IRV/RCV ain't saving money in Mineapolis!

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Buyer's remorse for Minneaopolis Ranked Choice Voting?

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

The continuing cost of RCV: $244,000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This new blog is the latest IRV con job!

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

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

IRV Factcheck

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Latest IRV con in NC!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

Aspen voters to vote on how they vote — again

Carolyn SackariasonThe Aspen Times

Aspen, CO Colorado

Wednesday, July 22, 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It was squirrely at best,” Milias said.

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

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

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

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

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

csack@aspentimes.com

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

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

IRV advocates are a bunch of bitchy little girls!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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