tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-79850041286095160502024-03-14T01:43:10.742-04:00IRV FactcheckThis site is designed to allow election reform activists, charter commissions and election officials who are looking at instant runoff voting (IRV, 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.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger16125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7985004128609516050.post-64220463374048588722014-04-18T08:22:00.000-04:002014-04-18T08:22:57.819-04:00A Response to Deceptive Claims About Draft Academic Paper on Ranked Choice Voting and Turnout<div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; outline: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 10px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<div>
<span style="color: #333333; font-size: x-small; line-height: 16.899999618530273px;"></span><span style="color: #454545; font-size: 12px; line-height: 17px;">There is good reason to believe that ranked choice voting (RCV) helps racial minorities achieve fairer levels of representation. In 2013, for example, </span><a href="http://www.fairvote.org/research-and-analysis/blog/the-role-of-ranked-choice-voting-in-201/" style="border: 0px; color: #3a6e8e; font-family: inherit; font-size: 12px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; line-height: 17px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">four cities</a><span style="color: #454545; font-size: 12px; line-height: 17px;"> held contested RCV elections, and all four saw gains in representation of racial minorities, including the election of two Latinos, two Hmong Americans and a Somali American (all for the first time in those cities). People of color hold 16 of San Francisco’s 18 offices elected by RCV, up from only nine before RCV’s introduction in 2004. </span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/1249902371/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_awd_kDxArb1MHBNV1" style="border: 0px; color: #3a6e8e; font-family: inherit; font-size: 12px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; line-height: 17px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Denise Munro Robb’s scholarly study</a><span style="color: #454545; font-size: 12px; line-height: 17px;">found that RCV in San Francisco led to “increasing minority representation and greater participation rates at the ballot box,” particularly in contrast with the low turnout runoff elections previously held for the Board of Supervisors. Such outcomes are consistent with a long history of RCV elections working well for racial minorities in cities such as New York and Cincinnati, as reviewed in a </span><a href="http://www.fairvote.org/articles/instant-runoff-voting-and-its-impact-on-racial-minorities/" style="border: 0px; color: #3a6e8e; font-family: inherit; font-size: 12px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; line-height: 17px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">2008 analysis</a><span style="color: #454545; font-size: 12px; line-height: 17px;"> by the New America Foundation and FairVote.</span></div>
</div>
<div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #454545; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 17px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 10px; vertical-align: baseline;">
However, public officials and others in cities that have debated RCV have once again been spammed with email from Terry Reilly, a San Jose based opponent of ranked choice voting with a track record of deceptive attacks on RCV.[i] Reilly's latest irresponsible and false claim sent to his national list is that a new study by an academic at San Francisco State University “shows conclusively that IRV/RCV decreases voter turnout in historically disenfranchised voting groups.”</div>
<div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #454545; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 17px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 10px; vertical-align: baseline;">
Reilly is referring to an unpublished and recently withdrawn draft paper by San Francisco State University professor Jason McDaniel. McDaniel had posted the paper to SSRN, a website for social science researchers to post preliminary studies for feedback from other scholars prior to more rigorous peer review or publication. McDaniel’s paper was flawed, as we explain in a detailed critique (available upon request by emailing me at dspencer [at] fairvote [dot] org). He relied on much too limited data to possibly reach firm conclusions as to the effect of ranked choice voting on turnout generally and racial minority turnout in particular, especially since it contradicted the bulk of evidence suggesting that ranked choice voting works well for racial minority populations. He only looked at five elections for a single office in a single city, just one of which was a meaningfully contested ranked choice voting election.<br />
<br />
As a result of our critique and Reilly’s publicizing of the paper, McDaniel withdrew the draft from SSRN. He wrote to FairVote that this version of the paper was not intended for promotion to the public and said that any interpretation of his analysis should be treated “with caution."</div>
<div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #454545; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 17px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 10px; vertical-align: baseline;">
We do hope that McDaniel engages in extensive revisions. He applied sophisticated statistical tools to his limited data set and found a string of correlations, but they are best explained by factors other than the introduction of ranked choice voting. For example, McDaniel completely ignored the fact that voter turnout in mayoral elections has sharply declined in many big cities in recent elections, including far more steeply in Los Angeles; in fact, San Francisco’s 2011 election had the highest turnout of any mayoral election in the nation’s 22 largest cities, as of a <a href="http://www.fairvote.org/research-and-analysis/blog/fairvote-report-low-turnout-plagues-u-s-mayoral-elections-but-san-francisco-is-highest/" style="border: 0px; color: #3a6e8e; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">FairVote review</a> in 2012.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #454545; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 17px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 10px; vertical-align: baseline;">
The limitations of McDaniel’s data become plain upon full review of the correlations he found. McDaniel’s most touted claim was that RCV hurts turnout among black voters, but his analysis also found statistically significant results purporting to show that it hurt turnout among white voters and actually helped turnout among black voters over the age of 65. The paper found no significant effect for Latino or Asian American voters (in 2011, Asian American turnout in San Francisco soared to an all-time high and Latino turnout was its highest in decades).</div>
<div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #454545; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 17px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 10px; vertical-align: baseline;">
Furthermore, while McDaniel suggests that RCV leads to more overvotes, he does not address the fact that there were more than five times as many ballots invalidated as overvotes in the non-RCV June 2012 Senate primary in San Francisco and Oakland than in the comparably contested RCV mayoral elections in those cities. Furthermore, there have been notably fewer undervotes in Board of Supervisors elections since the introduction of RCV, meaning that more voters who go to the polls to vote for president or governor are also voting in city elections and are not put off by the RCV ballot. Additionally, turnout has been significantly higher and more representative in RCV elections for the Board of Supervisors and non-mayoral offices as compared to previous runoffs for those offices. <a href="http://www.fairvote.org/articles/instant-runoff-voting-and-its-impact-on-racial-minorities/" style="border: 0px; color: #3a6e8e; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The 2008 study by FairVote and the New America Foundation</a> found that racial minority voters have had no trouble ranking candidates. Meanwhile, <a href="http://www.fairvote.org/assets/Ranked-Choice-Voting-Civility-Study-April-2014.pdf" style="border: 0px; color: #3a6e8e; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">mounting evidence</a> suggests that RCV enhances the civility and positivity of campaigns, and that voters appreciate that difference.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #454545; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 17px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 10px; vertical-align: baseline;">
Although no system is perfect and San Francisco’s implementation of ranked choice voting can be improved, RCV in fact has many benefits for participation. Inflammatory claims about RCV, especially when originating from agitators like Terry Reilly, must be treated with great skepticism. More academic research would be helpful to fully determine the effects of RCV on voter turnout in the U.S., but mischaracterization of a single preliminary draft paper should not be taken seriously.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #454545; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 17px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<br />
<hr />
<div style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<div style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; outline: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 10px; vertical-align: baseline;">
[i] Reilly’s unprincipled opposition to RCV dates back to at least 2007. He has engaged in a campaign of multi-media attacks on ranked choice voting around the country. Several posts at <a href="http://www.irvfactcheck.blogspot.com/" style="border: 0px; color: #3a6e8e; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">IRVFactcheck.com</a> are in response to his attacks, and a FairVote intern made a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UV_S15AkMJw" style="border: 0px; color: #3a6e8e; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">video</a> in 2011 going through one of Reilly’s videos in a point-by-point example of how he manipulates facts. Terry Reilly is also <a href="http://www.mercurynews.com/san-jose-neighborhoods/ci_22045830/cofou" style="border: 0px; color: #3a6e8e; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: bold; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">cofounder</a> of Friends of the San Jose Rose Garden.</div>
</div>
</div>
Drew Spencerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06173216291037972957noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7985004128609516050.post-55878616264033149442012-08-03T11:23:00.000-04:002012-08-03T11:23:37.978-04:00Alleged Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Oakland<style type="text/css">
<!--
@page { margin: 0.79in }
P { margin-bottom: 0.08in }
-->
</style>
<br />
<div style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Who: Alexander Holtzman</div>
<div style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0in;">
What: Stanford University honors
senior thesis</div>
<div style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0in;">
IRV FactCheck Rating: <b><span style="color: red;">NOT CREDIBLE</span></b></div>
<div style="color: red; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<b><br /></b>
</div>
<div style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) opponent
Terry Reilly has recently been distributing and promoting by <a href="http://cfer.org/eastbay-rcv/TerryReilly-20120625-email.pdf">email</a>
and <a href="http://www.hawaiifreepress.com/ArticlesMain/tabid/56/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/7050/Stanford-University-Paper-Looks-at-Ranked-Choice-Voting.aspx">news article</a>
a 2012 undergraduate thesis by Alex Holtzman, titled “The
Unanticipated Inequalities of Electoral Reform: Racial and Ethnic
Disparities in Voting Behavior under Oakland's Ranked Choice Voting
Program ”. </div>
<div style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0in;">
As a result of his paper, Holtzman was one of
twenty-eight students awarded <a href="http://news.stanford.edu/news/2012/june/graduating-seniors-awards-062112.html">Stanford University's Firestone Medal for Excellence in Undergraduate Research</a>
in 2012. Terry Reilly has highlighted the paper in support of <a href="https://groups.google.com/a/co.larimer.co.us/forum/?fromgroups#%21searchin/commissioner_johnson_public/ranked/commissioner_johnson_public/_hrVCj9W6x4/qlhsjwNIaP4J">RCV repeal efforts in Oakland and San Francisco</a> (both
repeal efforts failed) and to discourage the use of RCV in other parts of
the country.</div>
<div style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0in;">
You can probably look just about
anywhere and find voting behavior differences along some set of
demographic characteristics, regardless of which election method is
being used. However racial and ethnic differences still deserve special
vigilance. But racial and ethnic disparities are generally known to still exist with traditional election methods. So what should be of particular interest in
evaluating RCV implementations is not just whether flaws exist, but how
any flaws have changed, what are the causes of those changes, and what are good ways to mitigate the flaws and
continue the improvements.</div>
<div style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Much of Holtzman's quantitative
analysis purports to compare Oakland, California voter turnout data
for the mayoral contests in 2006 and 2010. The 2006 contest used a
traditional June/November runoff system and was won in June; there
was no November runoff. The 2010 contest was decided with one RCV
election in November. In both years, local elections were consolidated with state-wide elections in June and November.</div>
<div style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Overall Holtzman finds mixed support
for his hypothesis that an alleged increase in complexity associated
with voting under RCV causes a decline in voter participation,
especially among traditional racial and ethnic minorities. The
effects he finds tend to be small and sometimes don't support his
hypothesis. But a bigger problem is that his quantitative analysis
appears to be seriously flawed from the start.</div>
<div style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Holtzman does not actually use any
turnout data from the June 2006 mayoral contest. Instead he uses November
2006 turnout data, when there was no mayoral contest, and compares it
to November 2010 turnout. He also uses overall turnout data for each
election rather than contest-specific data. As a result, he finds
an overall increase in turnout of only 1 percentage point.
There was actually an increase of 14.1 percentage points between the
two mayoral contests (46.0% for June 2006, 60.09% for November 2010,
a 30.6% relative increase).</div>
<div style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0in;">
A quantitative analysis that starts
with grossly erroneous data and understates the overall effect by
more than an order of magnitude (1% vs. 14.1%) just can not provide a
credible analysis of the components of that effect. This problem
with the choice of data spoils both the within-city analysis of
Oakland alone and also the difference-within-difference model that
additionally introduces turnout data from Long Beach, California.</div>
<div style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0in;">
The principle claim that RCV proponents
make about increased turnout, compared to a traditional two-election
runoff system, is not that RCV necessarily brings more voters out to
vote, but that it allows the entire contest to be decided in a single
election that can be scheduled when the most voters are likely to be
voting anyway. RCV helps avoid the one lower-turnout election.
In Oakland, the June primary was the low-turnout election. In San
Francisco, which used a November/December runoff system before
upgrading to RCV, the December runoff was most often the low-turnout
election. By using the wrong data, Holtzman's paper fails to
investigate this claim.</div>
<div style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0in;">
</div>
<div style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0in;">
The 2006 versus 2010 mayoral comparison
for Oakland has been written about previously, both <a href="http://cfer.org/eastbay-rcv/RCVEmpowersOaklandVoters.pdf">overall</a> and <a href="http://cfer.org/eastbay-rcv/RCVEmpowersOaklandVotersByDistrict.pdf">by city council district</a>,
showing significant improvements in voter participation. Perhaps
the best overview of how RCV has helped increase voter
participation is a <a href="http://ellabakercenter.org/sites/default/files/downloads/ebc_2010_mayoral_election_rcv_inforgraphic.pdf">poster</a> produced by
the <a href="http://ellabakercenter.org/">Ella Baker Center for Human Rights</a> and <a href="http://oaklandrising.org/">Oakland Rising</a>.</div>
<div style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Holtzman also does a ballot usage
analysis that only looks at the Oakland 2010 mayoral data. However
his analytical framework is flawed and too often he extends his
conclusions beyond what his data shows. Marking a choice for only
one candidate does not mean that the ballot will be exhausted or
that the voter is disenfranchised or confused about RCV. Holtzman
does not investigate actual vote exhaustion rates. Without
comparisons to Oakland's experience with its traditional two-election
runoff system, the results Holtzman does find beg the question of
whether the RCV experience was an improvement. RCV often has lower rates of
exhausted votes than comparable contests using a traditional
two-election runoff system. The advantage tends to grow as the
number of competitive candidates increases and is evident in Oakland.</div>
<div style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Because of <a href="http://cfer.org/eastbay-rcv/Holtzman2012ThesisProblems.pdf">these and other serious flaws</a> with
the paper, most of the core results should not be relied upon and
likely are significantly wrong. I contacted both Holtzman and his
thesis adviser, Clayton Nall, to share my concerns about the paper.
Both declined to discuss the substance of those concerns.</div>
<div style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0in;">
So Holtzman's undergraduate thesis gets
an overall IRV FactCheck rating of <b><span style="color: red;">NOT CREDIBLE</span></b>.</div>
<div style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Some of the ancillary results in the
thesis may have some validity, but without a demonstrated comparison
to traditional runoffs and a consideration of compensating effects,
neither those findings nor the thesis as a whole support Terry
Reilly's contention that RCV is a failed reform.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>David Caryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13998087437112625663noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7985004128609516050.post-83479460093287869612012-08-02T02:11:00.000-04:002012-08-02T03:27:23.998-04:00Terry Reilly: IRV is only non-monotonic election method<div style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Who: Terry Reilly<br />What: Claim that IRV is the only non-monotonic election method<br />IRV FactCheck Rating: <b><span style="color: red;">FALSE</span></b><br /><br />Terry Reilly has often faulted IRV for being non-monotonic. It is one of his <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZGTnp3cgFY">favorite complaints</a> to make about IRV.<br /><br />IRV is not monotonic because in certain situations giving a candidate greater preference, for example marking the candidate as your first choice instead of your second choice, can make that candidate lose. Likewise, in certain situations giving a candidate less preference, for example marking the candidate as your second choice instead of your first choice and raising another candidate to first choice, can in certain situations make the downgraded candidate win.<br /><br />A perfect election method would be monotonic. So saying that IRV is not monotonic is really just another way of saying IRV is not perfect. But no election method is perfect.<br /><br />However when talking about the problem, Terry Reilly is playing a game of <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClynhFKMs3c">Your Epidermis is Showing</a>. He takes commonly accepted election method behavior and exploits people's unfamiliarity with voting theory in order to skew their judgement. Terry Reilly knows that if he gives a quick example only in relation to IRV, many people will erroneously jump to the conclusion that being non-monotonic is an intolerable problem with IRV and they are better off keeping or returning to traditional election methods.<br /><br />What Terry Reilly doesn't tell people is that traditional two-election runoff systems are also non-monotonic. In fact, some of the examples of non-monotonicity that he gives for IRV work just as well with a traditional two-election runoff system, the kind of voting that is the most popular alternative to IRV. If Terry Reilly really thought that being non-monotonic was such a serious flaw in an election method, you have to wonder why he would <a href="https://groups.google.com/a/co.larimer.co.us/forum/?fromgroups#%21topic/commissioner_johnson_public/39PH1KL9cEs">celebrate attempts to return to traditional two-election runoffs</a> (both attempts failed).<br /><br />If you have voted in a local election where the top two candidates advance to a later runoff election, you've used an election method that is non-monotonic and lived to tell about it. If you have voted in a partisan primary for state or federal office where the winner was chosen from two or more candidates in the November general election, you have likely confronted bigger challenges to having your voice heard than the potential problems of deciding the contest with non-monotonic elections.<br /><br />But if you have ever enjoyed the benefits of voting in an IRV contest or would consider doing so, Terry Reilly wants to warn you: your epidermis is showing.<br /><br />You might not have expected such a misleading and exploitative argument from someone who promotes himself as a former chair of the Campaign Finance Review and and Ethics Board for San Jose, California. Unfortunately, sometimes Terry Reilly goes even further by explicitly claiming that IRV is the only election method that is not monotonic.<br /><br />In a recent <a href="http://cfer.org/eastbay-rcv/TerryReilly-20120625-email.pdf">email</a> and <a href="http://www.hawaiifreepress.com/ArticlesMain/tabid/56/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/7050/Stanford-University-Paper-Looks-at-Ranked-Choice-Voting.aspx">news article</a>, Terry Reilly did not just feature his criticism that IRV, also known as ranked choice voting (RCV), is non-monotonic. He also claims that being non-monotonic “is unique to the RCV style voting”. <br /> </span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Since traditional two-election runoff systems are also non-monotonic, Terry Reilly's claim is clearly false. Given his professional and elections background and experience, it is difficult to believe that Terry Reilly just doesn't know better. I emailed Terry Reilly to see if he had a justification for his claim, but he has not responded. </span><br style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;" /><br style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">So Terry Reilly's claim that only IRV is non-monotonic earns an IRV FactCheck rating of </span><b style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="color: red;">FALSE</span></b><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">.</span><br style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;" /><br style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;" /><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">In the same email and news article Terry Reilly has also misleadingly expanded on IRV being non-monotonic with the vague and conceptually confused claim that “your vote can hurt your candidate rather than help them.” To be clear, marking your favorite candidate as your first choice never hurts that candidate's chances of winning compared to you not voting at all. Marking a second-choice candidate will never keep your first-choice candidate from winning compared to not marking any second-choice candidate. But like all other election methods, with IRV there are some situations where voting strategically can give a better election result for some voters. An important advantage of IRV is that the opportunities for strategic voting tend to be less than with traditional election methods or many other alternatives. But Terry Reilly counts on many people reading more into his vague generalization than is justified.</span></span>David Caryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13998087437112625663noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7985004128609516050.post-40661714844225425402011-06-26T15:00:00.003-04:002011-06-26T15:02:55.340-04:00Updated "Myths and Facts" AnalysisWe have just updated our detailed "Myths and Facts" analysis of claims about instant runoff voting. Permanently linked from the sidebar on the right, you can also read it at <a href=" http://irvfactcheck.blogspot.com/p/there-is-lot-of-miss-information.html">this link.</a><br /><br />If you have issues you would like us to address, please send an email to irv [at] fairvote [dot] org.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7985004128609516050.post-86139913052578550992010-06-29T18:33:00.018-04:002011-06-26T10:13:58.603-04:00More Cities Keep Moving to IRV<span style="font-style:italic;">Updated in June 2011</span><br /><br />In 2000, no city in the United States used instant runoff voting (IRV). Since then, 17 cities and counties have passed ballot measures adopting IRV, including at least one every November since 2004. Eight of those jurisdictions have used IRV in elections. Two additional cities in North Carolina have used IRV as part of a pilot program. See <a href="http://www.instantrunoff.com/exitpoll.php">exit polls</a> done by local universities in several of these jurisdictions that show positive reactions to IRV by voters after using it.<br /><br />In addition, Arkansas, Louisiana and South Carolina all use IRV ballots for their overseas voters participating in runoff elections, and Springfield (IL) did so in 2011 after a 91% vote to adopt this practice in 2006. Since 1941, Cambridge, Mass., has used a similar ranked choice ballot in <a href="www.choicevoting.com">choice voting </a>elections held citywide for its nine-seat city council and its school committee.)<br /><br />In nongovernmental elections, IRV is widely used. Nearly 60 <a href="http://www.fairvote.org/colleges-and-universities-using-instant-runoff-voting/">colleges and universities </a>have adopted IRV for student elections (including this spring at Brandeis and Brown, where student voters passed it by lopsided margins), along with <a href="http://www.fairvote.org/organizations-and-corporations-using-instant-runoff-voting">even more associations</a>, including for the Best Picture Oscar by the Academy of Motion Pictures and for several governing bodies of associations with more than 100,000 members. Internationally, IRV has recently been adopted and used for electing mayors in cities like London (United Kingdom) and Wellington (New Zealand). It is used for national parliamentary elections in Australia and Papua New Guinea and for presidential elections in Ireland, which will next be held in October 2011.<br /><br />Since a victory in San Francisco in 2002, there have been three repeals of IRV among those 16 cities that passed it at the ballot. Here's a chronological review of what has happened in each of the 18 jurisdictions that have used IRV or voted to adopt it.<br /><br /><strong>* 2000</strong><br /><br /><strong>San Leandro (CA) </strong>passed a charter amendment by a vote of 63% to 37% to establish IRV as an option in its elections. In 2010, the first year in which the city had state-certified voting equipment available to be used, the city council voted to exercise its option to use IRV for its elections in November 2010. It was used in a hotly contested, high turnout election for mayor that year, with some 99.7% of mayoral election voters casting valid ballots.<br /><br /><strong>* 2002 </strong><br /><br /><strong>San Francisco (CA)</strong> passed a charter amendment by a vote of 55% to 45% to establish IRV for mayor, Board of Supervisors and several othter city offices elections. IRV was first used in November 2004, and has been used for elections every November since that time. Here's <a href="http://archive.fairvote.org/?page=2555">an interview</a> with Gerard Gleason, long-time member of the city's elections commission.<br /><br /><strong>Basalt (CO) </strong>adopted a new charter by a vote of 74% to 26% that included a provision that IRV will be used for mayor when there are more than two candidates seeking the office. The city clerk has prepared for such an election, but none has to date been necessary.<br /><br /><strong>*2004</strong><br /><br /><strong>Berkeley (CA) </strong>passed a charter amendment by a vote of 72% to 28% to use IRV for city elections once certain conditions were met relating to election administration. 2010 was the first year in which these conditions were met, and the city council voted by 8-1 to exercise its option to use IRV in November 2010. The election went very smoothly.<br /><br /><strong>Ferndale (MI)</strong> passed a ballot measure by a vote of 70% to 30% to use IRV for city elections once certain conditions were met relating to election administration. Those conditions have not yet been met.<br /><br /><strong>* 2005</strong><br /><br /><strong>Burlington (VT) </strong>passed a charter amendment by a vote of 64% to 36% to use IRV for mayoral elections in the wake of landslide advisory votes in 2002 and 2004. The city first used IRV in the mayoral elections in March 2006 in a five-way race in which no candidate earned 40% of the vote. It used IRV again in March 2009 in a five-way race in which no candidate earned more than a third of the vote and the incumbent mayor won after trailing in first choices. A repeal drive led by backers of a losing candidate started in 2009, seemed to falter, but regained steam as the mayor lost popularity in the wake of a local controversy. The March 2010 ballot measure to repeal IRV was opposed by the League of Women Voters, Common Cause, Howard Dean and nearly every elected official in the city. Five of the city's seven wards voted to keep IRV, but the mayor's unpopularity helped drive high turnout in the remaining wards, and the repeal was successful by a vote of 52% to 48%.<br /><br /><strong>Takoma Park (MD)</strong> passed an advisory referendum on adoption of IRV by a vote of 84% to 16%. The city council adopted a charter amendment moving to IRV for all city elections in 2006 and used it for the first time in a special election in 2007, followed by uneventful mayoral and city council elections in 2007 and 2009. FairVote's exit poll survey in the 2007 vacancy election found support had risen to nearly 90%.<br /><br /><strong>* 2006</strong><br /><br /><strong>Minneapolis (MN)</strong> passed a charter amendment by a vote of 65% to 35% to use IRV for mayor, city council and certain other offices. It used IRV in these elections in November 2009. Patrick O'Connor, who oversaw implementation of IRV in Minneapolis in 2009, said about his experience: "I have had the great fortune to be a small part of what could easily be considered the most significant civic exercise in the history of Minnesota government: the implementation of the first Ranked Choice Voting election in Minneapolis and in Minnesota. We proved that it could be well administered, quickly and accurately counted, and that voters had little problem with the concept."<br /><br /><strong>Oakland (CA)</strong> passed a charter amendment by a vote of 69% to 31% to use IRV for mayor and city council elections once available as a realistic option to the city. That condition was met in 2010, and the city council voted to use IRV in November 2010. The hotly contested <a href="http://www.fairvote.org/ranked-choice-voting-in-bay-area-elections">mayoral election</a> drew the most interest, including <a href="http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/politics/july-dec10/oakland_11-19.html">a profile</a> by the PBS Evening NewsHour.<br /><br /><strong>Pierce County (WA)</strong> passed a charter amendment by a vote of 53% to 47% to use IRV for county council, county executive and other county executive offices. In 2007 voters handily approved measures keeping implementation of IRV on track for 2008. IRV was used for highly contested races for county executive and other offices that year, but the county also for the first time used and paid for the "top two" primary system for state and federal offices that had been restored in a 2008 Supreme Court decision. Use of IRV seemed redundant and costly to many voters, and it was repealed in 2009 despite support for keeping it from the League of Women Voters and the <em>Tacoma News Tribune.</em><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">North Carolina</span>'s state legislature passed a law authorizing up to 10 cities to use IRV in a pilot program. In 2007, two cities chose to do so: <span style="font-style:italic;">Cary <span style="font-weight:bold;"></span></span>and <span style="font-style:italic;">Hendersonville<span style="font-weight:bold;"></span></span>. In 2008, the legislature extended the pilot for three years. Hendersonville used IRV again in 2009 and has voted to use it again in 20011. In addition, North Carolina used IRV for four judicial vacancy elections in 2010, including <a href="http://www.ncvotes123.com">one statewide election</a> with more than 1.9 million voters.<br /><br />*<span style="font-weight:bold;"> 2007</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Sarasota (FL) </span>by a margin of 78% to 22% passed a charter amendment to replace runoff elections with IRV. Sarasota will use IRV once it has a cost-efficient and certified means to implement it.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Aspen (CO) </span>by a margin of 77% to 23% passed a charter amendment to replace runoff elections with IRV in elections for the mayor and the two-seat city council elections. In May 2009, IRV was used for the mayoral race and a new form of IRV was used for the council races, stirring some controversy and particularly heated, well-financed opposition from the losing mayoral candidate. In November 2009, voters by 8 votes failed to approve an advisory measure to reject consideration of replacing IRV. Seemingly fatigued with ongoing debate about the system, voters backed a binding repeal in November 201o<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">* 2008</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Santa Fe (NM)</span> by a margin of 65% to 35% passed a charter amendment to replace plurality voting with IRV for city elections. The city will use IRV upon development of a means to implement IRV.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Telluride (CO) </span>passed a statutory initiative by 67% to 33% to replace plurality voting with IRV for mayoral elections. It will be used in November 2011.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Memphis (TN)</span>, the second largest city in the southeastern United States, voted by a margin of 71% to 29% to adopt replace runoffs with IRV in city council elections. It will be used once Shelby County has voting equipment ready to run IRV elections.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">* 2009</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">St Paul (MN)</span> voted by 52.5% to 47.5% to replace two rounds of voting with IRV in elections for mayor and city council. It will first be used for city council elections in November 2011.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">* 2010</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Portland (ME)</span> voted by 52% to 48% to back a new charter that established a direct election for mayor using IRV. IRV will first be used for mayoral elections in Maine's largest city in November 2011.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7985004128609516050.post-32519068269096325472010-06-16T10:54:00.007-04:002010-06-25T16:51:39.461-04:00Myths about Voting Rights and IRV (and STV)Instant runoff voting and its related multi-seat, proportional voting variant cakked "choice voting" (also called "single transferable vote" or STV) do not remove voter rights that exist in current U.S. elections. Here are point by point responses to those who have argued otherwise.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Myth #1 </span> <span style="font-style: italic;">"IRV/STV remove the right cast a vote with a positive effect on a candidate’s chances of winning."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Truth</span>: With IRV, your decision to vote and rank a candidate first can never in itself harm that candidate's chances of winning. This myth refers to the voting theory concept of "non-monotonicity." As in <span style="font-style: italic;">any </span>runoff election system (whether instant or traditional) that winnows candidates between rounds, there is a theoretical possibility that a better way to help your candidate win ("have a positive effect") might be to vote in the first round for a weak opponent rather than your favorite candidate. If you're certain that your favorite candidate will advance to the final runoff round without your vote, you can vote for the weaker opponent so that your favorite will face this weak opponent instead of a stronger opponent in the final round, and thus help your favorite in the ultimate runoff round.<br /><br />Note that this dynamic exists in traditional runoff elections, as used to elect many American officeholders, and to elect most presidents around the world. Variations of this dynamic also exist in elections with a primary and general election, as nearly universally used in the United States for partisan offices. It also exists with IRV, but to a lesser extent because a voter can't strategically change his or her ballot between rounds of counting.<br /><br />Given that most elections in the United States are subject to this same theoretical strategy, it is simply wrong to say that IRV removes an existing voter right in this regard. Furthermore, because voters need accurate information on how other voters are likely to vote in order to utilize this theoretical strategy, combined with its counter-intuitive nature and great risk of back-firing, its significance is questionable. There is no evidence that this non-monotonicity dynamic has <span style="font-style: italic;">ever</span> played a strategic role in a single one of thousands of public IRV elections.<br /><br />Exploiting this non-monotonic possibility is <span style="font-style: italic;">more</span> plausible in a traditional two-election runoff system. In runoffs with two rounds of voting, this is a risky strategy, but relatively safer compared to IRV, because you can move your vote back to your true favorite in the final round (if your favorite makes it into the final round). It is much more difficult in an instant runoff with a single ballot where insincere votes will stay with the competitor, and thus can back-fire.<br /><br />Also, it is important to understand that any voting method that satisfies the monotonicity criterion in every situation must also fail the later-no-harm criterion (where indicating support for an additional candidate may cause your favorite candidate to lose). Unlike non-monotonicity, the later-no-harm criterion has a direct impact on actual voter behavior, with voters "bullet-voting" for a favorite rather than risk hurting this candidate by indicating their sincere second choice -- and those that do so getting a big advantage for their favorite candidate over those who just follow the ballot instructions. As with all evaluation criterion, there is a trade-off, but IRV strikes a favorable balance and can be advocated with confidence.<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Myth #2</span> <span style="font-style: italic;">"IRV/STV removes the right to participate in the final decision of who wins the election by eliminating voters’ ballots prior to the final counting round. The more candidates, the more voters are eliminated prior to the final counting round."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Truth</span>: Every voter has the right to participate in the final decision of who wins the election. Some voters will, of course have their votes count for a losing candidate. Under standard IRV and STV rules every voter has the same right to have their vote counted in every round of the tally.<br /><br />This myth would appear to refer to the possibility that a voter may choose to not rank either of the two final candidates, and thus abstain from the final tally (voting for neither of them).<br /><br />In addition, there are some implementations of IRV where, due to limitations of voting equipment, voters are limited to no more than three rankings. In these specific situations, and when there are many candidates, it is possible that a voter may not have ranked either of the finalists, but would have, given more ranking opportunities. These voters' ballots are said to be "exhausted" because they are stuck with a losing candidate. This issue lead to a federal court challenge in San Francisco in 2010. But the court rejected the complaint and upheld IRV.<br /><br />The fact is that under plurality elections all of the voters who do not vote for a winning candidate likewise have their ballot stuck (exhausted) with a losing candidate. So, IRV, even in a case where voters are limited to three rankings, only IMPROVES the chances all voters have to have their ballot count, compared to plurality elections. Even in traditional runoff elections, all voters who voted for any of the candidates other than the top two, effectively get no say over which candidates advance to the final round, whereas with IRV, many of these voters have their ballots transferred to alternate choices and can help determine which two candidates make it to the final round. Thus, it is quite misleading to suggest IRV or STV take away a voter right in this regard.<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Myth #3 </span><span style="font-style: italic;">"IRV/STV removes the right to have one’s votes counted equally and fairly with all other voters’ votes because only voters supporting the least popular candidates as their 1st choice are assured of having their 2nd choice candidate counted when their 1st choice candidate looses."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Truth</span>: Every voter's vote is treated equally under IRV and STV. This myth suggests that a voter supporting a leading candidate would want to have the "right" to have her ballot count for her second choice, possibly defeating her first choice candidate. This would not be a "right," but rather a defect in the voting rules that would violate the Later-No-Harm voting criterion. The beauty of IRV and STV is that the alternate rankings are treated as contingencies rather than as simultaneous votes. A voter's ballot only counts for an alternate choice if that voter's more preferred candidate is out of the running. All voters' ballots are treated the same under this rule.<br /><br />In a Michigan case where IRV was upheld by the court, the court decision stated:<br /><br />"In the final analysis, no voter is given greater weight in his or her vote over the vote of another voter, although to understand this does require a conceptual understanding of how the effect of a '[IRV] System' is like that of a run-off election. The form of majority preferential voting employed in the City of Ann Arbor's election of its Mayor does not violate the one-man, one-vote mandate nor does it deprive anyone of equal protection rights under the Michigan or United States Constitutions."<br /><br />In the 2009 Minnesota Supreme Court case unanimously upholding IRV the court decision stated:<br /><br />"Nor does the system of counting subsequent choices of voters for eliminated candidates unequally weight votes. Every voter has the same opportunity to rank candidates when she casts her ballot, and in each round every voter's vote carries the same value."<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Myth #4</span> <span style="font-style: italic;">"In comparison with top-two runoff elections, IRV/STV remove the right to elect majority winners. San Francisco had to eliminate its legal right to elect majority winners when it adopted IRV/STV because STV routinely elects winners with far less than 50% of the votes."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Truth</span>: IRV elects majority winners according to the same logic of traditional two-round runoff elections, be reducing the field to two finalists, and electing the one with a majority of votes among the voters expressing their preference between these two.<br /><br />This myth is based on using different standards to compute majorities under IRV and traditional runoffs.<br /><br />These IRV opponents argue that there is a failure to produce a "real" majority under IRV because they use the total number of votes in the first round to compute a majority, not the total number of votes cast in the instant runoff. Sometimes the number of exhausted ballots - that is, ballots that don't rank any of the remaining candidates in the final instant runoff - is greater than the final margin between the top two candidates.<br /><br />The mayoral election in Burlington (VT) in 2009 is used as an example of this "failure." In the first round of that election, the results were:<br /><br />Kurt Wright 2,951<br />Bob Kiss 2,585<br />Andy Montroll 2,063<br />Dan Smith 1,306<br />Write-ins 36<br />James Simpson 35<br />(With four invalid ballots, three of which were found to be valid in a partial recount.)<br /><br />In the final result of the election, the results were:<br /><br />Bob Kiss 4,313<br />Kurt Wright 4,061<br />(with 602 exhausted ballots and the 4 invalid ballots)<br /><br />IRV opponents argue that although Kiss won a majority of the valid ballots in the final round of voting, he failed to win a "real" majority because his final round votes were only 48% of the votes case in the first round.<br /><br />IRV advocates point out that the result was due to some voters exercising their option to abstain from a choice between the two finalists - just as many registered voters abstained from voting in the first place. That doesn't change the fact that the winner Bob Kiss earned majority support from voters who chose to indicate a preference for either him or Kurt Wright.<br /><br />Australia avoids this possible outcome by requiring voters to rank all candidates in its IRV races for the House of Representatives. That's certainly an option for those who want this definition of a majority, and it does ensure the voters take the time to indicate their last choice along with their first choice. But if eligible voters have the right to skip voting altogether, some will argue that they have the right to skip ranking candidates they don't like.<br /><br />But it's not fair to say indicate that a traditional runoff produces a "real" majority due to only using the total number of votes in the runoff round to calculate a majority. By this argument, Vincent Dober won a "real" majority in the March 2009 Burlington's City Council Ward 7 election even though he received considerably fewer votes in the second round of the runoff election than the first:<br /><br />Round 1:<br />Ellie Blais 461<br />Vincent Dober 612<br />Eli Lesser-Goldsmith 619<br />Write-ins 4<br /><br />Round 2<br />Vincent Dober 515<br />Eli-Lesser Goldsmith 425<br /><br />Under the standards that IRV opponents apply to IRV, we would use the first round totals to compute a majority, and Dober in the runoff would have secured only 30% of the vote - a considerably worse majority "failure" than in the Mayoral election held at the same time with IRV. IRV opponents can't have it both ways. Either Bob Kiss and Vincent Dober both won majorities or neither of them did.<br /><br />A more consistent standard to compare IRV and traditional runoffs would be to look at the decline in turnout from the first round to the last. In the Mayoral election under IRV, 93% of the voters who cast a ballot in the first round ended up participating in the final round. In the City Council election under a traditional runoff, only 55% of the voters who cast a ballot in the first round ended up participating in the second round.<br /><br />Another revealing example is the 2008 U.S. Senate election in Georgia. Incumbent Republican Senator Saxby Chambliss won re-election in a December runoff after falling short of a majority in November. Turnout in the second round was only 57% of the first round in spite of the fact that a Democratic filibuster-proof majority was at stake in the Senate.<br /><br />First round:<br />Saxby Chambliss 1,867,097<br />Jim Martin 1,757,393<br />Allen Buckley 127,923<br />Write-ins 72<br />Total 3,752,577<br /><br />Second round:<br />Saxby Chambliss 1,228,033<br />Jim Martin 909,923<br />Total 2,137,956<br /><br />If this election was held under IRV, the number of ballots cast for the final round would have been at least 96.6% of the first round total. It would likely have been higher, as most of Libertarian candidate Allen Buckley's supporters probably would have indicated a second preference. Even if Buckley won a far larger share of the vote and none of his supporters cast votes for their second choice, it would have been mathematically impossible for final round votes to be only 57% of the first round total as under a traditional runoff.<br /><br />To be fair, it is possible for second round turnout to exceed that of the first round under a traditional runoff -- and every now and then it happens. However, large declines in turnout seem to be the norm under traditional runoffs --- sometimes dramatically so, with turnout falling on the order of ten times in statewide runoffs in Texas and North Carolina in 2008. The strongest evidence for large declines in participation from the first to the second rounds of traditional runoffs come from federal primary runoffs. From 1994 to 2008, turnout declined in 113 of 116 regularly scheduled federal primary runoffs, and the average decline was about 35% -- see FairVote's data on these runoffs.<br /><br />Bottom line: you can't make a majority of voters like one of the candidates running. But you can enact IRV to make sure you always elect the candidate who has majority support over his or her top opponent in the final round and to ensure the defeat of the candidate whom a majority of voters see as their last choice - a result that plurality voting makes all too possible.<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Myth #5</span> <span style="font-style: italic;">"IRV/STV remove the right to a transparent, verifiable election process with a decentralized, simple counting process that can be easily manually counted and audited."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Truth</span>: IRV and STV elections can <span style="font-style: italic;">enhance</span> election transparency and integrity, and are manually audited routinely. IRV elections for the national president of Ireland are manually counted at decentralized counting centers, though a centralized count is also possible. The count can be done manually as well as by computer.<br /><br />Because ranked ballot optical scanners capture individual ballot records (rather than just running totals), they can add a higher level of security and fraud detection than paper-only elections. It is the redundancy of ballot records (both paper and computer), made possible by the new generation of optical scanners, that makes fraud so much more difficult to accomplish and easy to detect (the perpetrator needs to utilize two distinctly different strategies using different kinds of resources and overcoming different kinds of security measures to change BOTH records, to get away with it.)<br /><br />The procedure for manually auditing a ranked-choice ballot election is a little more involved than a typical plurality election. There are two elements to such an audit: confirming that the machine record of ballot rankings matches the rankings marked on the paper ballots, and confirming that the IRV vote tallying procedure was properly done. To audit the ballot rankings, a random sample of voting machines are selected. San Francisco compares the total number of each ranking reported by the machine to the total number of each ranking manually counted on the same sample of paper ballots. A better method is to print a list of each ranking combination (such as 23 ballots ranked the candidates in order: candidate B, candidate A, candidate D, candidate C) and then looking at each ballot in the sample and checking off each corresponding ballot type on the list, until every ballot has been looked at and every ballot ranking on the list is checked off. There are several ways too confirm the IRV tallying algorithm. San Francisco runs the software again for the sample of ballots only, while also doing a manual IRV tally with the paper ballots, to confirm the results match. A better procedure is to run an IRV tally of all ballot data using different means (such as independent software, or just a basic spreadsheet program). Cities such as Burlington (VT) and San Francisco (CA) post all of the ballot records on the Internet so that anybody who wishes can double check the tally on their own as well. This creates greater integrity than is typical of any customary election audit. For more on this topic visit:<br /><a href="http://www.fairvote.org/?page=2438">http://www.fairvote.org/?page=2438</a><br /><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Myth #6</span> <span style="font-style: italic;">"IRV/STV gives voters of the least popular candidates the most power to decide which candidates are eliminated, counting their 2nd choices first, [so] IRV/STV tend to elect extreme right or extreme left candidates, eliminating centrist majority-favorites."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Truth</span>: Current plurality voting is more likely to elect "off-center" candidates than is IRV. In a plurality election with several candidates, a candidate does not need any support beyond his or her ideological core supporters to get the "most" votes - even if that is a relatively small percentage of the voters. With IRV, a candidate must be able to garner both strong core support and broad appeal in order to win. As with any runoff system, IRV will elect whichever of the two finalist candidates is most preferred by voters. With over 80 years of use in Australian elections for the House of Representatives, IRV has proven that extremists are not benefited by IRV.<br /><br />STV is form of proportional representation, and thus will assure that the majority of a representative body will be elected by the majority of voters, the body will also include a number of minority winners proportionate to their support in the electorate. This respects the principle that the majority have the right to govern but that all voters have the right top representation.Terry Bouriciushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06928242351793435111noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7985004128609516050.post-71188522604903902022010-06-15T10:03:00.009-04:002011-06-26T11:31:11.894-04:00Response to some recent attacks on IRVSome opponents of election reforms such as instant runoff voting (IRV) have been circulating certain supposed failures of IRV. These opponents' claims need correction.<br /><br />1. <span style="font-style: italic;">These opponents have claimed that IRV is costly.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">In fact, instant runoff voting can save money immediately – it depends on the context. </span><br /><br />Whether IRV will cost money or not depends on the situation. San Francisco’s use of IRV resulted in the City avoiding a number of runoff elections that would have cost millions of dollars more to administer than the cost of implementing IRV. It cost the city of San Francisco $2.4 million dollars to implement IRV, including $1.6 million for a one-time upgrade of voting machines and $800,000 to educate people on the new system. <a href="http://archive.fairvote.org/victoryfund/?page=2555">According to Gerard Gleason</a> of the San Francisco Election Commission, now that instant runoff voting (locally called "ranked choice voting") is well established, voter education and poll worker training costs are insignificant. It has had some ongoing costs, but they are minor and far less than the costs of administering runoff elections. As for savings, in the first year of its use, IRV saved the city of San Francisco $1.2 million dollars by avoiding runoffs in district races for the Board of Supervisors, and has avoided the need for at least one citywide runoff that would have cost approximately $3 million as well as several additional district runoffs in other years.<br /><br />Cary (NC) and Hendersonville (NC) are two cities that have participated in a state pilot program similar to the program envisioned in the New York legislation – a law first passed in 2006 and extended and expanded for three more years in 2008 after two IRV elections in 2007. The Wake County Board of Elections director Cherie Poucher estimates that<a href="http://archive.fairvote.org/?page=2543"> IRV saved Cary $28,000</a> in its election in 2007, and would have saved as much as four times that amount if the mayor’s race had gone to a runoff. Hendersonville has implemented IRV with little cost, and while no runoffs have been avoided, savings would have been immediate if there had been runoffs. After voting to use IRV for a second time in 2009, the Hendersonville city council in 2010 voted <a href="http://www.blueridgenow.com/article/20100402/NEWS/100409912?Title=Council-for-instant-runoffs">unanimously</a> to explore how it could make IRV a permanent part of its elections. <br /><br /><br />2. <span style="font-style: italic;">These opponents have suggested that rather than enhancing voter participation, IRV could reduce turnout, citing Minneapolis as an example.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">In fact, IRV generally increases participation for picking decisive winners, but there is no guarantee.</span><br /><br />IRV tends to improve voter participation, particularly when replacing two rounds of voting where either the first round or second round can have much lower turnout. But as a general matter, turnout is mostly driven by how exciting elections are, rather than the voting method. In the case of Minneapolis in 2009, the popular incumbent mayor had no serious opponent, and of course won in a landslide. When the outcome of an election is a foregone conclusion, turnout is generally low, regardless of method. Local scholars have dismissed IRV as a reason for the turnout decline in Minneapolis, pointing out that neighboring St. Paul had exactly the same dynamic with its mayor, and its turnout drop in 2009 was larger than that of Minneapolis. At the same time, Minneapolis avoided the need for its September primary, where turnout historically had been very low, yet eliminated most candidates.<br /><br />When IRV combines two round runoff systems into a single election the increased voter participation is most dramatic. An analysis of voter participation (<a href="http://www.fairvote.org/assets/turnout.pdf">http://www.fairvote.org/assets/turnout.pdf</a>) in San Francisco by Dr. Christopher Jerdonek found that the use of instant runoff voting in San Francisco’s November 2005 election increased voter participation in the decisive round of the Assessor-Recorder race by an estimated 2.7 times, or 120,000 voters of what would have happened in a December runoff that year. In six out of twenty-five neighborhoods, it is estimated that voter participation in the decisive round tripled due to RCV. (<a href="http://www.fairvote.org/assets/turnout.pdf">http://www.fairvote.org/assets/turnout.pdf</a>) <br /><br /><br />3. <span style="font-style: italic;">These opponents have suggested IRV may harm racial minorities.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">In fact, IRV has proven easy for voters of all races and has elected diverse representation in places like San Francisco.</span><br /><br />IRV is a majoritarian, winner-take-all voting method rather than a proportional voting method designed to represent those in the minority. For that reason, it is neither more nor less likely to elect racial minority candidates than existing single-winner methods in a general matter, although traditional racial minorities can have trouble competing as effectively in expensive, one-on-one runoff elections as better-financed white candidates.<br /><br />Nevertheless, there is convincing evidence that racial minorities easily adapt to using ranked ballots and, indeed, utilize IRV very effectively. Several studies of the San Francisco elections have shown that minority voters were just as likely to effectively utilize their rankings as other voters, with racially diverse districts actually decreasing the rate of residual votes (under-votes and over-votes) compared to non-IRV elections. Also, because the separate runoff election was eliminated, voter participation in the most racially diverse districts of San Francisco increased more than in white districts -- by an astonishing 307% compared to separate runoffs. <a href="http://www.fairvote.org/assets/turnout.pdf">http://www.fairvote.org/assets/turnout.pdf</a><br /><br />The City with the longest use of instant runoff voting is San Francisco. Its 11 members of its Board of Supervisors include 3 Asian Americans, 2 Latinos, 1 African American and 1 Persian American. A full analysis of the impact of IRV on racial minorities in several cities is available here<br /> <a href="http://www.fairvote.org/instant-runoff-voting-and-its-impact-on-racial-minorities">http://www.fairvote.org/instant-runoff-voting-and-its-impact-on-racial-minorities</a><br /><br /><br />4. <span style="font-style: italic;">These opponents claim that IRV usually produces a plurality winner and fails to elect majority winners.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">In fact, IRV elects candidates with majority support over their top opponent.</span><br /><br />As in traditional runoff elections, it is not surprising that the most common winner of the runoff tally is the leader of the first round. But, when a “spoiler” scenario has split the majority among similar candidates, IRV – just as in a separate runoff system – allows that majority to re-coalesce around the strongest candidate, resulting in a "come-from-behind" victory. Australia has used IRV to elect their federal House of Representatives for generations. An analysis of these elections from 1949 - 2007 shows that on average, in 16% of those contests that went to an instant runoff tally, there was a reversal with the first round leader being defeated. In other words, one out of six “plurality-only” leaders was in fact not the majority choice when the field narrowed to two. <a href="http://blogs.abc.net.au/antonygreen/2010/05/preferential-voting-in-australia.html">http://blogs.abc.net.au/antonygreen/2010/05/preferential-voting-in-australia.html</a><br /><br />In addition, as in separate runoff elections, some voters abstain from the runoff (either stay home if a separate runoff, or don't rank either of the two finalists in IRV). This can mean that the "majority" winner of the runoff gets fewer than half the votes cast originally in the first round. However, because IRV combines the two elections into one, the drop-off due to these "exhausted" ballots is generally much less severe than the drop-off occurring in separate runoff elections. Under separate runoff election rules, a "majority" winner often receives fewer votes in this runoff round than the "loser" received in the first round of voting – something that can never happen with IRV. For example, turnout in a 2009 citywide race with IRV in Burlington (VT) declined by 6% between the first round and decisive instant runoff. Turnout in an actual runoff in a city council race (which did not use IRV) that year in Burlington declined by 45%. Of all 116 federal primary runoffs in 1994 to 2008 in states around the country, fully 113 had declines in turnout, with the average drop in turnout of 35.1%.<br /><br /><br />5. <span style="font-style: italic;">These opponents claim that IRV leads to "2 party domination."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">In fact, IRV accommodates voter choice, but does not represent those who can’t win majorities.</span><br /><br />Some opponents of the American "two-party system" have suggested that IRV would simply entrench "2-party domination." IRV neither overthrows nor entrenches the current predominance of two major parties. IRV does allow minor parties to exist, contend for office, and possibly eventually win office, without being labeled as "spoilers." However, since IRV is a majority voting method, third parties that do not appeal to the majority of an electorate would not defeat candidates who can muster that majority support.<br /><br /><br />6. <span style="font-style: italic;">These opponents claim there is never enough voter education for IRV.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">In fact, voter education is always good, but often not necessary.</span><br /><br />Voter education has been more than adequate in every implementation of IRV in the U.S., as indicated by the fact that there have been very small numbers of ballots that did not indicate a valid first choice. In 2009, for example, Minneapolis for the first time implemented IRV to elect the mayor, city council and several other offices. A survey found that 95% of voters found the new election process easy to use and that the entire election produced just one defective ballot that could not be counted for its first choice among 45,968 cast.<br /><br />The key is a good ballot design, as the voters' task is simple. Voters can mark their ballots in exactly the same way as they always have in the past. However, the voter has the option of ranking alternate choices, in case there is no majority winner and the voter's favorite candidate doesn't make it into the final runoff count. Since a vote for a minor candidate won't be wasted, as long as the voter ranks other choices, the voter can generally avoid the conundrum of voting for a favorite or a lesser evil. This in many ways makes voting with IRV easier than having to calculate who is a credible candidate under the current plurality method.<br /><br />Scholars have conducted formal voter surveys in several U.S. cities that recently implemented IRV (see <a href="http://archive.fairvote.org/?page=2170">http://archive.fairvote.org/?page=2170</a>) to assess voter acceptance of the new system. Without exception, in every city, voters have overwhelmingly favored IRV over the old method. Also, studies of the San Francisco and Burlington IRV elections have proven that there was no increase in uncountable ballots (spoiled or skipping the IRV race) with the adoption of IRV. In the Burlington IRV election in 2006, for example, 99.9% of ballots cast in the IRV race for mayor were valid – and it rose to 99.98% in 2009 (a single invalid ballot). People had no difficulty voting; news reports indicated that poll workers on hand to explain IRV had an uneventful day.<br /><br />The two nations with the highest voter participation rates in the world, Australia (which also has mandatory voting) and Malta, both use ranked choice ballots<br /><br /><br />7. <span style="font-style: italic;">These opponents claim IRV "leaves some voters behind."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">In fact, voters use IRV effectively even without knowing the details of how the count works. </span><br /><br />The only "complicated" aspect of instant runoff voting is the tabulation that occurs if there is no initial majority winner. But the voters don't need to absorb these details. A voter can dial a telephone without understanding the complexities of the internal electronics or vote for president, without understanding the constitutional complexities with the Electoral College. IRV is easy for voters to use, and a well-informed voter does not get an advantage over a less-informed voter who indicates their favorite choice first, second-favorite second and third-favorite third – just as suggested by the instructions.<br /><br />A traditional vote-for-one method can create great strategic complexity for voters when there are more than just two candidates, due to the "spoiler" dynamic. However, IRV dramatically reduces the need for such calculations, as voters have less concern about "wasting" their votes, and second choices can never hurt that voter's first choice. While no voting method can completely eliminate every possibility of strategic "gaming," IRV allows for less strategic gamesmanship than either plurality elections or two-round runoffs.<br /><br /><br />8. <span style="font-style: italic;">These opponents claim that IRV is too difficult and complex to count.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">In fact, jurisdictions have developed fair and secure IRV counting methods.</span><br /><br />Because voters can say more with a ranked ballot, and it effectively combines two elections into one, tallying IRV ballots is more involved than a “vote for one with an “X” form of ballot. Nevertheless, a number of jurisdictions have met this challenge, either using special state-certified voting equipment (as in San Francisco, and, later this year, Oakland in California), new procedures (including a hand-count after tallying first choices at the polls, as done in 2009 in Minneapolis) or procedures using existing equipment (as in North Carolina, where all local elections must use federally certified equipment).<br /><br />IRV elections can be readily audited, as is routinely done. Many jurisdictions audit a random selection of voting machines to compare the machine record with the paper ballots. There is no need to transport ballots to a central location, though this is an option for a recount. In Ireland’s national elections, the IRV election for the national president is hand-counted at local voting centers in less than a day. Australian jurisdictions get an unofficial full election night tally by hand, then a final official central count. <br /><br />Jurisdictions in the U.S. typically collect voting machine data to run the IRV tally election night, with a manual audit later. Because IRV supports the capture of complete ballot images from paper ballots, rather than mere candidate totals, it can markedly enhance election integrity. It is the redundancy of having both a paper and electronic record of every ballot that makes fraud especially difficult. <a href="http://www.fairvote.org/ranked-voting-and-election-integrity-2/">http://www.fairvote.org/ranked-voting-and-election-integrity-2/</a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Featured Quote</span> "I have had the great fortune to be a small part of what could easily be considered the most significant civic exercise in the history of Minnesota government: the implementation of the first Ranked Choice Voting election in Minneapolis and in Minnesota. We proved that it could be well administered, quickly and accurately counted,<br />and that voters had little problem with the concept."<br />- Former city elections director <span style="font-weight: bold;">Patrick O'Connor</span>, who oversaw implementation of IRV in Minneapolis in 2009<br /><br /><br />9. <span style="font-style: italic;">These opponents claim jurisdictions are abandoning IRV.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">In fact, most jurisdictions with IRV are keeping it -- only two have repealed it.</span><br /><br />Some opponents of IRV imply that instant runoff voting has been repealed most everywhere it has been adopted. This is not true. Let's look at the facts, as of the date of this post.<br /><br />At the start of the 21st century, no city in the United States used instant runoff voting. Since then, 14 cities and counties have passed ballot measures adopting IRV, five of which have already used it. Two cities have voted to use it on a one-time basis as part of a pilot program. In addition, more than 50 major colleges and universities have adopted IRV for student elections, along with even more associations, including several with more than 100,000 members. Internationally, IRV has been adopted and used for electing mayors in cities like London (United Kingdom) and Wellington (New Zealand) for national elections in Papua New Guinea. The new British government has committed to holding a national referendum on IRV for electing the House of Commons.<br /><br />Returning to the United States, there have been two repeals of IRV among those 14 cities that passed it at the ballot: Burlington (VT) and Pierce County (WA). Repeals took place over the opposition of the local League of Women Voters and were tied to special partisan calculations that rarely will be repeated. At the same time, several cities are moving toward IRV, including action this year by the California city councils of Oakland, Berkeley and San Leandro to use it this November. Despite what some might claim, no other city has repealed IRV; as one example of opposition claims, Sunnyvale (CA) this year changed a never-used feature to have the 7-member city council use IRV when electing one of its members to be mayor – backers of this change stressed that their vote had nothing to do with their views on using IRV in actual elections.Terry Bouriciushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06928242351793435111noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7985004128609516050.post-41037630717806615992010-06-12T08:06:00.007-04:002010-06-12T14:46:06.524-04:00Rebutting the "Majority Failure" Argument Against IRVOne misleading argument made by some IRV opponents is that a "real" runoff (top two runoff, with a second election weeks or months after the first) produces a "real" majority, but that IRV may not produce such a majority. This argument is based on using different standards to compute majorities under IRV and traditional runoffs.<br /><br />These IRV opponents argue that there is a failure to produce a "real" majority under IRV because they use the total number of votes in the first round to compute a majority, not the total number of votes cast in the instant runoff. Sometimes the number of exhausted ballots - that is, ballots that don't rank any of the remaining candidates in the final instant runoff - can mean that neither of the two finalists has more than 50% of the votes cast in the first round.<br /><br />The mayoral election in Burlington (VT) in 2009 is used as an example of this "failure." In the first round of that election, the results were:<br /><br />Kurt Wright 2,951<br />Bob Kiss 2,585<br />Andy Montroll 2,063<br />Dan Smith 1,306<br />Write-ins 36<br />James Simpson 35<br />(With four invalid ballots, three of which were later found to be valid in a partial recount.)<br /><br />In the final result of the election, the results were:<br /><br />Bob Kiss 4,313<br />Kurt Wright 4,061<br />(with 602 exhausted ballots and the 4 invalid ballots)<br /><br />IRV opponents argue that although Kiss won a majority of the valid ballots in the final round of voting, he failed to win a "real" majority because his final round votes were only 48% of the votes case in the first round.<br /><br />IRV advocates point out that the result was due to some voters exercising their option to abstain from a choice between the two finalists - just as many registered voters abstained from voting in the first place. That doesn't change the fact that winner Bob Kiss earned majority support from voters who chose to indicate a preference for either him or Kurt Wright.<br /><br />Australia avoids this possible outcome by requiring voters to rank all candidates in its IRV races for the House of Representatives. That's certainly an option for those who care about this definition of a majority, and it does ensure the voters take the time to indicate their <span style="font-style: italic;">last </span>choice along with their first choice. But if eligible voters have the right to skip voting altogether, some will argue that they have the right to skip ranking candidates they don't like.<br /><br />But it's not fair to say that in contrast to IRV, traditional runoff produces a "real" majority while discounting the total number of votes cast in the first round when calculating a majority. By this argument, Vincent Dober won a "real" majority in the March 2009 Burlington's City Council Ward 7 election even though he received considerably fewer votes in the second round of the runoff election than his opponent received in the first:<br /><br />Round 1:<br />Ellie Blais 461<br />Vincent Dober 612<br />Eli Lesser-Goldsmith 619<br />Write-ins 4<br /><br />Round 2<br />Vincent Dober 515<br />Eli-Lesser Goldsmith 425<br /><br />Under the standards that IRV opponents apply to IRV, we would use the first round totals to compute a majority, and Dober in the runoff would have secured only 30% of the vote - a considerably worse majority "failure" than in the Mayoral election held at the same time with IRV. IRV opponents can't have it both ways. Either Bob Kiss and Vincent Dober both won majorities or neither of them did. Under normal usage, the candidate with more than 50% of the votes counted in the final round is called a "majority winner."<br /><br />A more consistent standard to compare IRV and traditional runoffs would be to look at the decline in participation from the first round to the last. In the Mayoral election under IRV, 93% of the voters who cast a ballot in the first round ended up participating in the final round. In the City Council election under a traditional runoff, only 55% of the voters who cast a ballot in the first round ended up participating in the second round.<br /><br />Another revealing example is the 2008 U.S. Senate election in Georgia. Incumbent Republican Senator Saxby Chambliss won re-election in a December runoff after falling short of a majority in November. Turnout in the second round was only 57% of the first round in spite of the fact that a Democratic filibuster-proof majority was at stake in the Senate.<br /><br />First round:<br />Saxby Chambliss 1,867,097<br />Jim Martin 1,757,393<br />Allen Buckley 127,923<br />Write-ins 72<br />Total 3,752,577<br /><br />Second round:<br />Saxby Chambliss 1,228,033<br />Jim Martin 909,923<br />Total 2,137,956<br /><br />If this election was held under IRV, the number of ballots cast for the final round would have been at least 96.6% of the first round total. It would likely have been higher, as most of Libertarian candidate Allen Buckley's supporters probably would have indicated a second preference. Even if Buckley won a far larger share of the vote and none of his supporters cast votes for their second choice, it would have been mathematically impossible for final round votes to fall to only 57% of the first round total as under a traditional runoff.<br /><br />To be fair, it is possible for second round turnout to exceed that of the first round under a traditional runoff - and every now and then it happens. However, large declines in turnout seem to be the norm under traditional runoffs - sometimes dramatically so, with turnout falling on the order of ten times in statewide primary runoffs in Texas and North Carolina in 2008. Federal primary runoffs in the several stats that hold them provide particularly strong evidence for large declines in participation from the first to the second rounds of traditional runoffs. From 1994 to 2008, turnout declined in 113 of 116 regularly scheduled federal primary runoffs, and the average decline was about 35% - see <a href="http://archive.fairvote.org/?page=1489">FairVote's data </a>on these runoffs.<br /><br />Bottom line: you can't make a majority of voters like one of the candidates running. But you can enact IRV to make sure you always elect the candidate who has majority support over his or her top opponent in the final round and to ensure the defeat of the candidate whom a majority of voters see as their <span style="font-style: italic;">last choice</span> - a result that plurality voting makes all too possible.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7985004128609516050.post-54413588906805929482010-06-08T12:34:00.005-04:002010-06-09T17:16:30.121-04:00IRV reduces problems of strategic votingA key element of IRV is that, contrary to some critics, it <span style="font-style: italic;">reduces </span>the need for strategic calculation compared to traditional vote-for-one plurality elections, or two-round runoff elections.<br /><br />For example, the concern that voting for your favorite candidate might help elect your least favorite choice (prevalent in vote-for-one plurality races with three or more candidates) is <span style="font-style: italic;">reduced</span> by IRV. With plurality voting, voters need to know the latest polls to determine who the likely front-runners are, to plan how to strategically use their one vote, and so on. While every voting method can have possibilities of strategic voting in some situations, IRV is less prone to strategic manipulation than plurality or two-round runoffs. <br /><br />Prof. Nicolaus Tideman in his latest book <span style="font-style: italic;">Collective Decisions and Voting </span>used real-world election data to analyze the resistance to strategy of various voting methods. On a scale of 10, with 10 being perfectly resistant (which no system is), plurality voting got a 6.3, two-round runoffs got 8.1 and IRV got 9.7.<br /><br />As to facts about real use of IRV in government elections, Australia has used it for generations. Here is <a href="http://www.blogger.com/%20http://blogs.abc.net.au/antonygreen/2010/05/preferential-voting-in-australia.html#more">an analysis</a> of IRV use in the federal House of Representatives of Australia from 1949 - 2007.<br /><br />IRV is also simple for voters to use (over 99.9% of IRV ballots were valid in Burlington's five-candidate mayoral races with IRV in 2006 and 2009, with no invalid ballots in the low-income/low education wards.<br /><br />The main point in response to concerns about strategy, is that with IRV, strategy is <span style="font-style: italic;">less</span> of an issue than with plurality elections or two-round runoffs. IRV also introduces NO new paradoxes or pathologies that do not <span style="font-style: italic;">already </span>exist (and <span style="font-style: italic;">worse</span>) under either two-round runoffs or plurality elections.<br /><br />Concerns about whether voters need an advance degree to fully understand IRV are misplaced. Do voters fully understand how a plain old telephone works (how the switching works, etc. to reach the intended person)? No. But they can use it just as effectively as an electrical engineer. So too with IRV, there is convincing evidence that voters with less education use IRV as effectively as anyone else.Terry Bouriciushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06928242351793435111noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7985004128609516050.post-5609141195943639822010-05-29T08:16:00.021-04:002010-06-19T13:46:10.943-04:00Instant Runoff Voting, Election Integrity and FairVote<em>Updated June 19</em><br />Some critics of instant runoff voting suggest that its backers, including FairVote, should take election integrity concerns like verified voting, manual audits and transparent elections more seriously.<br /><br />Local activists for IRV often have been leaders in local election integrity efforts - people like Rick Lass, who led the effort to win instant runoff voting in Santa Fe (NM) in 2008 and Anthony Lorenzo who led the effort to win an IRV ballot measure in Sarasota (FL) in 2007. As to FairVote, we've proposed <a href="http://www.fairvote.org/ranked-voting-and-election-integrity">procedures</a> for auditing ranked choice voting elections and periodicaly highlight our views in communications to our members, like in this November 2009 <a href="http://www.fairvote.org/suffragium-ex-machina">Innovative Analysis</a>. Here also is a link to<a href="http://www.fairvote.org/voting-equipment-election-integrity-auditability/"> our statement</a> on election security and audits overall.<br /><br />More broadly, FairVote was the first national group to propose establishing an affirmative <a href="http://www.fairvote.org/right-to-vote-amendment">right to vote in the Constitution</a>, and in so doing highlighting a full range of federal, state and local laws and practices undermining suffrage rights. For years, we have also been leaders in the call for public interest voting equipment, including open source software and removal of profiteering from elections -- for instance, see this excerpt from a <a href="http://archive.fairvote.org/global/?page=643&articlemode=showspecific&showarticle=833">Tompaine.com commentary</a> in 2004:<br /><br /><em>"Public Interest" voting equipment. Currently voting equipment is suspect, undermining confidence in our elections. The proprietary software and hardware are created by shadowy companies with partisan ties who sell equipment by wining and dining election administrators with little knowledge of voting technology. The government should oversee the development of publicly-owned software and hardware, contracting with the sharpest minds in the private sector. And then that open-source voting equipment should be deployed throughout the nation to ensure that every county -- and every voter -- is using the best equipment.</em><br /><br />Getting issues of election integrity right are of essential importance in running fair elections, however, and we look forward to ongoing communication with election integrity advocates who have constructive suggestions on how best to implement ranked voting in elections that are secure and can be audited.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7985004128609516050.post-31846097012336554372010-05-25T09:29:00.003-04:002010-05-29T08:14:31.573-04:00Fairvote MN statement on Minneapolis RCV Election Cost Report<div class="content"> <p><span style="font-size: small;"><strong>Minneapolis</strong><strong> Introduction of RCV Pegged at $365,000</strong></span></p> <p><span style="font-size: small;"><em>1/3 of amount attributed to one-time start-up costs</em></span></p> <p><span style="font-size: small;"><em>Further cost efficiencies expected in future elections as RCV-capable machines become available</em></span></p> <p><span style="font-size: small;">A new <a href="http://www.ci.minneapolis.mn.us/council/2010-meetings/20100430/Docs/RCV-CostReport_RCA.pdf">report</a> by Minneapolis Interim Elections Director Ginny Gelms concludes that costs associated with the city’s 2009 switch to Ranked Choice Voting were approximately $365,000. Of the total cost, slightly more than a third encompassed one-time expenditures that will not be required in subsequent elections. The report also noted that additional cost-efficiencies are expected as voting equipment is put in place and voters and election judges become increasingly familiar with the system. “Process improvements implemented from lessons learned in 2009 will likely make for a more efficient process . . . which will impact the overall cost,” Gelms wrote.</span></p> <p><span style="font-size: small;">The first RCV election in Minneapolis last November proved highly successful, with 95 percent of voters polled calling it easy to use. Former Minneapolis Interim Elections Director Patrick O’Connor who oversaw the implementation of the new system, says “we proved that it could be well administered, quickly and accurately counted, and that voters had little problem with the concept.”</span></p> <p><span style="font-size: small;">The April 26 report noted that Minneapolis’ 2009 municipal election cost $1.47 million, an increase over the $1.13 million spent in 2005 (adjusting for inflation). The hand count in the 2009 election represented the largest portion of RCV-specific expenses.</span></p> <p><span style="font-size: small;">Should a hand count be needed in the next election, however, the city can consider other options for cost savings such as removing the requirement to record the names of all write-ins (as former Minneapolis Elections Director Pat O’Connor has recommended).</span></p> <p><span style="font-size: small;">The report also indicated that if RCV-capable voting equipment was available in the next election to tally the ballots, costs would be reduced by more than half. Gelms has said that such equipment may be available within the next three years; the city is working closely with Hennepin County to have RCV-ready voting machines in place by the 2013 election. Such machines are currently used in San Francisco; Cambridge, Massachusetts; and will be used in upcoming November elections in Berkeley, Oakland and San Leandro, California. </span></p> <p><span style="font-size: small;">The highly effective voter education effort leading up to the 2009 election was the other major RCV-related outlay, accounting for 30 percent of RCV costs. The effectiveness of the effort can be seen in the facts that 95 percent of voters found the new election process easy to use and that the entire election produced just one defective ballot among 45,968 cast. These results illustrate the importance of voter outreach and education, efforts which council member Robert Lilligren says should be a priority – to improve voter familiarity with city elections and promote turnout – regardless of whether RCV is used.</span></p> <p><span style="font-size: small;">The city’s 2013 projections assume a continued strong investment in voter outreach, which FairVote Minnesota supports. Even so, RCV experiences in other cities, such as San Francisco, suggest that “earned media” coverage in newspaper, radio, and online news outlets can help defray future costs here as well. </span></p> <p><span style="font-size: small;">It’s worth noting that the report only looked ahead one election cycle and as such didn’t address the potential savings achievable over the long run through the elimination of the primary in combination with the use of machines and reduced voter educational costs. </span></p> <p><span style="font-size: small;"> The move to RCV was led by FairVote Minnesota, a nonprofit organization working to enhance democracy through advocacy and public education.</span></p> </div><br /><br /><em><strong>Featured Quote</strong>: Former city elections director Patrick O'Connor, who oversaw implementation of IRV in Minneapolis in 2009: "I have had the great fortune to be a small part of what could easily be considered the most significant civic exercise in the history of Minnesota government: the implementation of the first Ranked Choice Voting election in Minneapolis and in Minnesota. We proved that it could be well administered, quickly and accurately counted, and that voters had little problem with the concept."</em>Jeanne Masseyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07732074312214564640noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7985004128609516050.post-30667521596110356562010-05-24T18:21:00.007-04:002010-06-19T13:55:28.015-04:00The distorted "backlash" against IRV -- The Sunnyvale ExampleUpdated June 19, 2010<br /><br />IRV opponent Joyce McCloy is behind an <a href="http://instantrunoff.blogspot.com/">anti-instant runoff voting blog</a> with a simple modus operandi: highlight links to webpages that might discredit instant runoff voting and its advocates. This "evidence" tpically is incomplete, deceptive or just not true. But those seeking to seed doubt about change only need for it to <em>appear</em> possibly true.<br /><br />Today's screed about a new alleged "repeal" of IRV was a good example. As Ms. McCloy knows, IRV in recent decades has been repealed in two and only two governmental jurisdictions in the United States: Pierce County (WA) and Burlington (VT). Both of these repeals were disappointing to advocates, of course, but there was a context to them (see more on <a href="http://www.fairvote.org/irv-and-choice-voting-on-election-day-2009-wins-losses-and-the-long-term-trajectory">Pierce County</a> and on <a href="http://www.fairvote.org/lessons-from-burlington">Burlington</a>). <br /><br />And that's it. No other city has repealed IRV even as more cities, organizations and colleges keep using IRV every year. Ms. McCloy knows that Aspen (CO) hasn't repealed IRV, but she says it has because voters narrowly failed to pass a non-binding advisory question to keep it. She knows that Georgetown University uses IRV, but she says it's been repealed because students didn't use it for a single election in early 2009 (and never mind IRV's <a href="http://www.fairvote.org/colleges-and-universities-using-instant-runoff-voting">ongoing and growing use</a> in nearly 60 colleges and universities, including adoptions in the past year year at colleges like Cornell, Brown and Brandeis). She knows that Cary (NC) didn't repeal IRV (rather it had used IRV in a one-time pilot in 2007), but she says it did. And so on.<br /><br />Today she's <a href="http://instantrunoff.blogspot.com/2010/05/sunnyvale-ca-scraps-instant-runoff.html">excited </a>about Sunnyvale, California. This year, based on a rule adopted by a prior council, the Sunnyvale<span style="font-style:italic;"> might</span> city council would have used instant runoff voting <em>within</em> if at least three members of its seven-member city council had run mayor. Such small-scale uses of IRV can be interesting to consider, but with at least three candidates (all councilors) and only seven councilors with votes (including the three candidates), things can get tricky - tie votes, say, and efforts to outsmart colleagues.<br /><br />So in what seems like a very sensible decision that IRV advocates would be quick to support, Sunnyvale's city council decided to change its rule to use IRV for these internal elections of the council choosing the mayor in the future. But does this mean Sunnyvale has "repealed" IRV and that supporters of the change think IRV's too confusing as a system? Joyce McCloy has added Sunnyvale to her litany of "repeals" in communications, but consider this quote from a <a href="http://www.dweeb.org/2010/04/29/">thoughtful blogpost</a> by one of the backers of the change, Sunnyvale city councilor Jim Griffith:<br /><br /><em>First off, while ranked-choice (or instant run-off) voting is terrific for general elections or when you have a lot of candidates to choose from, it doesn’t work well with a small number of voters and a small number of candidates (in our case, 7 voters, 3 candidates). There’s a lot of opportunity for game-playing, plus a good chance of an end result that many members of the public simply won’t understand. Neither of those serve the public good, so I wanted to get rid of the ranked-choice option</em><br /><br />Joyce McCloy in her post bolds a quote from Councilmember Griffith as if he is anti-IRV when in fact he thinks IRV is <em>"terrific" </em>for general elections. Sadly, however, don't hold your breath waiting for corrections to her blog. A website URL can't be wrong or misleading, right?<br /><br /><strong>Addendum, May 25</strong>: I received an email from Sunnyvale city councilor Jim Griffith. He expressed appreciation for my post and clarified that in fact <em>the Sunnyvale city council never used IRV</em>. While there <em>might</em> have been three councilors seeking to be mayor this year, only two ended up doing so. But the potential choice among three councilors led to the council sensibly deciding that a binding IRV vote with only seven voters choosing among three or more candidates (all of whom also would be among the seven voters) wasn't appropriate. Griffith also reiterated his support for IRV for general elections.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7985004128609516050.post-63332019573643066662010-05-19T09:57:00.003-04:002010-05-19T10:19:08.386-04:00<span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-size:180%;">North Carolina </span></span><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-size:180%;">FAQ on Instant Runoff Voting </span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;">www.NCVotes123.com April 2010</span></span><br /><br />The following are questions frequently asked by North Carolina municipalities considering implementation of instant runoff voting (IRV) and answers based on responses from the State Board of Elections, the University of North Carolina School of Government, and scientific exit poll surveys conducted in North Carolina.<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">1. What is instant runoff voting (IRV)?</span></span><br /><br />IRV is a majority voting system that combines a regular election and a runoff by giving voters the option of ranking candidates in order of choice. The two candidates with the most first choices advance to the runoff. In the runoff, each ballot is counted for whichever runoff candidate is ranked higher. As with a traditional runoff election, the winner is the candidate with the majority of votes in the runoff round.<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">2. How is IRV an improvement over a city’s current method of election?</span></span><br /><br />IRV can improve each method of election used in our cities:<br /> <br />· If a city has a plurality election method, IRV would eliminate the possibility of a winner who was strongly opposed by a majority of voters, but won because votes for opposing candidates were divided among them.<br />· If a city has a partisan primary method, IRV would eliminate the problem of a majority of voters having limited choices that have been filtered by political parties and save the cost of an extra election.<br />· If a city has an automatic nonpartisan runoff, IRV would ensure a majority winner without the guaranteed cost of holding two separate elections.<br />· If a city has a conditional runoff, IRV would prevent the need for a separate costly low-turnout runoff.<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">3. What does an IRV ballot look like and how does a voter mark it?</span></span><br /><br />A sample IRV ballot used in Cary can be found <a href="http://archive.fairvote.org/media/irv/cary_demoballot.pdf">here</a>. A voter simply fills in the first bubble next to his or her favorite candidate, the second bubble next to the voter’s second choice candidate, and the third bubble for their third choice. A voter may rank only one or two candidates if they so choose. Ranking more candidates does not count against your first choice, but increases the chances that you will elect a preferred candidate or prevent the election of a disliked candidate.<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">4. How are IRV elections counted on North Carolina voting machines?</span></span><br /><br />The State Board of Elections has developed secure, inexpensive means to count IRV ballots on all voting equipment used by North Carolina cities. Hendersonville’s Ivotronic direct recording electronic system allows a final result on the night of the election. Cary’s M100 optical scan system allows a determination of first choices on the night of the election counted at the polls, with a final result one or two days later at a central location where all counting will be done on machine.<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">5. Is IRV legal in North Carolina? </span></span><br /><br />In 2006, North Carolina entered into a pilot program by adopting law allowing up to ten jurisdictions (each year) to try IRV for their local elections, including school board elections. In the summer of 2008, North Carolina extended the program for three years with passage of Elections Amendment Act (S-1263), authorizing continued use of the instant runoff voting for willing counties and municipalities.<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">6. Where has IRV been utilized in North Carolina?</span></span><br /><br />Both Cary and Hendersonville utilized Instant Runoff Voting in 2007. Hendersonville used it again in 2009. Outside North Carolina, cities recently adopting IRV include Memphis (TN), Oakland (CA), and Minneapolis (MN). It is a common method for elections of organizations, including the president of American Political Science Association and of student leaders at nearly 60 universities, including North Carolina State and Duke.<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">7. What expenses does IRV incur for a municipality that implements it for one year under the pilot program?</span></span><br /><br />A jurisdiction participating in the IRV pilot program is responsible for the cost of educating voters, candidates, and election officials on the election method. These costs were minimal, however. With the use of a good tested ballot design, education costs can be pennies per registered voter. In addition, groups like the League of Women Voters can provide volunteer voter assistance. The State Board of Elections has developed inexpensive procedures for conducting the IRV count. Despite the minimal cost of voter education in Cary, the City saved $28,000 with IRV.<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">8. What did the voter education programs consist of in Cary and Hendersonville?</span></span><br /><br />In both Cary and Hendersonville a simple ballot design was the key to successful voter education. Cary city officials sent sample ballots in utility bills and issued a media advisory about the ballot change. Local newspapers, in both cities, ran articles bout the new ballot design. Board of Elections staff visited civic organizations to inform them of the new method. Local radio stations ran 30-second Public Service Announcements. The North Carolina Center for Voter Education produced an informative video on IRV that ran on government access stations.<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">9. Did IRV save money in Cary and/or Hendersonville?</span></span><br /><br />By avoiding a runoff in one of its districts, Cary saved $28,000 in 2007. A citywide runoff would have cost more than $100,000. Hendersonville did not need a runoff in 2007 or 2009, but any runoff would have cost much more than IRV.<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">10. Were any surveys conducted of voters in Cary and/or Hendersonville and did voters understand IRV?</span></span><br /><br />Dr. Michael Cobb, assistant professor of political science and survey researcher at North Carolina State University (NCSU), in 2007 designed and analyzed the results of an exit poll survey on how voters in both Cary and Hendersonville felt about IRV. Karen Brinson of the NCSU Board of Elections managed the poll. The survey revealed that 68 percent of Cary voters preferred IRV, and 81% found it “very easy to understand.” It revealed that 71% of Hendersonville voters preferred IRV, and 86% found it “at least somewhat easy to understand.” Cary’s own survey in 2008 found similar findings, with even more dramatic differences among the more than 60% voters who gave IRV a top rating of 7-9 compared the 6% of voters who gave it a rating of 1-3.<br /><br />In 2009, Dr. Cobb again did a Hendersonville survey. Voters overwhelmingly found IRV easy to use, and only 20% opposed its use for statewide elections.<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">11. What jurisdictions opted to use IRV in the pilot program in 2009?</span></span><br /><br />Based on its administrative ease and strong public support for IRV, Hendersonville’s city council approved implementing IRV in for its 2009 elections and has indicated unanimous interest for 2011 elections and beyond. Cary considered doing so as well At a March 12th public hearing, city supporters of IRV heavily out numbered opponents, while the city’s 2008 survey revealed that a s strong majority of Cary voters understood and preferred IRV – indeed voters were ten times more likely to give it their highest rating of 7 to 9 compared to the lowest rating of 1-3. The council did not pursue the pilot, however, in part because of some uncertainty over the counting method for optical scan machines. Now that the State Board of Elections has developed a sensible procedure for doing IRV on the state’s optical scan machines, more cities may use IRV in 2011.<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">12. Does IRV make it harder for racial minorities (groups who have been historically disenfranchised and denied equal access to formal education) to vote, dissuade them from voting, or dilute the impact of their collective votes?</span></span><br /><br />African American endorsers of IRV include President Barack Obama, U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr., and election law scholar and Department of Justice official Spencer Overton. Surveys in both Cary and Hendersonville (as well as those in more diverse cities throughout the U.S.) show that voters of all racial groups understand IRV equally well. In most cases, IRV protects the strength of racial minority groups by preventing the need for a separate runoff for which racial minority voters have traditionally been the least likely to return, and by avoiding the possibility that racial minority voters will split their votes between opposing racial minority candidates of choice.<br /><br />Racial minorities have been strong backers of IRV when it has appeared on the ballot, including super-majority support in landslide victories in cities like Oakland, Minneapolis and Memphis (TN), all of which passed IRV by margins of two-to-one or more in recent years. Voters of color also have been strongly supportive of the system in exit polls, and in the City with the most IRV elections, San Francisco, the Board of Supervisors has become more diverse during the six years the system has been adopted.<br />In San Francisco turnout among racial minority voters increased under IRV in the decisive runoff round, and prevented the “splitting” of Asian votes among four strong candidates of choice in a district race for election to the Board of Supervisors in 2006.<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">13. What steps does a municipality take to enter the IRV pilot program for 2011?</span></span><br /><br />Each local governing board participating in the pilot (after receiving written instructions from the State Board of Elections on implementation) must approve participation in the pilot program, and agree to cooperate with local board of elections in a voter education program. The local board of elections must also approve participation. If a jurisdiction is in more than one county, all county boards of election must approve it. For more information please see Instant Runoff Voting: Goals, Standards, and Criteria for Implementation and Evaluation (presented to the North Carolina State Board of Elections on December 11, 2008 by the University of North Carolina School of Government). The report can be found at www.ncvotes123.com<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">14. How are IRV ballots exactly tallied to determine a winner?</span></span><br /><br />First, all ballots are counted toward their first choice. If a candidate receives a majority of first choice rankings, the candidate wins the election. If no candidate receives a majority of votes, then all candidates are eliminated except for the top two vote getters. In the runoff round, each ballot is counted for the runoff candidate ranked ahead of the other runoff candidate on the ballot. Any ballot listing one of those candidates first is counted for that candidate. Among the remaining ballots, any ballots listing one of those candidates second is counted for that candidate. Any ballots without a first or second choice ranking for a runoff candidate are counted for whichever runoff candidate is ranked third. The winner is the candidate with a majority of the total votes.<br /><br />In all jurisdictions, the first round of tallying is conducted using the jurisdiction’s current tallying procedure. For subsequent rounds of counting (if necessary) in jurisdictions in counties using direct-record electronic (“DRE”) machines, vote information is transferred to an Excel spreadsheet, validated for transfer accuracy, and then sorted and counted, either through the regular Excel functions or by hand-to-eye from the Excel spreadsheet. For jurisdictions located in counties using optical scan (OS) machines, subsequent rounds of counting take place centrally, using a methodology developed by the State Board of Elections that allows the count to be conducted entirely on OS machines.<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">15. Are these tallying methods certified and constitutional?</span></span><br /><br />All of the above methods are certified and constitutional.<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">16. Who endorses IRV?</span></span><br /><br />Public interest organizations like Democracy NC, Common Sense Foundation, Common Cause, North Carolina League of Women Voters, FairVote, NC Fair Share, Southern Coalition for Social Justice, NC Public Interest Research Group, Martin Luther King Jr. Coalition, Independent Progressive Politics Network, Southerners on New Ground, NC Green Party, and Traction support IRV. Individuals backing the North Carolina IRV pilot include House Speaker Joe Hackney, House Minority Leader Paul Stam, and John Hood of the John Locke Institute. Nationally, President Barack Obama, former governor Howard Dean and Sen. John McCain are among those who have acted on their support for IRV.<br /><br />For more information and videos on IRV please visit:<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">NC Votes 123 Coalition</span> <br />www.ncvotes123.com<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Democracy North Carolina</span><br />www.democracy-nc.org<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">FairVote's IRV Program (w/videos)<br /></span>www.fairvote.org/instant-runoff-voting<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">NC Ctr. for Voter Education video<br /></span>ncvotered.com/cary/<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">2</span><span style="font-weight: bold;">009 Hendersonville survey<br /></span>news.ncsu.edu/releases/wmscobbhirv09/<span style="font-weight: bold;"></span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Wake County review of Cary vote<br /></span>http://archive.fairvote.org/index.php?page=2543<br /><!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--><br /><!--[endif]--><p></p>Terry Bouriciushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06928242351793435111noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7985004128609516050.post-28852380928204435242010-03-27T09:53:00.009-04:002010-05-06T10:28:09.904-04:00Response to "blackboard" videos by SJVoterTerry Reilly ("SJVoter") is an opponent of instant runoff voting from San Jose. He has made a series of videos using a blackboard that share a fundamental misrepresentation. His videos appear to show flaws and troubling paradoxes unique to IRV. In fact, IRV doesn't introduce any paradoxes that don't already exist under common runoff elections systems ( including the runoffs Reilly ironically defends in San Jose). Every one of his videos' examples is also applicable to any runoff election system, and he ignores far more serious paradoxes with plurality elections, such as the possibility of electing a candidate that the majority of voters agree is the absolute worst candidate.<br /><br />If you don't immediately see how the paradoxes Reilly presents in the YouTube videos apply to traditional separate runoff elections, you only need to walk through the exact scenarios presented, but imagine that the IRV rankings are merely preferences inside voters' heads. These voters can vote for their first choice in the initial round of voting. Then in the separate runoff they use the preference order in their heads to decide which of the finalists they will vote for in the second round of voting. Whether the issue is non-monotonicity, winner-turn-loser, participation, etc.... ALL of these paradoxes apply to ALL runoff election systems, not just IRV.<br /><br />However, IRV does REDUCE the risk of these paradoxes playing any role in an election compared to traditional runoff elections. This is because, in a traditional runoff system, a voter can vote strategically in the first round for a weak opponent, and then switch his or her first choice to the true first choice in the runoff round. Since IRV uses a single ballot and a single round of voting, this trick can't be used. So with IRV attempting to exploit these paradoxes to manipulate the election is far more likely to back-fire than with traditional separate runoffs.Terry Bouriciushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06928242351793435111noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7985004128609516050.post-60621734632746534972010-03-26T13:19:00.001-04:002010-03-26T13:21:06.420-04:00Response to Kathy Dopp "Report" on IRV "Flaws"<strong>Kathy Dopp, a Blogger and lone member of what she calls the </strong><strong>"National Election Data Archive,"</strong> <strong>has authored a "report" alleging 18 flaws of IRV. Her "report" has been floating around the Internet, but is deeply flawed itself.</strong><br />Here is a response to each of the points she raises...<br /><br /><strong>1. Dopp: "Does not solve the "spoiler" problem except in special cases..."</strong><br /><br />Dopp has her "special cases" reversed. In fact, IRV solves the spoiler problem in virtually all likely U.S. partisan elections. Whenever a third party or independent candidate is unlikely to be one of the top vote-getters (true in over 99% of U.S. elections), IRV eliminates the spoiler problem completely. If a third party grows to the point that its candidates out-poll major party candidates, another issue that is related to the spoiler problem, can occasionally arise. This is where supporters of a third party candidate may worry that by supporting their favorite candidate, they risk causing their less-preferred compromise choice to be eliminated from the final runoff, leading to the election of their least-preferred choice. In other words, the issue of whether to vote for your favorite choice, or to rank your compromise choice first can resurface in this unique circumstance. But this is extremely rare and no different than a candidate in a party’s political primary arguing "Vote for me because I am more electable in the general election."<br /><br /><strong>2. Dopp: "Requires centralized vote counting procedures at the state-level…" </strong><br /><br />IRV creates no need to centralize the counting or the ballots themselves, although that is one possible counting procedure -- and indeed a central count is often sensible for smaller jurisdictions. But all that is required to implement IRV is central coordination of the tally. If ballot images are recorded on optical scan equipment, the data from those images can be collected centrally for an IRV ballot (with an appropriate manual audit to confirm accuracy). If a hand-count is conducted, vote totals need to be reported to a central tallying office in order to determine what step to take next in the count. In Ireland, for example, there are 43 counting centers in the presidential race. Election administrators count ballots and report their totals to a national office that in turn instructs the administrators at each counting center on what to do next. The entire process takes less than a day even though more than a million ballots are cast.<br /><br /><strong>3. Dopp: "Cannot be implemented without modification to the ballots or to the optical scan voting machines or their software."</strong><br /><br />She is wrong when she says older "discrete-sensor machines cannot accommodate ranked ballots. San Francisco has used such voting machines for IRV since 2004. Obviously one needs to modify the ballot to give voters the option of ranking candidates, and many current voting machines are not programmed to record ballot rankings. While true, this is hardly a "flaw" of IRV.<br /><br /><strong>4. Dopp: "Encourages the use of complex voting systems and …[FairVote promotes] electronic-balloting…"</strong><br /><br />Most government IRV elections are in fact conducted with hand-count paper ballots, including national elections in Australia, Ireland and Papua New Guinea. FairVote is a leading advocacy organization for IRV, but it is joined in supporting IRV by numerous other organizations and individuals, including the founders of TrueVote Maryland and election integrity leader David Cobb and Anthony Lorenzo.<br /><br />As to FairVote, it advocates the replacement of all paperless voting machines with paper-ballot systems, such as optical scanners. All three of the major voting machine vendors have created optical scan options for ranked-choice ballots. Not all of these are ideal (some, for example, cannot handle more than three rankings), but FairVote expects IRV elections to be overwhelming run on paper ballot systems in the future. FairVote advocates that all such machines store a redundant electronic record of each ballot, as well as a paper ballot to allow for better fraud detection, and simplify ranked ballot tabulations. Rather than making such elections more complicated, this would simplify the process, while improving transparency and integrity.<br /><br /><strong>5. Dopp: "Confuses voters…"</strong><br /><br />All the evidence shows that voters are not confused by IRV. The rate of spoiled ballots did not increase in any of the U.S. cities when they switched to IRV. For example, Burlington (VT) used IRV for the first time in a hotly contested race for mayor in 2006, and among those casting votes in the IRV race fully 99.9% of ballots were valid, with the very highest valid ballot rate in the ward in town with the highest number of low-income voters. San Francisco’s rate of valid ballots in the most closely contested race in its first citywide election with IRV was 99.6%. Furthermore, exit polls have been conducted in every city having an IRV election for the first time in the modern era. Each survey shows that voters overwhelmingly prefer IRV to their old method of elections.<br /><br /><strong>6. Dopp: "Confusing, complex and time-consuming to implement and to count…"</strong><br /><br />IRV certainly is simpler for election officials and voters than conducting a whole separate runoff election to find a majority winner. It is more complicated to administer than a single vote-for-one election, but election officials have adjusted well to their new responsibilities. Note that the winning threshold for an IRV election, as with any election, must be specified in the law.<br /><br /><strong>7. Dopp: "Makes post election data and exit poll analysis much more difficult to perform…"</strong><br /><br />To date, IRV election can make it easier to do post-election and exit poll analysis. Because optical scan counts with IRV require capturing of ballot images, San Francisco (CA) and Burlington (VT) were able to release the data files showing every single ballot's set of rankings – thereby allowing any voter to do a recount and full analysis on their own.<br /><br />Exit polls can be done just as well under IRV rules as vote-for-one rules. California requires a manual audit in its elections, which has been done without difficulty in San Francisco’s IRV elections. Manual audits should be required for all elections, regardless of whether IRV is used or not.<br /><br /><strong>8. Dopp: "Difficult and time-consuming to manually count…"</strong><br /><br />Manual counts can take slightly longer than vote-for-one elections, but aren't difficult, unless many different races on a ballot need to go to a runoff count. As cited earlier, Irish election administrators can count more than a million ballots by hand in hotly contested presidential elections in one standard workday. In most IRV elections the bulk of the ballots have first preferences marked for the two strongest candidates, so these ballots only need to be sorted once. It is only the small stacks of ballots for eliminated candidates that may need to be resorted according to alternate choices.<br /><br /><strong>9. Dopp: "Difficult and inefficient to manually audit…"</strong><br /><br />IRV can be manually audited just as well as vote-for-one elections, although it does take more effort (since voters must be allowed to express more information on their ballot). Contrary to Dopp's insistence, there is no need to use precinct sums to perform an audit. A manual audit can be done using a random sample of ballots from a random sample of voting machines to confirm that the ballot records are accurate, or by a complete re-tally from a random sample of voting machines. A complete re-tally of all ballots (a recount) is, of course, possible but unnecessary unless a court recount is ordered.<br /><br /><strong>10. Dopp: "Could necessitate counting all presidential votes in Washington, D.C.…"</strong><br /><br />If the Electoral College were abolished and IRV were then adopted for future national popular vote elections for president, there would need to be national coordination of the tally in order to know which candidates got the fewest votes nationwide and needed to be eliminated – just as in Ireland. But the actual counting of ballots does not need to be federalized any more than if IRV was not used, and could be conducted by counties, states or whatever level is easiest and most secure for that jurisdiction. Note that voters certainly would be pleased to have a majority winner in elections for our highest office.<br /><br /><strong>11. Dopp: "IRV entrenches the two-major-political party system …"</strong><br /><br />IRV neither "entrenches" nor "overthrows" the two-party system. It simply ensures no candidate wins in the face of majority opposition. If a minor party has the support to earn a majority of votes, it will win in an IRV election.<br /><br />IRV is a winner-take-all method, like plurality voting and two-round runoffs. However, IRV allows independents and candidates with minor parties to run without being labeled as spoilers. This may reveal a higher level of support for these parties, and if these parties are attractive to voters, their support may grow.<br /><br />Relating to multi-party representation, any winner-take-all, single seat election method tends towards two dominant parties, at least in any given geographic area. To allow for multiple parties to regularly win office, jurisdictions should adopt a form of proportional representation in which candidates will be able to win office with less than 50% of the vote.<br /><br />Note that Australia’s IRV elections are often cited as an example of two-party domination. But while the two major parties (one of which is actually a coalition of two parties, with one party running in one particular region of the country) dominant representation, the minor parties contest elections very vigorously, with an average of seven candidates contesting house elections in 2007. That year the Green Party did not win any seats in house elections, but it ran candidates in every district and earned 8% of the national vote. It naturally would prefer a proportional representation system, but supports IRV over alternate winner-take-all systems and uses it to elect its internal leaders.<br /><br /><strong>12. Dopp: "Ranking a voter’s first-choice candidate LAST could cause that candidate to WIN…"</strong><br /><br />Dopp is referring to what election methods experts refer to as the "non-monotonicity" paradox. The key fact she doesn't state is that this is not unique to IRV, but common to all runoff election systems (whether instant or traditional). While technically correct, her presentation is intentionally miss-leading. The mere receiving of an additional first choice vote can never be the cause of a candidate's losing (although her wording intentionally implies this). Non-monotonicity is the result of the possibility that a change in the order of finishing of the other candidates that results from switching votes may mean that the otherwise winning candidate will face a stronger opponent in the final round of the runoff (whether an instant runoff or a separate runoff). In traditional separate runoff election systems this possibility may open the door to strategic manipulation, in which voters vote for a weak opponent of their true favorite in the first round, and then switch to their true favorite in the second round. Fortunately, with IRV the appeal of such manipulative strategy is practically eliminated, because a voter is not able to change her first choice between rounds, and thus the risk of the strategy backfiring is much greater with IRV than in a traditional runoff. For a fuller discussion of the monotonicity issue see http://www.fairvote.org/monotonicity/<br /><br /><strong>13. Dopp: "Delivers other unreasonable outcomes..."</strong><br /><br />Unreasonable outcomes are less likely with IRV than with any other single-seat voting method in use today. Every single voting method ever proposed can deliver "unreasonable outcomes" in some scenarios, but real-world experience has shown IRV to be one of the best methods. The overwhelming number of election method experts agree that IRV is fairer and more democratic than plurality voting even if some might prefer other theoretical voting methods. The American Political Science Association (the national association of political science professors) has incorporated IRV into their own constitution for electing their own national president. Robert’s Rules of Order recommends IRV over plurality voting.<br /><br />As to the specific examples…Irv can indeed have more ties, because there may be numerous rounds in the tally. However, such ties are for last place and elimination, and have little possibility of mattering. Most jurisdictions with IRV use a rule that eliminates in a single batch all candidates at the bottom with no chance of winning, so that none of these potential ties among write-ins or fringe candidates need to be settled.<br /><br />As to the vanishingly rare but mathematically possible pair-wise "lose to everybody except one" possibility, Dopp fails to mention that plurality elections frequently elect the candidate who in pair-wise comparisons would lose to every other candidate (the "Condorcet loser") which can never happen with IRV.<br /><br />Real world experience for over 80 years in Australia proves that IRV does not in fact favor extremist candidates over centrists. Certainly not has much as plurality elections can. This is because under IRV a candidate needs to not only have strong core support, but also appeal to the supporters of other candidates for second choices. If anything, candidates in the political center have the benefit that it is easier for them to win second rankings from the supporters of candidates on either side of them politically, than for candidates at the margins.<br /><br /><strong>14. Dopp: "Not all ballots are treated equally…"</strong><br /><br />This charge reveals a lack of understanding of how IRV works. All ballots are treated equally. Every one has one and only one vote in each round of counting. Just as in a traditional runoff, your ballot counts first for your favorite candidate and continues to count for that candidate as long as he or she has a chance to win.<br /><br />Your rankings should be considered as backup choices. Your ballot will only count for one of your lesser preferences if your favorite candidate has been eliminated. Every ballot counts as one vote for your highest ranked candidate who is still in the running in every round of counting.<br /><br />Note that courts in Michigan and Minnesota have upheld IRV for this very reason and Robert’s Rules of Order recommends it over plurality voting. For some key quotes from the Michigan court decision upholding IRV's equal treatment of ballots, please see note <1> below, or for the full court decision see http://www.fairvote.org/library/statutes/legal/irv.htm<br /><br /><strong>15. Dopp: "Costly…"</strong><br /><br />The two main expenses associated with the transition to IRV are voting equipment upgrades and voter education. Both of these are one-time costs that will be quickly balanced out by the savings coming from eliminating a runoff election in each election cycle. In San Francisco, for example, the city and county saved approximately $3 million by not holding a separate runoff election in 2005, easily covering the mostly one-time costs spent in 2003-2004 to implement the system.<br /><br />In North Carolina, counties spent $3.5 million for the Superintendent of Public Instruction runoff in 2004, at election with statewide turnout of only 3%. In 2007, IRV elections in Cary (NC) avoided the need for a runoff in one of the city council districts that would have cost taxpayers $28,000.<br /><br />An effective voter education program can also be done for relatively little money by learning from what types of education worked well in other jurisdictions and what types did not – with the biggest factors being a good ballot design, clear voter instructions and effective pollworker training in that order. In a report to the Vermont General Assembly, the Vermont Secretary of State estimated that, based on how well IRV was implemented in Vermont’s largest city of Burlington in 2006, voter education for statewide IRV in Vermont would cost less than $0.25 per registered voter. In a city of more than 100,000 people, Cary spent less than $10,000 on all IRV implementation and voter education (saving the $24,000 cost of a separate runoff election in District B) – with highly favorable reactions from voters.<br /><br /><strong>16. Dopp: "Increases the potential for undetectable vote fraud and erroneous vote counts…"</strong><br /><br />Actually, just the opposite is true, so long as paper ballots (such as optical scan) are used. The reason that any attempts at fraud are easier to detect with IRV is that there is a redundant electronic record (called a ballot image) of each ballot that can be matched one-to-one with the corresponding paper ballot. Cities such as San Francisco (CA) and Burlington (VT) release these ballot files so that any voter can do their own count. Without such redundant ballot records (which are not typical with vote-for-one elections) there is no way to know for certain if the paper ballots have been altered prior to a recount.<br /><br /><strong>17. Dopp: "Violates many election fairness principles…."</strong><br /><br />This charge reveals either a general lack of understanding, or intentional miss-representation. Every single voting method ever devised must violate some "fairness principles" as some of these criteria are mutually exclusive. Dopp's example in appendix B of "Arrow's fairness condition" (the Pareto Improvement Criterion) completely misunderstands the criterion, and gives an example that has no relevance to it (and contrary to her implication, IRV complies with this criterion). IRV works essentially the same as a traditional runoff election to find a majority winner. When the field narrows to the two finalists in the final instant runoff count, the candidate with more support (ranked more favorably on more ballots) will always win. Some theoretical voting methods may satisfy some "fairness' criteria, such as monotonicity, but then violate other more important criteria such as the majority criterion, or the later-no-harm criterion.<br /><br /><strong>18. Dopp: "Unstable and can be delicately sensitive to noise in the rankings…"</strong><br /><br />This point has some validity, but is of extremely minor significance. Whenever there is a close election with many candidates, regardless of the voting method, there is a chance that the ultimate winner may win due to the votes of the "most ill-informed voters." Holding a separate runoff as proposed by Dopp as a way of effectively excluding many voters (due to typically smaller turnout) is an anti-democratic approach.<br /><br />No implementations of IRV in the U.S. have suggested mandating that voters rank all candidates, as is typical in Australia. It is rarely ever important that a voter "fill out a ballot ranking every candidate 10 deep." A study of the related single transferable voting method used in Cambridge (MA) found that in a race with over 20 candidates for nine seats on the city council, approximately 90% of voters saw their first or second choice elected. Dopp's final suggestion of "restricting the ranking depth" so as to ease the cognitive burden on voters and eliminate "noise" of low rankings has been implemented in many U.S. applications, though most experts agree it is preferable to give voters the option to rank as many candidates as they wish.<br /><br /><em>Endnotes</em><br /><br /><span style="font-size:x-small;"><1> The rank order ballot used in instant runoff voting (and other voting systems) is known by political scientists as the "single transferable vote" or STV. This balloting procedure has been consistently upheld in United States courts as constitutional and upholding the "one person, one vote" principle. As an example, here is what the Michigan Court ruled in upholding the use of instant runoff voting in an Ann Arbor, Michigan Mayoral race in a 1975 challenge: </span><br /><span style="font-size:x-small;"><br /></span><br /><span style="font-size:x-small;">"Under the "M.P.V. System" [IRV], however, no one person or voter has more than one effective vote for one office. No voter's vote can be counted more than once for the same candidate. In the final analysis, no voter is given greater weight in his or her vote over the vote of another voter, although to understand this does require a conceptual understanding of how the effect of a "M.P.V. System" is like that of a run-off election. The form of majority preferential voting employed in the City of Ann Arbor's election of its Mayor does not violate the one-man, one-vote mandate nor does it deprive anyone of equal protection rights under the Michigan or United States Constitutions."</span><br /><span style="font-size:x-small;"><br /></span><br /><span style="font-size:x-small;">page 11, Stephenson v Ann Arbor Board of City Canvassers File No. 75-10166 AW Michigan Circuit Court for the County of Jackson</span><br /><span style="font-size:x-small;"><br /></span><br /><span style="font-size:x-small;">The Judge also observed on page 7, "Each voter has the same right at the time he casts his or her ballot. Each voter has his or her ballot counted once in any count that determines whether one candidate has a majority of the votes. . . . Far better to have the People's will expressed more adequately in this fashion, than to wonder what would have been the results of a run-off election not provided for."</span>Terry Bouriciushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06928242351793435111noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7985004128609516050.post-5835575712859534692010-03-26T12:56:00.000-04:002010-03-26T13:08:17.703-04:00Response to Gierzynski "Assessment" of IRV<span style="font-weight: bold;">Table of Contents:</span><br /><br />1. Introduction<br />2. response from Prof. Richard DeLeon<br />3. Response from Terry Bouricius<br />4. Response from Prof. Jack Nagel<br />5. Appendix A: further comments by Prof. Richard DeLeon<br />6. Appendix B: Refutation of Gierzynski's paradox arguments by Terry Bouricius<br /><br /><br /><b>1. Introduction:<br /></b><br />Anthony Gierzynski's "assessment" of IRV is not an impartial academic analysis, and Mr. Gierzynski is not an impartial academic. As Professor Richard DeLeon writes, “Anthony Gierzynski’s assessment of IRV is shoddy, biased, and borders on ridiculous.” His report is misleading and seems motivated by his clearly stated bias against a voting method that accommodates independent and third party candidates. This bias against third parties is not surprising considering that Mr. Gierzynski in 2002 was a Democratic candidate for the Vermont legislature who lost to Progressive candidate Bob Kiss. His analysis of the subsequent IRV election of his former opponent, Bob Kiss, incorporates this bias. His stated solution to the "spoiler" problem, which can punish voters and result in the election of the least preferred candidate, is for third parties to merge into major parties - - a solution that is irrelevant to non-partisan municipal elections, impractical for Vermont and unable to address the potential of independent candidacies that also have been an ongoing feature of Vermont elections.<br /><br />If one wants a genuinely impartial analysis of IRV, one shouldn't choose a partisan political opponent of the two-time IRV winner in the Burlington mayoral race, merely because he also has an academic credential. There are many genuine experts without axes to grind within the field of political science. Indeed, it should be noted that the primary organization of political science professors, the American Political Science Association (APSA), incorporates IRV into its own constitution for electing its national president.<br /><br />In addition to this rebuttal of Gierzynski's essay, below you will find comments that have been offered by other political scientists with actual expertise in the area of election methods. These include Prof. Richard DeLeon, Prof. Jack Nagel<br /><br />=====================<br /><br /><b>2. Response from Prof. Richard DeLeon:<br /></b><br /><i>San Francisco State University professor emeritus Richard DeLeon [ http://bss.sfsu.edu/deleon/ ] was founder of the Public Research Institute at SFSU and its long-time director. He was Chair of SFSU's Department of Political Science from 1994-2000, chair of California State University Social Science Research and Instructional Center and author of numerous award-winning articles and books. He was a consultant to SFSU's surveys on ranked choice voting in San Francisco 2005 and 2006. (rdeleon18@comcast.net)</i><br /><br />“Anthony Gierzynski’s assessment of IRV is shoddy, biased, and borders on ridiculous. It uses tortured logic, cherry-picked “evidence,” and dubious arguments to slam IRV and lamely defend two-party rule and the status quo ante. Worst, it distorts and misrepresents San Francisco’s experience using IRV, which has been used in six elections now with very good results. As documented in two university exit polls, San Francisco voters of all races and classes (a) understand how IRV works, (b) like that it allows them to choose their preferred candidates and not waste their votes, and (c) overwhelmingly prefer IRV to the traditional run-off system.”<br />[Additional comments from Prof. DeLeon are contained in Appendix A]<br /><br />=====================<br /><br /><b>3. Response from Terry Bouricius</b><br /><br /><i>FairVote policy analyst and former Progressive Party Burlington City Councilor and State Representative<br /></i><br />Below is a rebuttal of each of the sections of Gierzynski's "assessment" of IRV.<br /><br />Discrimination by Complexity:<br />Anthony Gierzynski argues that by having a more complex ballot, IRV discriminates against less educated voters. At some point, added complexity certainly could introduce significant discrimination into the electoral process. However, Mr. Gierzynski does not provide any evidence that IRV approaches that threshold. In fact, most evidence indicates that education levels have no actual impact on effective use of ranked ballots. Prior to the first use of IRV in Burlington elections, to provide one anecdotal example, third grade students at Burlington's Edmunds Elementary School were asked to use IRV to elect a student council representative. These third-graders easily used the ranked choice system, and there were no spoiled ballots. Gierzynski simply dismisses the fact that the Burlington voters in Wards with the lowest income and education levels had no increase in invalid ballots and were just as likely to mark alternate choices as voters in Wards with higher incomes and education. Instead he relies on an exit poll he conducted in 2006. Gierzynski's 2006 report on that exit poll states:<br /><br /><i>"In general most voters thought that IRV was a better way to express voting preferences—both theirs and voters’ in general—than the usual system (see Figure 3). Seventy-one percent of respondents agreed that IRV was “a better way to express my voting preferences than the usual system.” Sixty-nine percent agreed that with IRV “the election results will better reflect voter preferences than the usual system.” Regarding any difficulty voters might have had with IRV, only 8.6% of voters said they found the ballot confusing."</i><br /><br />However, Gierzynski notes, among the least educated 14.5% agreed the ballot was confusing. Though not insignificant, it still reflects a small minority of such voters, and does not mean there was any corresponding failure to effectively use the ranked ballot. We do not know how many of these voters who found the ballot somewhat confusing, none the less appreciated the additional ranking opportunity, and how many disliked it. For example, a person might say that their cable TV selections are more confusing than having only over-the-air programming, but still want to keep and be able to use cable television. Since virtually every one of these less educated Burlington voters cast valid ballots (99.9% of all IRV ballots were valid), it is unreasonable to suggest, as Gierzynski does, that any class of voters were disenfranchised or harmed.<br /><br />Much of the rest of Gierzynski's analysis about ballot complexity relates to a hypothetical situation in which IRV might be used for all, or most general election contests, rather than a short municipal ballot. For municipal elections the current "complex" ballot typical in the U.S. does not apply. Typically, towns are only electing two or three offices, and voter turn-out is far lower than in state elections with "complex ballots" with many races. Contrary to Gierzynski's implication, the relative "complexity" of ballots clearly is far less significant than how exciting the races are in terms of affecting turnout. Races with only one or two uncompetitive candidates do not drive high voter turnout. Because IRV accommodates, and as Gierzynski points out, may even encourage more than two candidates while reducing the threat of a "spoiler" scenario, it does appear to somewhat enhance voter turnout. Burlington's two recent IRV mayoral elections had higher turnout than the two preceding mayoral elections (though not higher than some historic races). Aspen (CO) conducted its first ever municipal election using IRV recently and saw the highest turnout for a municipal election ever. However, IRV certainly does not guarantee a high turnout. For example, a recent San Francisco election in which the incumbent mayor won a landslide victory over only token opposition, did not spur high turnout despite the use of IRV.<br /><br />Paradoxes:<br /><br />This section of Mr. Gierzynski's assessment is the most disturbing. It reveals either a lack of basic understanding of voting methods, or an intentional effort to mislead the reader. Gierzynski discusses four voting paradoxes that can occur with IRV, but amazingly fails to note the key fact that these identical paradoxes can also occur under normal plurality elections or two-round runoff elections, and are not at all unique to IRV. He also neglects to mention the dramatic paradox of his preferred system of plurality voting that would have elected the candidate least preferred among the top three candidates in Burlington.<br /><br />Nothing in this section of his assessment brings any useful information to light, as these paradoxes have nothing to do with any difference between IRV and the voting methods already commonly used throughout the U.S. The only possible purpose for presenting these paradoxes (and not mentioning that they also apply to plurality or runoff elections) is to mislead the reader into assuming they are unique "defects" of IRV.<br /><br />An exhaustive presentation of paradoxes and election method criteria see<br /><br /><a href="http://fc.antioch.edu/%7Ejames_green-armytage/vm/survey.htm">http://fc.antioch.edu/~james_green-armytage/vm/survey.htm</a><br /><br />[Appendix B contains a more thorough explanation of the four paradoxes Gierzynski mentions and how all of them also apply to plurality or traditional runoff election systems.]<br /><br />Addressing the "Real" Problem:<br /><br />Mr. Gierzynsnki virtually defines "the real problem" as voters getting more than just two choices on the ballot – it is “technical fix” to solve a “political problem” that is the very fact of more than two candidates running. He writes “single seat contests (such as mayor, or US Senator, or governor, or president) provide an incentive for those of similar political mind (that is ideology) to coalesce behind a single candidate in order to win a majority of votes and capture the seat – those that work together to build a majority before elections win, those that don’t, lose. This structural incentives is the main reason the US has a two party system." Mr. Gierzynski goes on to make it clear that he is a strong advocate of the two-party system with only two choices on the ballot.<br />This view is debatable for state and federal elections and has even less influence in a municipal setting with non-partisan elections. Under a plurality voting system that suffers a serious threat of "spoiler" scenarios, worthy potential candidates often refrain from running so as to avoid causing a split in the majority. Some people may agree with Mr. Gierzynski that democracy is enhanced by such limitations on voter choice, and encouraging behind the scenes negotiations and arrangements prior to the election to avoid having more than just two choices on the ballot. However, I believe that most people believe greater voter choice would be a good thing, so long as the spoiler problem could be mitigated with either a traditional runoff or IRV. Certainly it diminishes some of the worst abuses of attack politics and the impact off campaign spending on those attack ads.<br /><br />Cost:<br /><br />As to the cost of transitioning to IRV, Gierzynski again miss-represents reality. In jurisdictions that replace two-round voting systems (either primary and general, or first round and runoff) with IRV, cost savings are the norm (see the response of the Wake County election administrators about the savings from using IRV here http://www.fairvote.org/?page=2543). However, there can be a modest net increase in costs if the jurisdiction is replacing single-round plurality elections. The added cost depends largely on the voting equipment in place, and whether it can easily be adapted to ranked ballots. Some jurisdictions may decide a more democratic election process warrants the additional cost and others may not.<br /><br />Conclusion:<br /><br />Here Mr. Gierzynski has turned reality on its head with his analogy to climate change scientists. Virtually every election method expert knows that the paradoxes Gierzynski discusses are not unique to IRV, but apply to plurality or traditional runoff elections as well. If anything, in his analogy Gierzynski represents the climate change denier, being outside the norm among electoral method experts (I again refer you to the fact that the APSA itself incorporates IRV into its own constitution). Many leading comparative political scientists support instant runoff voting over plurality voting. Some of them can be found on this list: http://www.fairvote.org/irv/endorsers.htm<br /><br />=====================<br /><br /><b>4. Response from Prof. Jack Nagel<br /></b><br /><i>Fullbright Scholar Jack Nagel is graduate chairperson of the Department of Political Science at Wharton, University of Pennsylvania. His area of research includes elections and voting theory. He is Co-Editor of the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, on the Editorial Board of Electoral Studies, and on the Editorial Board of Political Science.<br /></i>(<a href="mailto:nageljh@sas.upenn.edu">nageljh@sas.upenn.edu</a>)<br /><br />Prof. Nagel made this comment after reading Professor Gierzynski’s report: <blockquote><p>“IRV always prevents the victory of a candidate that the majority of voters like least. A runoff plan that elects any candidate with a plurality provides no such guarantee. As for repeal advocates’ desire for a two-party system, the two-party system has already broken down in Burlington, so voters will be better served by an election method like IRV that is well adapted to multi-party races. ”</p></blockquote><br /><br />=====================<br /><br /><b>5. Appendix A<br /></b><br />Further comments from Prof. DeLeon:<br /><br />1. Here's a link to my original report on my re-analysis of the PRI exit poll data for the Nov 2004 election in San Francisco:<br /><br /><a href="http://www.sfusualsuspects.com/resources/docs/Rich%20DeLeon%27s%20Working%20Paper%20on%20IRV%20in%20SF%20--%20Sept%2011%202005.pdf">http://www.sfusualsuspects.com/resources/docs/Rich%20DeLeon%27s%20Working%20Paper%20on%20IRV%20in%20SF%20--%20Sept%2011%202005.pdf</a><br /><br />Most relevant regarding alleged negative effects of ballot complexity etc. are Tables 1 (understanding IRV) & 2 (information burdens of IRV) on p 4, the bottom line critical results in Table 6 (overall preference for IRV vs old system), and Table 7A on p 8, with the interpretive note: "Notice that voters who gathered more information were much more inclined to favor RCV (71%) than were those who gathered less (52%) – a result some readers may find surprising, especially if they view information-gathering as a burden or cost of voting rather than as a benefit."<br /><br />2. Here's a relevant excerpt from my written testimony to Minnesota State Senate :<br /><br />QUESTION 1: Did San Francisco voters understand ranked-choice voting?<br /><br />ANSWER: Yes. More than half the sample voters (52.8%) said they understood ranked-choice voting (RCV) “perfectly well,” and another 35.3% said they understood it “fairly well.” About 12% said they had at least some trouble understanding RCV, including only about 2% who said they did not understand it at all. See Table 1, attached.<br /><br />QUESTION 2: Did RCV require voters to gather more information about candidates compared to past elections?<br /><br />ANSWER: Yes, on net, with about 31% of sample voters saying they gathered more information than in the past and only about 7% saying less. The vast majority of voters, however, reported no difference. Whether the need to gather more information is a good or bad thing, however, is an open question. There is evidence, for example, that voters who gathered more information were actually much more pro-IRV than were those who gathered less.<br />3. The piece I did for the Los Angeles people (see attached) might be of some use. This is based on PRI's exit poll of voters in the Nov 2005 election, with an exclusive focus on the responses of self-identified Latino and Latina voters. Esp. see Tables 3 and 4 and the interpretive notes, particularly this bit following Table 4: "More than four out of five Latino voters in all income classes reported that they understood RCV perfectly or fairly well.<br /><br />4. In general, there's no evidence I've seen in the 2004 & 2005 PRI exit polls that IRV ballots are so complex or burdensome that they discriminate against lower SES classes of voters by confusing them & discouraging their turnout in elections, etc. For me, the bottom line is that SF voters, including lower SES voters, overwhelmingly prefer IRV to the old system, and for good & plausible reasons (fewer wasted votes, more able to vote for preferred candidates, etc.).<br /><br />5. One last thought: A much more "complex" version of rank choice voting (in the form of its use in full-blown PR/STV systems) was used by voters in a number of U.S. cities between 1915 & 1960, including some big ones like Cincinnati & Cleveland in Ohio, and the voters had no problem with using it with good results -- and this long before computers & when the average schooling level was much lower. See Kathleen L. Barber's book, Proportional Representation and Election Reform in Ohio (Ohio State Univ Press, 1995). In her conclusions, she writes: "The conventional wisdom came to be that the PR/STV ballot was too complicated for people to understand, causing turnout to decline. In four of the five cities this turned out not to be true...." p 308. Re claim that ranked choice voting leads to greater conflict, she writes: "In none of the Ohio cities using PR elections was there a significant increase in conflict among council members. In fact, it appears that the electoral pressures of ranked voting led to greater consensus as campaign styles changed." p 308. Her overall conclusion is that: "In these five Ohio cities, PR/STV was demonstrated to be an electoral system technically capable of facilitating public decision making in complex communities as well as producing fair representation." p 309.<br /><br />=====================<br /><br /><b>6. Appendix B: Refutation of Gierzynski's paradox arguments</b><br /><b>by Terry Bouricius<br /></b><br /><br />All of the paradoxes Anthony Gierzynski describes apply to common plurality or two-round runoff election systems as well as IRV, and are thus irrelevant to deciding between these voting methods. He also neglects to discuss the far more serious paradoxes of plurality elections (such as the fact that the candidate who the large majority of voters agree is the single worst candidate can win under plurality rules).<br /><br />Gierzynski describes a paradox known as the "Condorcet cycle" paradox (the rock/paper/scissors cycle of winners). This is simply a restatement of a well know fact among political scientists that with three or more choices, it is mathematically possible that no single candidate is favored by a majority of voters over all other candidates. Such a cycle could exist, even if unrecognized in any election using plurality rules. The declared "winner" of a plurality election with less than 50% could even be the single candidate that the majority of voters believe is the worst choice (which can't happen with IRV). Likewise if there is an actual tie between two candidates, there will be no "majority winner." These non-majority realities are not "caused" by IRV or any other voting system. They are simply mathematical truisms and have no relevance to choosing a voting method. No voting system can ultimately guarantee to find a majority winner since there may not be one to be found. However, the standard method to try and find a majority winner used in the U.S. is to reduce the field of candidates to two finalists and hope that in the runoff there isn't a tie. This is the same logic used by IRV.<br /><br />Another paradox Gierzynski mentions deals with what is called the "Condorcet winner." In the Burlington example he uses, the candidate in third place (Andy Montroll) was the preferred compromise second choice of the supporters of both of the stronger candidates (Bob Kiss and Kurt Wright). If Montroll had somehow made it into a runoff against either Wright or Kiss he might have won. Using the logic of a traditional runoff, having less core support than Kiss or Wright, Montroll with 23% support did not make it into the final IRV runoff tally. However, it would be possible to write election rules that made a series of pair-wise comparisons of all five candidates in that race to see if one candidate would theoretically beat all comers. There are advocates of such voting rules within academia, though there is no track record for such a system for governmental elections. One reason such a system would have a hard time passing muster, is that it would be possible for the candidate who came in dead last in terms of "first choices" to be the Condorcet winner simply by being inoffensive. However, it seems bit disingenuous for Gierzynski to fault IRV for failing to elect this weak compromise candidate who also would have lost under plurality elections (finishing in third place) or a traditional runoff election (being eliminated before the final runoff.). IRV found the "majority winner" in the same sense that a traditional runoff election does…by narrowing the field to the two strongest finalists and seeing which is preferred by more voters. Just as in a traditional runoff election, some voters may sit out the final runoff, by staying home in the case of a separate runoff, or by declining to indicate which of the two finalists they prefer over the other, in the case of IRV. This right to abstain should be respected, but should not prevent the conclusion of the election process with the declaration of a winner.<br /><br />He mentions the "non-monotonic" paradox, in which a candidate who receives more votes from voters who otherwise supported an opponent, thereby goes from being a winner to a loser. This ironic possibility exists in any runoff election or any election based on two rounds of voting in which some candidates are eliminated in the first round. It is not actually the additional votes going to this candidate that cause the switch to a defeat, but rather the change in relative positions of the other candidates that results from the swapped votes, such that this otherwise winner ends up facing a stronger opponent in the final runoff. For example, in any runoff election (whether instant or two round) there is a possibility that a voter might help her favorite candidate by instead of voting for that favorite, by voting for a weak opponent in the first round, so that her favorite candidate will have a better chance of winning in the second round. Of course this strategy can easily back-fire if too many voters attempt it and is counter-intuitive in IRV elections. Since under IRV voters cannot make this strategic switch in the first round only, it is a far less likely scenario than under two-round runoff elections, where voters can switch to their true favorite in the second round. Thus this particular paradox is significantly more likely to be a factor in a traditional runoff election than in an IRV election. A court affidavit by Prof. Jack Nagel in a Minnesota court case involving this issue is available here: <a href="http://www.fairvote.org/docs/MinneapolisAffidavitofJackNagel11-3final.pdf">http://www.fairvote.org/docs/MinneapolisAffidavitofJackNagel11-3final.pdf</a><br /><br />Note that the Minnesota court and on appeal, the Minnesota Supreme Court, concurred and upheld IRV.<br /><br />A fourth paradox he mentions is the "no-show" paradox, which again is common to both IRV and all runoff elections throughout the U.S. It is possible in a traditional runoff election, that by staying home during the first round of voting, voters may keep their favorite candidate from advancing to the final round. But in this final match-up, if their favorite were a candidate, he or she would lose to a candidate the voter thinks is the worst candidate. However, by sitting out the first round of voting, an acceptable compromise candidate might make it into the final match-up against the hated candidate, and this compromise candidate has broader appeal and can win.Terry Bouriciushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06928242351793435111noreply@blogger.com