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

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

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.

Raleigh, NC overwhelmingly endorses Approval voting!

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

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!

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.

MASS IRV koolaid drinker claims to know that IRV was a success here in NC!

Folks - there are so many people out there who claim to know that IRV worked really well in NC who were nowhere near Cary when they cast or counted votes. Here's a blog from a guy in Mass - http://www.somerville.org - who claims to know how well IRV worked from videos created by FairVote and the exit poll managed by Bob hall from DemocracyNC and done by people ranging from real volunteers to the former IRV America Director from FairVote who admitted faking a southern accent when she interviewed voters (I believe it's her voice and/or arm in the video).

So I responded to his first posting and he replied to that. I tried to respond, but was unable to do so. Check out http://www.somervilleirv.org/?p=3#comment-18 and see what he wrote in response to me and see my response he wouldn't let me post to his blog.

Greg - my statements are not misleading or false. There was no objective measure of IRV success in North Carolina that was established before the elections. That is one reason why the Raleigh City Council didn't want to pilot IRV - there was concern that we wouldn't know if it worked or not.

And actually my truthful and hard-hitting arguments against IRV have been very successful where both sides of the issue have been presented to decision makers before they took their vote. In Raleigh, where the pro-IRV presenters outnumbered me 4 to 1 (and greater odds if you counted the pounds), no one in the Raleigh City Council wanted to pilot IRV after I got done. When both sides were heard, IRV went down in flames.

So pro-IRV people started to sneak around and talk to elected officials behind closed doors for weeks and months before they took a vote. So of course they voted to use IRV - they only heard one set of facts. That is how they got Cary and Hendersonville to go along.

Greg, you seem like an intelligent fellow even though you have obviously drunk the IRV kool-aid. It two educated and intelligent fellows like us can't even agree on how to count IRV votes and if IRV was a success, how do you think that the less educated and less literate voters in my state or other states will be able understand IRV? They won't understand it and if they don't understand it they won't bother to rank candidates if they do show up, or they won't show up at all. IRV is already turning into a math literacy test for college educated voters - it will be even worse for the voters who will show up to the polling places and not know they were expected to rank their choices in the first place.

The program didn't replace the runoff - it was a one-time experiment. Cary will have a traditional elections in 2009 unless they vote to pilot IRV again in 2009. Since Julie Robison, who originally supported IRV, not longer supports IRV, I doubt they will be able to get the votes to pilot it again.

And I never mentioned that the program was extended due to its success. Please do not put words in my mouth. IRV supporters claimed it was a success. Legislators never had the chance to fully debate how IRV worked in 2007. But it should be mentioned that even before the Cary Town Council voted to participate in the pilot, the NC State Board of Election knew in March 2007 that IRV would not be used in the 2008 election because it posed risks. What those risks are, they never said. And unfortunately for NC voters, most of our legislators were too incurious to ask what those risks were. The amendment to extend the pilot was submitted at the last minute, with no time to fully study the 2007 pilot.

Now you are deliberately trying to confuse people. You can't say that IRV ensures a majority winner of the non-exhausted ballots because if there are ANY non-exhausted ballots you still have to count them. You can't declare a winner if you still have votes to count!

You are wrong with your assertion that absentee and no-shows are not counted when determining the majority. Either IRV determines a majority winner by a number that is determined by the first column votes (a number which doesn't change because it has to include all the votes cast for the top two in the first column) or you are manufacturing a majority out of a plurality win by not counting all the ballots cast.

You can't compare people who don't cast second or third round choices to people who don't show up for a traditional runoff because in that race you don't carry forward the votes from the first election. And you are wrong in stating that claiming that ballots exhausted after the first or second columns aren't counted in the denominator when determining the majority - that is how it's done in San Francisco. You can not not use 3022 as a denominator in determining the majority because you are carrying the first column votes forward. If you kept the votes for the top two and changed the denominator, you really are advocating ENRON-style vote counting methods. What would you have the denominator be at the end of the second and third column tabulations?

The majority in the Cary race was based on the 3022 ballots cast in that race. A non-exhausted ballot is one that can still be counted. By the time Don Frantz got his 1401 votes, all the votes had been counted - there were no more that could be counted for him. But he still didn't have the 50% plus one vote (or 1512 votes) out of 3022 in order for him to win.

Going by your thought process, had there been no winner at the end of the first round, and only one total second or third column vote cast for either one of the two remaining candidates, you would still have a winner with only one more vote cast. You are essentially taking a plurality and manufacturing it into a preferential majority.

But one thing that I don't get about IRV supporters is that most won't admit that IRV does not always ensure a majority winner in all elections. Some do - and they did that in the legislation to use IRV for student elections at NCSU. Their IRV bill can be found at http://students.ncsu.edu/sgims/archive-87/bill/efficient-fair-elections-act-1064.html

§103. Requirements for Enactment of Preferential Balloting.
All statutes or other acts enacting preferential balloting for an elective contest shall indicate one of the following preferential balloting methodologies to be used:
(a) “IRV Majority” is §201 Instant Run-off Voting conducted with a §301 Full Preference Ballot. It is applicable to single winner races requiring majority election.

§301. Full Preference Ballot.
On any elective contest using a Full Preference Ballot, to cast a legal ballot the voter must rank all choices presented on the ballot. If a write-in allowed in the contest and used by the voter, the voter must rank it in addition to the choices presented on the ballot.

Comment
Only a full preference ballot ensures that in IRV/STV allocation, every ballot has a place to be allocated in every round. Otherwise, ballots may become exhausted and unallocated, potentially resulting in no majority or Quota in the final round.

They do require a full preference ballot - meaning that you have to rank every candidate in every race for any of your votes to be counted. In real adult elections in the USA, we don't force you to vote a full ballot in order for your votes to be counted. But at NCSU they take the total number of ballots submitted and that becomes the denominator from which a majority must be received in order to declare a winner using this method.

§201. Allocation Under Instant Run-off Voting.
Under Instant Run-off Voting, each vote shall be initially allocated to the highest preference on the voter’s legal ballot. If no candidate or option has votes equal to or greater than a majority of legal ballots, votes will be reallocated as further provided by this section. Reallocation shall proceed by determining the candidate or option with the least amount of votes as currently allocated, and then reallocating each of that candidate’s or option’s votes to the next remaining preference on each ballot that was a source of votes. Ties for least amount of votes shall be broken as provided by §211. Reallocation shall be repeated until a candidate or option has votes equal to at least a majority of legal ballots in the contest, and is thereby declared winner. No vote shall be allocated to a candidate or option previously eliminated.

But at NCSU they take the total number of ballots submitted and that becomes the denominator from which a majority must be received in order to declare a winner using this method. They don't keep changing the denominator as your statement would suggest is done in ballots where there are no second or third column votes to be tallied.

§221. Occurrence of Traditional Run-off Election under IRV.
For §201 Instant Run-off Voting in contests requiring a majority of votes to be elected, a traditional run-off election must be ordered when, due to exhaustion of preference ballots, no candidate receives a majority of votes in the final allocation round. Such run-off shall be conducted with the last two (2) candidates or options remaining in the allocation round, and shall use a non-preference ballot.

Comment
When IRV is used with a partial preference ballot, preference exhaustion may occur, necessitating an additional election to obtain a majority. This cannot occur with a full preference ballot except in the unusual case of write-in candidates reaching the final allocation round.

But where you don't require full preference balloting, you see it right there- preference exhaustion can occur. It did occur in Cary - 1401 votes is not the 50% plus one vote (or 1512 votes) of the 3022 votes cast and counted in the first round of the Cary District B race. At least at NCSU, the students admit that IRV won't always ensure a majority win by the time all the ballots are exhausted. it's a shame the adults who pushed IRV couldn't do that in Cary.

For those voters who show up at the polling places on election day and didn't know beforehand they were supposed to rank their choices, what is left for them to do? Going by the less than professionally conducted NC exit polls, 25% of Cary voters and 33% of Hendersonville voters had this problem. In San Francisco, about a third of the voters showed up not knowing they were expected to rank their choices in 2004 - it was almost HALF the votes the next year.

What would you have those voters do? Either donkey vote for candidates they know nothing about just to keep them from having to come back for the runoff when they might possibly have taken the time to learn about the remaining candidates, or just not count ANY of their votes? Either choice hardly seems democratic.

I have been curious about that - the Secretary who signed that letter wasn't even the secretary when IRV was used in Cary. She has no experience with IRV to know about the costs and transparency. The Chair has been pushing IRV for a long time, with some of his travels sponsored by FairVote (according to a statement he made at a legislative hearing in another state). He has made many less than accurate statements about the benefits of IRV, and has contradicted himself many times. It's just too bad that most members of the Fourth Estate haven't taken the time to check the facts before they coble up a story out of a press release.

Debra Goldberg, the secretary of the Wake BOE during the IRV pilot, totally backs up my claims. She was one of only 4 county election administrators in one county out of NC's 100 counties to have any direct experience tabulating IRV ballots. Her op-ed piece titled "Instant Runoff Voting is no solution, says election official who was there" can be found here: http://www.citizen-times.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=200880826043

There is nothing misleading about what I have posted. You weren’t even here to know what happened. There is no proof that the NC Legislature has any knowledge that IRV saved money, boosted turnout or was a success. There was no debate on those topics - they were asked at the very end of the legislative session to extend the pilot. And they only did so after first amending the extension by requiring that goals, standards and criteria for the implementation and evaluation of the pilot be developed consistent with NC election law - because there was A LOT of concern that the first pilot wasn't done accurately and/or lawfully. The new law states that if IRV can't be done consistent with our tough election laws - it won't be done.

And if there are some NC voters and editorial boards see IRV that way, it's not because they really know anything about what actually happened. They just happened to be hustled by the very well-funded IRV advocacy groups that spent tens of thousands of money and staff time into pushing IRV in NC with no verifiable way to determine if it worked or not. Taking a press release and turning it into a story or an op-ed piece, or publishing a ghost-written op-ed piece doesn't prove that IRV works.