The Instant Runoff Virus hits play elections!

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?

Instant Runoff Virus errors found in Aspen vote totals

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!

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!

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

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?

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

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?

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

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!

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.

2 out of 3 Pierce County RCV "winners" don't have a true majority

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

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.