRV (two elections):

$193,187

Non-Partisan Election and Runoff with IRV (one election plus IRV education costs):

$112,409

Non-Partisan Primary and Election without IRV (two elections):

$193,187

Non-Partisan Primary and Election with IRV (one election plus IRV education costs):

$112,409

(2) Fiscal impacts for future budget years might potentially be less if the Town were to continue using IRV, especially once IRV is well established and no longer requires public education.

That last statement is incredible, because there is ample evidence from the San Francisco Board of Elections that shows they have been spending $1.87 per registered voter on IRV elections since 2004, and in 2008 a civil grand jury informed them that they aren't doing a good job educating voters. Even after 4 years, voters not only require continuing education but they haven't been getting enough even after spending $1.87 per registered voter! See http://noirvnc.blogspot.com/2008/07/all-is-not-well-with-irv-elections-in.html for more information.

What about the people who continue to move into Cary - will they not need IRV education? What about people who become citizens or turn 18 - will they not need voter education? It's overly simplistic to

It has not been proven that IRV will save any jurisdiction any money. In fact, financial impact studies by other governing bodies such as in VT and MD and even Washington state have shown that IRV could easily cost more money and be much more complex to administer and be less transparent and open.

There are also no real goals here – one of which is whether or not IRV is easier or harder for voters to understand how to cast their votes? Is another goal of the IRV pilot program to compare how easy or difficult it is to count or otherwise administer IRV elections vs. traditional elections and runoffs?

Several jurisdictions have performed studies to see how much it will cost to implement IRV. The Vermont Secretary of State performed a study. VT is a small homogenous state with highly educated and active voters and no central elections commission or state-wide standards like we have in North Carolina. Even though VT claimed they could do IRV on the cheap with voter education costs around 25 cents per registered voter, their study did find that IRV would be more expensive.

Maryland is a state with a central elections board and of a similar size (slightly smaller) and makeup. The MD Legislature performed three fiscal studies on IRV – in 2001, 2006 and 2008 – and estimated as best they could the costs per registered voter for initial implementation ($3.54) and ongoing voter education ($0.48) on top of the current costs per registered voter for election administration. These costs were not complete because there is certified software or equipment that can tabulate IRV at this time. None of the IRV bills passed out of committee, presumably because it appeared that IRV would cost more than the cost of rarely-needed runoff elections..
What would the combination of the Maryland costs per registered voter for implementation and for voter education be if they were used here in NC?

Initial cost of $3.08 per registered voter multiplied times 6,283,277 registered voters. 48 cents per registered voter in ongoing costs every year thereafter.

Initial cost of $3.08 per registered voter multiplied times 6,283,277 registered voters. 48 cents per registered voter in ongoing voter education costs every even year thereafter, and 24 cents per registered voter in odd-year elections.

http://mlis.state.md.us/2008rs/fnotes/bil_0002/hb1502.pdf
http://mlis.state.md.us/2006rs/fnotes/bil_0002/sb0292.pdf

The Maryland cost estimates factor in elections every two years, whereas in North Carolina we have local elections in odd years, and elections for county officers in both odd and even years. Therefore IRV voter education would need to be done each and every year. With 5.8 million voters over the summer and 6 million voters as of 11/04/08, annual voter education costs alone would equal the cost of the rarely needed state-wide runoff elections. Add to that nearly $20 million in implementation costs (not including certified software and hardware that does not exist) and IRV would never be cheaper than holding second elections even at the state level. So unless you blindly believe that one election (no matter how complicated) is cheaper than two, the push to IRV can’t really be about costs unless you chose to ignore this evidence.

So why is it that no one is asking questions about supporting IRV over traditional elections and runoffs even if IRV costs more than those elections?

Report on the 3/12/09 Cary Town Council Public Hearing on IRV

2009-03-14T16:03:00.007-04:00

On 3/12/09, the Cary Town Council held the second meeting where the 2009 IRV pilot was addressed.

There was about a two to one ratio of pro-IRV speakers to anti-IRV speakers. Andy Silver, Perry Woods, Don Hyatt and myself spoke out against IRV. Don Hyatt, a Republican from Cary, used similar words used by John Hollingsworth (former president of the Wake County Progressive Democrats):

"The IRV math doesn't make sense!"

Here is Andy Silver's report:

Chris, Perry, I, and a couple other people spoke against having a second IRV pilot in Perry at the Town Council meeting tonight, and about twice the number spoke for. Then Erv Portman made a motion for IRV, and spoke for it, but Don Frantz gave a devastating account of the problems of counting the ballots in 2007, followed by comments against IRV by 3 or 4 other members. Finally, Erv withdrew his motion and another motion to use plurality to decide elections was passed, meaning only that allowing plurality elections will be discussed again, and I think there will be an open forum on it April 15. This does not rule out IRV, which can be discussed again at the same time (really complicated, in parliamentary terms). Several members wanted to get clearer information from the BOE (not sure whether Wake or state) on possibility of counting the second and third rounds of votes by optical scan - also whether the sorting before those counts could be done by machine.

Some remarks were made about disappointment with the BOEs for not providing analysis and conclusions about the 2007 pilot election - otherwise what is the point of having a pilot?

I thought that the discussion by council members was amazing - could provide an excellent civics lesson on IRV and its pitfalls. I look forward to their posting the video of the proceedings on the town website.

It was clear from talking to some town council members before the meeting that they were impressed by our side's information. The pro IRV people commented mostly on the reported ease of voting, and how Cary voters liked it according to the exit poll. They seemed to feel that our side had the most reasoned arguments.

So at the meeting I wasn't surprised at the pro-IRV arguments I heard. The same old stuff was trotted out - IRV ensures majority winners (it did not do so in Cary), it costs less (not if you keep track of all the costs and don't do it under the table and off the books), and people like it (but do they really understand it?), etc. The Cary Town info officer showed some information was cheaper, but I suspect that was not including other costs that other legislative groups have factored in.

In fact the whole issue that Cary is still claiming that IRV elections are cheaper disturbs me, given that there is overwhelming evidence from many sources (San Francisco, VT, MD, and now Pierce County WA) that IRV elections are more expensive than traditional general elections and runoffs once all the costs are considered. But Cary continues to claim that a single IRV election is always cheaper than a traditional runoff election.

From the http://www.townofcary.org/depts/pio/biennialsurvey/html/2008BiennialSurveyReport.htm

The respondents were next asked their support for using the Instant Runoff Voting Method using a 9-point scale from not supportive at all (1) to very supportive (9). The respondents were also informed the use of the method would save Cary taxpayers approximately $28,000 by not having to hold a physical runoff election.

No one really kept track of all the expenses in the 2007 pilot - including keeping track of the value of all the volunteer work done by FairVote and DemocracyNC that they actually have to keep track of in the 2009 pilot guidelines. So since the pilot was done so haphazardly in 2007, maybe they shouldn't claim that IRV saved money over traditional elections?

They should ask the question a couple of different ways:

If using IRV in a single election cost more than holding a traditional general election plus runoff, would you favor using it in Cary?
If using IRV meant we had to pay for the cost of voter education and an exit poll, and that cost more than holding a general election and runoff election, would you favor using it in Cary?

Another thing that was amazing about this survey was that the results showed there was a difference in how people answered the questions based on age, race, gender, income, education level, and where they lived (apartment, house, condo, etc.) - something that the original exit poll did not reveal. Could that be because Cary actually hired a professional polling organization that didn't have a dog in the hunt?

Respondents who were registered voters were subsequently asked their understanding of the Instant Runoff Voting Method (Table 63). A 9-point scale was used ranging from do not understand at all (1) to understand very well (9). The results indicate there was a level of misunderstanding among the respondents. The mean was 5.83 with 58.6% on the “understand” side (above 5) of the scale and 30.6% on the “not understand” side (Figure 19). This includes 22.0% who indicated they do not understand at all. Overall this indicates a degree of misunderstanding among the respondents.

And here is more interesting information:

There were several subgroups indicating considerably lower levels of understanding including apartment dwellers (3.65), 0-1 year Cary residents (4.10), and those with no internet access (4.62). Also exhibiting a degree of misunderstanding were $30,001-$50,000 income level (4.96), 18-25 age group (5.00), 2-5 year Cary residents (5.25), townhouse/condo dwellers (5.33), 6-10 year Cary residents (5.52), $70,001-$100,000 income level (5.52), and those without a college degree (5.55).

So clearly IRV is not the wonderful thing unaffected by socio-economic boundaries as claimed by FairVote!

But after all that - it was obvious that everything presented by the Town of Cary and IRV supporters dealt with the front-end of elections - the voting. Although a good chunk of people didn't understand IRV, and 25% of voters in the FairVote survey didn't know they were supposed to rank their choices, none of the info dealt with the back-side (or ass-end) of elections - the election administration and vote-counting.

And on this point, having two sitting council members (Frantz and Robison) who attended the 2007 IRV tabulation along with Perry Woods and myself was a major factor in why three other council members (Adcock, Robinson and Smith) had such problems with it.

First off, they didn't like the fact that Cary was once again being asked to be a guinea pig for IRV - why not let someone else do it? There was no information on what was proved in the 2007 pilot - which was something I had been asking to be done even before the election. So if they had no idea what the 2007 pilot proved, why then do another pilot in Cary? Good points for sure!

Then Frantz and Robison stated quite cleary something that I have been stating all along - the IRV tabulation procedures are lousy! As simple as some claimed they were, the Wake BOE couldn't follow them - and this was the council members saying it on the record, not just me. So if they couldn't follow them in 2007 - how could they be sure the same procedures would be used and followed in 2009? The big problems were with the hand-sorting by board memners and volunteers with no overhead projectors, along with the math and calculator errors - and of course the secret non-public recount that no one (not even the candidates) were invited to!

Add to that some last-minute plan to somehow use M-100s scanners to count the hand-sorted votes that had no details to it, and the council members were not very impressed. They wanted more details - and I suspect those details either don't exist yet, or if they do - using the M-100s in that way might not be legal. The Council members weren't impressed by any plan that still used problematic hand-sorting. So they decided to ask for more information from the Wake BOE and deal with it at another meeting in two weeks.

Other than some things that I heard from one particular council member that I couldn't believe he actually said and believed himself, that was the end of IRV at this particular meeting. Then the Council voted 6 to 1 to consider switching to the lower cost plurality election method - which will be cheaper still than using IRV with any method. Especially since IRV only delivers plurality victories based on the total number of votes cast in the 1st round - which if IRV supporters are going to be intellectually honest about it - is all that should count if they want to stick to their claims that IRV is one single election. You can't go changing the denominators of an election to manufacture a majority win if you want to still claim it's a single election.

But this did remind me of the 2007 Raleigh City Council meeting where I went up against Bartlett, Gilbert, Poucher and Hall on IRV. The Raleigh City Council decided to wait two weeks to gather more info, then came back and couldn't even gather support for a motion to use IRV - it died in chambers. When municipal leaders really have the time to study IRV, and they have access to all the information - it goes down in flames.

That is what happened in 2007. And last year when the City of Wilmington was considering a special law to allow them to use IRV (before there was a pilot extension bill), they backed out of it because they found out about the back-side problems as well as the majority failure issues and costliness. It was also because someone wrote the bill to require the use of IRV, not give them the option.

It's just like it says on my 2nd plate at the Flying Saucer: "VAX IS USSR" (anagram)

Chris Telesca

2nd IRV election in Burlington VT does not result in a majority winner!

2009-03-04T09:45:00.003-05:00

Got a posting on another news group from Anthony Lorenzo, Florida IRV advocate who appears to post damn near everything issued by FairVote.

FairVote is the nation's leading pusher for IRV propaganda. Here is a link to the FairVote release in the Huffington Post:

Burlington’s Has Second Highly Successful Instant Runoff Voting Election

This year, with so many viable choices, no candidate won an outright majority of more than 50% of first choices – indeed, plurality winner Kurt Wright won only a third of the initial vote. The election went to an instant runoff tally. In the instant runoff, the candidates with the fewest votes were dropped, including independent Dan Smith and Democrat Andy Montroll, and the field was narrowed to two finalists. In the final instant runoff round, every ballot counted as a single vote for whichever of the two finalists, Progressive mayor Bob Kiss or Republican Kurt Wright, was ranked higher on each ballot. By 8:25 p.m. the IRV tally was completed and Kiss had been re-elected, defeating Wright in the final round by 51.5% to 48.5%.

Notice that the comments for that posting are closed - apparently Rob Richie doesn't want to have people post opposing viewpoints about IRV - or that his claims are false.

The press release claims that the second IRV election in Burlington VT was a success and that incumbent mayor Bob Kiss had a majority win over Republican Kurt Wright 51.5% to 48.5%.

Is that true? Notice that the total number of votes is not listed anywhere in the article. I had to go to the Burlington Free Press to get the numbers for the first round and the final round:

From http://www.wcax.com/Global/story.asp?S=9941176&nav=menu183_2

Initial Round:

* Kurt Wright (R) 2952 - 32%
* Bob Kiss (P) 2585 - 28%
* Andy Montroll (D) 2065 - 23%
* Dan Smith (I) 1307 - 14%

So that is a total of 8909 votes

But in Burlington you need a majority to win and after two rounds of IRV, it was Kiss on top with 51.5 percent to Wright's 48.5.

Final Vote:

* Bob Kiss (P) 4313 - 51.5%
* Kurt Wright (R) 4061 - 48.5%

Wrong!

Bob Kiss had 4313 - or 48.41% of the original 8909, not 51.5%.
Kurt Wright had 4061 - or 45.58% of the original 8909, not 48.5%.

That is because the total number of votes for these two candidates in this round is 8374 - or 535 less than the original 8909 cast in the first round. That is why an IRV win is not a true majority win in all but one or two cases because you never really get a true majority of the first round votes cast.

Here is what happened - according to the Free Press:

According to an unofficial tally, Wright led after the first round of vote counting by 252 votes. After the second-choice votes of the fourth and fifth place finishers — independent Dan Smith and James Simpson of the Green Party — were redistributed, Wright still led by 213.

Wright lost when the 2,554 second-choice votes of third-place finisher Democrat Andy Montroll’s went to Kiss by a 2-1 margin.

How does Andy Montroll get 2,554 second-choice votes when he only got 2065 in the first round?

“I’ve heard so many people say this instant runoff system is flawed,” said John Pijanowski, a Wright supporter, after consoling Wright with a hug. “I hope he challenges this all the way to the highest court.”

Yes - I agree - it seems very flawed. And it does appear to advantage the incumbents because in rounds beyond the first, you might not know anything about the other challengers, so you might vote for the incumbent for no reason other than they already got the job. That is an advantage of incumbency.

On the other hand, had there been a separate runoff election and some campaigning between the top-two candidates, who knows who would have come out on top? While people who preferred Montrol as their first pick chose Kiss 2 to 1 over Wright in their 2nd or 3rd choices, we don't know the actual number of votes, or if they would have really picked Kiss over Wright if the race was only between them. That is precisely why RRO prefers traditional runoff elections OVER preferential balloting like RCV or IRV.

Even some colleges that vote on computers that don't count any of their votes the way we do in the real world admit that you have to take the total number of votes cast in the first round of an IRV race and use that as the threshold - you can't do what Burlington, Cary and so many others have done and have a gradually reducing threshold for your "preferential majority". Even the students at NCSU recognize that you might not have a true majority after all the ballots are exhausted - so you would need to have a second or runoff election. As we should have done in Cary and they should have done in Burlington.

Calling something a majority win when it is not a true majority is called many things - false advertising and fraud are two things that come to mind.

Traditional runoff elections are more democratic even at UNC-CH!

2009-02-21T00:33:00.002-05:00

General Election at UNC-CH:
8736 votes cast
Thomas Edwards had 41%
Jasmin Jones has 21%
presumably there were other candidates who had the other 38% of the vote

Runoff election
9513 votes cast - more than in the general election
Jasmin Jones had a real majority win - 51.3% to 48.7 for Edwards.

So let me see if I get this straight - at UNC, the runoff election not only had more turnout than the general election a week before, but the second place finisher in the general election beat out the first place finisher from the general election.

How would IRV have made this more democratic - except to give the students more time to "study"? In IRV, the first place finisher goes on to win the "instant" part of the runoff in about 99% of the elections. In traditional runoff elections, the second place finisher in the general election goes onto win 33% of the time.

Perhaps this was a good lesson in democracy for these students as they go forward in life?

Here are several things we can be certain of:

1) had there been an IRV election, more voters wouldn't have taken part in the election as they did in the runoff. 9513 votes in the runoff is more than 8736 in the general election.

2) with 4 other candidates in the election besides Edwards and Jones, it's possible that many other students would have voted for two of the other three candidates who weren't in the top two, and there votes wouldn't have been counted in a top two IRV election. At least all those people who showed up for the runoff cast really "meaningful" votes on their ballots.

3) there was a real majority winner that is simple and clear for all students to understand. The same cannot be said for the Cary IRV election - where even Don Frantz (who won the election) knows he didn't win by a 50% plus one vote majority as Cary voters were told would happen. Hell - even the NCSU students who voted to go with RCV for their student elections have a requirement for a threshold for the election and recognize that a majority might not be reached after all the ballots are exhausted - which might require a traditional runoff election to come up with a majority winner.

You cannot make the assumption that voters would have gone for Ms. Jones as #2 because the 4 other candidates supported her in the runoff precisely because those 4 other candidates didn't support Ms. Jones until AFTER the general election. Just like Vicki Maxwell garnered the majority of the support of the voters who cast 2nd and 3rd choice votes in Cary, she never got enough votes to overcome the margin Don Frantz had after the 1st round. That is exactly the problem that occurs in damn near every IRV race - the 1st column winner goes onto win because no one can overcome their initial lead.

Traditional runoff elections where the 2nd place finisher in the general election beats the 1st place general election leader 33% of the time is more democratic. That is a conclusion based on FACTS!

That is typically something that can't be done before the election - since you really only can make your 2nd and 3rd choices based on circumstances that might be different after the election DEPENDING ON THE FINISHING ORDER - something we hope we don't know before the election.

If you need to cast a second vote, you can decide who to vote for based on what is said after the 1st election. You never get that with IRV/RCV.

If Jasmine Jones had not decided to accept their platforms, they might have voted for the other guy - or they might have stayed home. But I think this is a good sign. With the Internet and text messaging and many other advances in communication, there is no excuse to claim that voter turnout is always lower in the traditional runoff. That is like saying that women won't vote because they couldn't vote 100 years ago. Times are changing, and many minority candidates embrace runoff elections instead of fearing them when they were a tool to lock them out of an election. Minority candidates like Jasmine Jones - an African American female.

The same thing happened in NC in two other 2007 municipal elections - one in Rocky Mount and another in Wilmington. In each one, an African-American candidate came from second place in the general election to beat the more favored white male candidate in a traditional runoff election that had greater turnout than the general election. This is also something that couldn't happen with IRV!

Chris Telesca

http://www.dailytarheel.com/news/university/it_s_jones_by_a_hair-1.1483295

It’s Jones by a hair

249 votes decide president runoff election with unprecedented turnout

Blake Frieman and Elisabeth Gilbert, Staff Writers

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Published: Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Updated: Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Jasmin Jones knew it was close. The Board of Elections had just announced that only 249 votes separated the winner and loser in the student body president race.

So when she found out she had come back from a huge deficit in last week’s election to win the presidency in a runoff, Jones and her campaign staff jumped up in an explosion of cheers.

Jones received 51.3 percent of the record 9,513 votes cast — an unprecedented turnout.

Her opponent Thomas Edwards earned 48.7 percent.

Ryan Morgan, chairman of the Board of Elections, expressed the significance of such a large voter turnout for the next president’s upcoming work.

“Whoever wins will have an incredible mandate to get done what the students want,” Morgan said before the results were announced.

Jones’ victory comes a week after she received only about half as many votes as Edwards in the general election. He received 41 percent of the 8,736 total votes cast. Jones received 21 percent.

Jones now must assemble her cabinet, which includes the vice president, treasurer and committee chairmen. They will take office April 7.

Acknowledging last week that she would have to put in another long week of work, Jones also admitted that she was just happy to be in the runoff.

“I think we were out there more, longer and later,” Jones said Tuesday when asked about her additional campaigning efforts throughout the last week.

She said she felt it was her staff’s attitude that was a major factor in her victory.

“We stayed positive,” she said. “We just encouraged students to get out there and vote. It didn’t matter for who — just vote.”

Over the past week, she was a staple in the Pit. She and her staff wore their trademark neon visors and spawned many an impromptu dance battle.

While she said her campaign team put in a lot of work, they certainly were not alone in their efforts.

Jones garnered the unified support of all four of last week’s defeated candidates — Ron Bilbao, Michael Betts, Ashley Klein and Matt Wohlford — after they held a joint strategy meeting Saturday.

“I feel like their support was a large portion of our success,” Jones said. “I am overwhelmed with gratitude.”

In multiple e-mails sent out to all students who voted in last week’s election, the quartet encouraged their original followers to vote for Jones the second time around.

They cited her openness to accept their platform points as an example of her ability to collaborate well with others, a trait they all agreed would be important for the next student body president to have.

“Honest to God, I can’t believe that actually worked. I can’t believe we actually pulled it off,” Bilbao said.

“She took down the machine. She took down the Terminator. It’s the David versus Goliath.”

Edwards was visibly shaken by the results but received a standing ovation from his campaign workers.

“Go finish my physics lab for tomorrow,” Edwards answered after the announcement, when asked what he intended to do next.

He said the results did not change his feelings about his campaign.

“I really think that we went into this thinking that we did everything that we could,” Edwards said.

Contact the University Editor at udesk@unc.edu.

Georgetown University ditches Instant Runoff Voting - cites problems

2009-02-21T00:24:00.002-05:00

So tell me again that everyone likes IRV and has no problems with it? Even at colleges that don't conduct their elections with the same degree of scrutiny and verification as regular elections in the real world have problems with it.

Jesus - at least these college students realize IRV is not perfect. How much do you wanna bet that the Hoya's would know that 1401 votes is not half of 3022 votes? If students at Georgetown don't understand IRV, what makes you think some highschool dropout with literacy problems will get IRV - or understand how the votes are counted?

Now I happen to think that a traditional top-two runoff election works better than IRV, because at least it gives people a chance to elect a candidate with a majority win. But plurality is better than IRV all around because IRV is so much more complicated than plurality elections, which in all but one case IRV delivers the win to the highest vote getter in the first round of the election. In reality, an IRV "majority" is nothing more than a "preferential majority" which is another way of saying "plurality"

http://www.thehoya.com/node/17665

New Voting System for GUSA

Presidential Election to Feature Plurality System

By
Katie Kettle,
Kathleen Nahill,
Elizabeth Rowe
| Jan 29 2009 |
GUSA

On Tuesday night the GUSA Senate voted to change the method of voting in the presidential election from instant runoff voting to a plurality system. This change comes in response to controversy over last year’s election, which resulted in the selection of Pat Dowd (SFS ’09) as Student Association president and James Kelly (COL ’09) as vice president.

Instant runoff voting was adopted by the Election Commission in 2006 after five years in which no GUSA ticket won the majority of student votes. IRV is a system in which voters rank candidates in order of preference. If no ticket receives a majority of the first-place votes, the ticket receiving the lowest number of votes in that round is eliminated, and these votes are redistributed to the remaining tickets based on what the voter indicated as his or her second choice. This process continues, with votes for eliminated candidates being redistributed based on the voter’s next choice, until one ticket receives a majority.

Last year, the senate rejected the results of the presidential election, citing problems with the IRV system. A second election was held with only four of the seven original tickets on the ballot. D.W. Cartier (COL ’09) and Andrew Rugg (COL ’09), who won the first election with 51.2 percent of the vote, were defeated by Dowd and Kelly in the second election.

GUSA Vice Speaker Brian Wood (COL ’09) explained the need for the bylaw change.

“I got a lot of calls [about the last election],” he said. “I have gotten a lot of resistance to instant runoff voting.”
Senate Speaker Reggie Greer (COL ’09) said he supports the plurality system, where the ticket that receives the most votes wins the election, regardless of whether or not that ticket receives the majority of the votes.

“I like it,” he said. “It’ll make it easier for people to understand the election.”

“I understand the founding fathers of the senate had a different vision, and I agreed with them at the time,” Greer said. “But this way we have one vote, one person.”

Other changes included an increase in campaign spending limits, raising the limit from $200 to $300, which includes all donations and expenses incurred over the course of the campaign by anyone campaigning on behalf of a candidate. The role of the campaign staff has been written out of the bylaws, and the funding rule now applies to anyone contributing on behalf of a candidate.

Frederick Moore (COL ‘09) and Will Dreher (SFS ‘09) were also approved as the new election commissioners. They will work with the Election Commission to oversee election standards this spring.

2 out of 3 Pierce County RCV "winners" don't have a true majority

2008-12-07T19:37:00.008-05:00

Peirce County WA claims to have winners in their RCV races - but were they real majority wins?

It doesn't appear so in more than one race. Here's what happened in the County Executive race:

	Round 1
	votes	%	transfer
Mike Lonergan	45330	15.15%	-45330
Pat McCarthy	79235	26.49%	12973
Calvin Goings	69052	23.08%	8375
Shawn Bunney	105057	35.12%	13633
Write-In	458	0.15%	-458
Total	299132
Exhausted by Over Votes	532	0.17%
Under Votes	13107	4.19%
total under and over	13639	4.36%
TOTAL BALLOTS	312771

Out of a total of 312,771 ballots cast, there were 299,132 votes that were counted. No one got over 50% of the votes. So they dropped out the Mike Lonergan and the Write-In votes, and they counted the 2nd column votes for the remaining three candidates. 10,807 fewer votes were cast in the 2nd column than in the first.

	Round 2
	votes	%	% Round 1
Mike Lonergan	0
Pat McCarthy	92208	31.98%	30.83%
Calvin Goings	77427	26.85%	25.88%
Shawn Bunney	118690	41.17%	39.68%
Write-In	0
Total	288325

N9w in the first % column for round 2, they are only calculating percentages for the total runoff 288,325 votes being counted only in this round - not of the 299,132 votes counted in the first round. Using either method, no one still has over 50% of the vote. So they proceed to round 3, where 30,494 were cast than in the 1st column.

	Round 3
	votes	%	% Round 1
Mike Lonergan
Pat McCarthy	136346	50.75%	45.58%
Calvin Goings	0
Shawn Bunney	132292	49.25%	44.23%
Write-In
Total	268638

They are obviously only counting the votes of the top remaining candidates, but they are using the votes of the people who voted for these two candidates from the 1st and 2nd columns. Using the totals for these two remaining candidates, one obviously has a majority of the remaining votes - 50.75% - but this candidate only has 45.58% votes of the original 299,132 cast. Not enough votes to have been declared a winner in the 1st column.

This is the big problem with people claiming IRV ensures a majority win in one election instead of two. if you don't have enough vote to get a majority win in the 1st column, all you are ever going to have is a larger plurality win.

Is a larger plurality win really worth the extra money and confusion? 63% of voters who answered a survey said "no".

But interestingly enough, the top-vote getter in the beginning lost in the end in an IRV election. That is like the 2nd time this has happened in a little over 20 IRV/RCV races. This happens about 33% of the time in traditional runoff elections.

Which do you think is more democratic?

And it happened again in County Assessor-Treasurer race. With the same 312K ballots cast, there were 262,447 votes for 6 candidates plus some write-ins. That is almost 40 thousand voters fewer voters than those who votes in the County Executive race. And I thought IRV/RCV increased voter turnout?

In order to get a true majority, the winner would have needed 131,224 votes. The person who led the race in all 4 rounds "won" the RCV race in the 4th round with 98,366 - 32,858 short of a true majority.

But the County Council, District #2 race was interesting. There were only three candidates, plus a few write-ins. That race only went two rounds - with presumably only the second column votes counted. Out of 43,661 ballots, there were exactly 40,000 votes cast. This makes calculating the majority win threshold very easy - exactly 20,000 votes. After dropping out the write-in and the lowest candidate on the ballot, in the second round the top vote getter Joyce McDonald got 19,967 votes - or 49.92% of the vote. 33 votes short of the majority.

The second-place vote Al Rose getter got12,317 votes. The third candidate Carolyn Merrival and the runoff candidates got the remaining 7716 votes. And even if all of these 7716 voters votes for Al Rose, there is no way Rose could ever beat the top vote getter McDonald - so why did they even bother to count the race - unless they really hoped McDonald would cross the real 50% threshold. Well, that is what happened. McDonald ended up with 21,078 votes - for an honest 52.70% win - not the 55.26% "preferential majority" win from only the votes of the top two vote getters.

Just like here in NC, the second-place actually got more votes in the 2nd column of the ballot than those received by the top vote-getter. But in this race, it was 4747 to 1111. And do the numbers 40,000, 4747, and 1111 bother anyone?

So in two of the three Pierce County RCV races, the first column top vote getter ended up winning. And in the last race, there was no way the second-place finisher could have overtaken the leader, so why bother with RCV? Even though Rose got 4 2nd column votes to every one received by McDonald, Rose couldn't overcome the 1st column lead McDonald had going into the second column. Do the math - there was no way that Rose could have overtaken McDonald with an RCV race.

But had there been an traditional runoff election among McDonald and Rose, there is a good chance that the people who voted for the third-place and write-in candidates would have overwhelmingly voted for Rose.

This is one way that you could avoid a traditional runoff election by re-writing the statutes to allow someone ahead by a large enough margin to not need a runoff election. even if they didn't have a majority win. Because so far, IRV didn't give a true majority win in 2 out of 3 Pierce County RCV races. If you are just going to declare a plurality win a majority win by ENRON-style accounting, why not just lower the threshold?

Chris Telesca

63% of Pierce County WA voters don't like Ranked Choice Voting that cost $4.14 per registered voter

2008-12-07T17:57:00.007-05:00

http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/government/story/559306.html

Results are in: 63 percent disliked Ranked Choice Voting
Auditor defends ranked choice
JOSEPH TURNER; joe.turner@thenewstribune.com
Published: December 6th, 2008 12:05 AM | Updated: December 6th, 2008 01:45 AM

90,738 Pierce County voters answered a questionnaire included with their ballots that asked, “Did you like this new Ranked Choice Voting method?”
The results:
Yes: 29,206 (32%)
No: 56,751 (63%)
Undecided: 4,781 (5%)

Pierce County spent a lot of money on a new voting method for a few county offices in November’s election, and most voters didn’t like it a bit.

Auditor Pat McCarthy said ranked-choice voting will cost county taxpayers about $1.7 million, which is half of the overall $3.4 million it cost to put on the 2008 general election.

Although Pierce County voters changed the county charter last year to allow the new voting method, it appears they’ve changed their collective mind. Two of three voters who responded to a survey were opposed to the concept.

“It was overwhelming,” McCarthy told members of the state Senate Government Operations and Elections Committee on Friday. “The majority did not like it.”

That was based on nearly 91,000 voters who filled out a questionnaire that accompanied mail-in ballots.

Ranked-choice voting, sometimes called instant runoff voting, allowed voters to indicate their first, second and third choice in a race. If no candidate gets more than 50 percent of the total number of votes in the first round of counting, the second choice on ballots of the last-place candidate are then counted. That continues until one candidate finally gets a majority.

McCarthy, who won a close election in a four-way race for county executive, joined election officials from Yakima and Chelan counties to give state lawmakers a report on the election. The state used online voter registration, and 37 of the 39 counties – all but King and Pierce – conducted their elections entirely by mail.

Pierce was the only county to use ranked-choice voting, and for only a few county races. Pierce voters got a second, conventional ballot to vote for president, governor, Congress and local races.

McCarthy said she considered the election “an amazing success,” even though she didn’t care much for the new method. She said the computer system and algorithms worked and that most voters understood how to fill out the ballots.

State Sen. Pam Roach, R-Auburn, a committee member, took issue with that assessment.

“How can you say it was a success when voters didn’t know who the executive was for two weeks?” Roach asked. “That absolutely was a disaster.”

Processing ranked-choice ballots did slow down the tally, McCarthy said, but the method had nothing to do with how close the races were. Her own race for executive wasn’t decided until three weeks. But McCarthy pointed out that a couple of legislative races were so close that even using conventional voting methods, they required a recount and weren’t decided until earlier this week.

The decision to adopt the new voting method was approved by 53 percent of voters. McCarthy said she thinks voters were eager to switch to something else because they were still angry about the previous election when they were forced to pick a Democratic, Republican or other political party’s slate of candidates.

She said she hopes the County Council will give voters a chance to reconsider the charter amendment that created ranked-choice voting.

Susan Eidenschink, treasurer of the Tacoma-Pierce County League of Women Voters, blamed the long lines at the polls on Election Day on McCarthy’s decision to have fewer polling places.

“We’re interested in seeing it expanded,” she said of ranked choice. “We feel it definitely deserves more of a trial than this one election.”

Krist Novoselic, chairman of FairVote, echoed that sentiment. The former Nirvana bassist is now a local government official in rural Wahkiakum County and said he’s worked to get Memphis, Tenn., and Telluride, Colo., to try ranked-choice voting.

Committee chairwoman Sen. Darlene Fairley, D-Lake Forest Park, said she’s been listening for years to people and groups who are supporters of the new voting method, but she has no interest in seeing it extend beyond the borders of Pierce County.

“I’m with those folks who said they were confused,” Fairley said.

“This sounds just insane,” said Sen. Eric Oemig, D-Kirkland, a committee member.

Joseph Turner: 253-597-8436

blogs.thenewstribune.com/politics

http://www.co.pierce.wa.us/pc/abtus/ourorg/aud/Elections/Archives/feb08/results.htm

Let's see - Pierce County had 411,103 registered voters for the November elections. Divide $3.4 million by 411,103 gives you $8.27 per registered voter. RCV cost them $1.7 million or $4.14 per registered voter.

Using the number of registered voters in NC obtained from the SBOE at
http://www.sboe.state.nc.us/, multiply 6,286,207 registered voters times $4.14 and that gives you almost $26 million to do IRV in North Carolina in statewide races - not free or even as cheap at IRV supporters have claimed.

This is even more expensive than the cost estimates from three MD legislature fiscal studies ranging from $3.08 to over $3.50 per registered voter - not including costs for software and hardware that Peirce County supposedly used for their RCV race.

So how is doing a separate statewide runoff at $3.5 to $5 million across the state more expensive than doing IRV/RCV?

Chris Telesca

Raleigh, NC overwhelmingly endorses Approval voting!

2008-09-04T10:35:00.007-04:00

Met up with some friends last night at the Flying Saucer. It was "glass night" and you could vote for a presidential candidate (Obama or McCain) by buying their glasses. You could buy more than one, so I guess this was "approval voting" night at the Saucer - no IRV for these people.

The voting commenced at 7PM, and Obama had the lead until we left, varying between 58% to 60%. A crew of Obama volunteers came in. A McCain team came in, consisting of a rather constipated-looking young man and two Cindy McCain clones. We were surrounded by McCain supporters - some of whom couldn't believe that two small business owners (Jesse and myself) could possibly be Obama supporters.

Some Libertarians came in and were pissed there were no LIB glasses, or write-ins. You could recognize them because one looked like he lived in a cabin in the woods for years, and the other wore a "Munger for Gov" t-shirt.

When we left at 8:50, it was 223 Obama to 142 McCain. At closing time last night (verified by me by phone), and the result was 251 Obama to 187 McCain - Obama lead through the night and defeated McCain by 57%-43%

I am taking that as a good sign - and an endorsement of approval voting that produced an actual majority winner with no one arguing about it! No one needed a calculator to figure out who won, there was no complicated sorting of glasses, where some of them might break (so they wouldn't get counted), and no calculator error. No one came in and faked an accent or asked leading questions to get you to buy a glass or two or more.

This was a ringing endorsement of Approval Voting over traditional first past the post and IRV since no one objected to being able to cast as many votes as they wanted to. Money was not a factor in the Obama victory - no deep-pocket Republican came in and bought enough glasses for themselves or for other voters to keep up with Obama - there was just not enough interest in McCain to justify that sort of election trickery.

And even though there were only two glasses, there was plenty of choice to go around - you bought the glass, but could put any one of 200+ beers in the glass. So there were no crybabies bitching about not having choice or how people couldn't vote their hopes and dreams. Everybody supported the candidate and drank the beer of their choice!

Interesting pro-IRV site that talks about problems with centrallized processing of IRV ballots

2008-09-02T02:07:00.004-04:00

Did more searching of google using "IRV sucks" as my search criteria, and this popped up - http://www.braindoll.net/vote/ for general site, and this particular link for hand counting IRV: http://www.braindoll.net/vote/#Technicalities%20(or:%20I%27m%20a%20geek).5

5.5. How could you do a hand count for IRV?
If you have all the ballots in one place, it's easy. Separate the ballots into counted piles according to the first choice marked. If no one pile is 50%, take the smallest pile, cross out the first choice on those ballots, and redistribute. If any have no choices left, put them in an "exhausted" pile. Continue the process until one candidate's pile is over 50% of the ballots NOT in the "exhausted" pile.

The problem is that you have to have all the ballots in one place. You can transmit them physically or electronically, but you need every individual ballot. However you transmit them, it's an opportunity for fraud or incompetence.

If you don't have the ballots in one place, you can do the first count, transmit the results to a central location, wait until everyone else finishes and the results are all in, recieve the word of who to eliminate, recount those ballots, retransmit the results, wait again... It's a lot of chatter back and forth, and a lot of waiting for the slowest counter, not just once, but several times.

This is one of the biggest problems that I see with IRV in North Carolina or anywhere else - the fact that vote counting will now rely on central processing, not just central reporting. This seems to make sense for paper ballots, but here's where it gets much more difficult if not IMPPOSSIBLE....how do you do the manual counts, recounts and audits of IRV elections?

5.11. So using the same mathematical language in Arrow's theorem, what are the flaws in IRV? In VOTE-123?

Both of them have problems with independence of irrelevant alternatives (IIAC). This means that they can be manipulated by controlling the pool of candidates. It also means that the voters can change the results by strategically ignoring (down-ranking) certain candidates who have no chance.

5.12. Wait a minute. Up above you say that under VOTE-123 "You can always vote honestly, period." But here you seem to be contradicting that by saying that no voting system can be perfect that way.

OK, you caught me. There's a theorem related to Arrow's theorem (the 'Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem') that shows that there is no voting system without some strategy - that is, some situation where an omniscient voter could vote dishonestly and thus increase their satisfaction. But just as you can mathematically prove that there's always a situation like that, you can mathematically prove that (especially given the right tiebreaker) under VOTE-123 it is always too risky to try it. Specifically:

Strategic voting only works under VOTE-123 if, either before or after the strategic changing of votes, there is a "Condorcet tie" - what I've been calling a three-way tie. This situation is very rare - as I said, it involves nearly-balanced voting blocs which not only disagree about which candidate is better, but also about which candidates are similar to each other. Most especially, it is very, very hard to predict accurately using polls. Most people will never make the effort to reliably tell pollsters who their second choice will be, and in such a closely-balanced situation the tiniest polling error could throw off the poll's results. And if you switch around your vote based on a poll that's wrong, you're more likely to end up hurting than helping yourself - especially since your plans will probably leak out and people can plan a counterstrategy.

So, you can still say it categorically: under VOTE-123, there is never a good reason to vote strategically.

And from the same source - http://www.braindoll.net/vote/#The%20politics%20of%20PV%20(or:%20Get%20Involved).5.2 they claim that FairVoteSF coughed up $87,000 to push the pro-IRV Proposition A in 2002.

2.5.2. San Francisco, 2002: IRV vs. Lobbyists
For a more modern case, I plan to do an analysis of the San Francisco vote on Prop A (to use IRV in city elections) which passed in 2001. There were two committees against Prop A: one small committee of honest skeptics, and one that was run by Jim Sutton, the guy who's the lawyer for all the big-money campaigns in San Francisco. He used his whole bag of shady tricks to run a last-minute lying smear campaign without having to disclose anything about his funding until long after the election is over. (Once his funding disclosures come out in August 2002 and I have time to analyze them, I'll give you the details.)

Preliminary numbers from the Department of Ethics Forms 460: "No on A", a small committee formed by some people honestly suspicious of that the SF department of elections couldn't handle IRV, had a total budget of about $500.

It's easy to understand why some people felt that San Francisco Dept. of Elections couldn't handle IRV. One posting on here from the FairVote site shows they had doubts that SF could handle IRV in 2004! And it really hasn't gotten any better - between the reports that San Francisco still doesn't have a certified method to tabulate IRV votes, the civil grand jury that states there are still voter education problems after 4 IRV elections, as well as the month's-long IRV tabulation - they still have much to work out after 4 IRV elections.

Do we really want to buy into all that hassle? We must investigate cheaper and less complicated alternatives to IRV to deal with the occasional need for runoff elections. San Francisco has proved IRV isn't the way for NC to do it.

"San Franciscans for Voter Rights", an anti-IRV PAC formed by a big-time downtown lobbyist, declared in the last 16 days before the election to try to get around reporting requirements, sent out lying hit pieces using about $77,000. This originally came entirely from downtown businesses, most of it came funnelled through big PACs (such as $61,000 from the "committee on JOBS") which have a long term reputation for backing corporate-written bills (for instance, insurance industry bills, etc.).

If you add up the other contributions of those same large PACs to various "voter guide" organizations (the "so-and-so Democratic club", etc.) which all conveniently had a "No on A" stance, there are over $100,000 EXTRA (in addition to the amounts above). There were obviously other issues on the ballot, but given the way many of these "voter guides" highlighted their measure A "NO" with bold face, I think that it's fair to count at least 10% of this as anti-A money; so count this as another $10,000

Add in 1/2 of the $32,000 staff expenses, January-March, for "San Francisco Chamber of Commerce 21st Century Fund", which although it is supposed to be a "general" lobbying organization took up no other issues in this race: another $16,000

Total anti-A money: over $100,000

For balance, the pro-a money:

"Fair Vote SF", a pro-A group, got $87,000 from small contributions from individuals, most (about $55,000) of it funneled through national or state PACs that see voting reform as important (primarily Center for Voting and Democracy).

Using the same analysis as above (what else did the pro-A PACs do with their money?) there is no extra money to report. Obviously there were pro-A "voter guides", but these voter guides did not get money from clearly pro-A PAC's. Not surprising: generally, the forces of good have simpler accounting practices than the forces of evil. (For full disclosure - the CVD did give $2,713 to "Matt Gonzalez for Supervisor")

Total pro-A money: $87,000

Pro IRV sources in FL claim that FairVote contributed thousands if not tens of thousands in money and staff time to push IRV in Sarasota. I wonder how much they spent to push IRV in general and in Cary and Hendersonville in particular that never got included in the cost of implementing IRV?

They knew in Vertmont back in 2006 that IRV wasn't all it was cracked up to be!

2008-09-01T19:04:00.004-04:00

After all the depressing stuff on Gustav today, I decided to have some fun. I googled "IRV sucks" and came up with some fascinating stuff. One of them was this entry in the Vermont Daily Briefing from May 2, 2006 - http://vermontdailybriefing.com/?p=270

Here is an excerpt:

During Burlington’s last mayoral election — the city’s first use of Instant Runoff Voting — Political Science professor Tony Gierzynski mobilized an army of exit-pollers and gathered massive amounts of data.

This data he then crunched. Crunched it real good.

It took a great deal of time and foresight, but the results were utterly unique: no one had done such a study anywhere in America.

This is true - they sure as hell haven't done anything like that in NC. And I don't see anything in the study where they tolerate a paid IRV advocate doing the survey work, both deviating from their instructions and faking a southern accent.

So I went to the survey - located at http://www.uvm.edu/~vlrs/IRV.pdf and, as usual, I went to the end where the juicy stuff is. Here is some of it:

The relationship between education levels and awareness and understanding of the IRV ballot in our exit poll is similar to the findings of the exit poll conducted during San Francisco’s recent experience with IRV (see discussion above) and is one of the main concerns with this method of voting. As the experience of Florida in the 2000 presidential election demonstrated, certain voters are likely to have enough difficulty with complex ballots so that their votes do not end up counting. The percentages of people who were unaware of IRV or found the ballot confusing in the Burlington election were low even for the lowest levels of education (undoubtedly due to the City of Burlington’s effort to educate voters on IRV). The number of confused voters represented by those percentages, however, would be much greater in elections in larger cities or in statewide contests. Additionally, the higher level of voter turnout in statewide elections means that a larger proportion of the electorate would be composed of groups that, according to both our results and those of the San Francisco exit poll, had more difficulty with IRV, namely, those with lower levels of education. To illustrate, the percent of eligible voters casting ballots for governor in Vermont in 2004 was 65.1%25 compared to the 30.3% turnout in the 2006 mayoral election in Burlington. Only 12% of voters in Burlington’s mayoral election had a high school degree or less, while 26% of voters in the 2004 presidential election had a high school degree or less.26 Because they represent the group that had the most difficulty with IRV, a higher percentage of voters with a high school degree or less would undoubtedly inflate the percentage, as well as the number of those uninformed about IRV and/or confused by it. In other words, there is a good possibility that the difference among voters based on education levels would be intensified in an election with a higher voter turnout.

Here is a place where IRV advocates point to success in IRV elections, yet a study done in their own version of the Institute of Government shows there is a good possibility that IRV could cause voters with less education to become confused by the IRV ballot.

So what did that report conclude?

The exit poll results do, however, raise a couple of concerns about IRV. There appear to be both education and partisan differences in the reaction to IRV. The relative lack of awareness and confusion voiced by those with lower levels of education suggests that IRV has the potential to engender some inequities in the electoral process based on class. The partisan divide found on IRV in Burlington — Progressives and Democrats liking the system, Republicans disliking it — poses a problem for the perceived fairness of elections and the legitimacy of those elected.

While a sound argument can be made that IRV functions in a manner to select candidates based on majority preferences, the minority party may see it as an unfair changing of the rules of the game that deprives them of a chance of winning when their opposition is in such disarray as to offer multiple candidates. Were any of the potential voting paradoxes discussed above to arise in an election (especially if a Republican candidate had the lead in the 1st round and lost after the second round) there would surely be attacks on the legitimacy of that election in the press. Then there will be a real test of the public's understanding of IRV.

Other questions remain to be answered regarding the effect of IRV elections. It is unknown how IRV affects campaigning. It may ensure more congenial elections since candidates would not want to alienate any potential 2nd place votes from supporters of their opponents. But, it could also make it so candidates play down their policy differences for the very same reason—not wanting to alienate any potential 2nd place votes—making it less clear to the voters what their choice really means in terms of governance. Nasty campaigning, it should also be noted, could simply go underground as it may have in the Burlington mayoral contest. It also remains to be seen how IRV affects voters’ decisions. Despite claims of its supporters to the contrary, IRV does allow for, and even encourages strategic voting (as opposed to pure preference-based choices). What voters’ strategy would be and how it might differ from their calculus in the typical single-vote system used in the US is unknown, as is the way that such differences might affect the outcome of elections.

In the end, elections are about building governing majorities. IRV offers an opportunity to have an electoral majority without doing the hard work and compromise necessary to build it. How that dynamic might affect the ability of elected officials to govern is a whole other matter to be seen.

Recent readings of mine suggest that IRV could exacerbate the problems we are having getting a census government - it could lead to a "balkanization" of American politics and make matters worse, not better. Why should we experiment with a voting method that might make matters worse, not better.

That is why this voting activist doesn't favor experimenting with votes using IRV to see if it can be made to work. The laudable goals of IRV could be achieved without all the risks that even the NC State Board of Elections knew were posed by IRV way back in March 2007 - even before the first communities were considering taking part in the first round of the pilot program.

Partisan Primary and Election without IRV (potential of three elections):	$291,920
Partisan Primary and Election with IRV (two elections and IRV education costs):	$208,290
Non-Partisan Plurality without IRV (one election):	$97,306
Non-Partisan Plurality with IRV (one election plus IRV education costs):	$112,409
Non-Partisan Election and Runoff without IRV (two elections):	$193,187
Non-Partisan Election and Runoff with IRV (one election plus IRV education costs):	$112,409
Non-Partisan Primary and Election without IRV (two elections):	$193,187
Non-Partisan Primary and Election with IRV (one election plus IRV education costs):	$112,409