IRV without legislation giving 3rd parties equal rights is

meaningless. The idea of IRV has potential, but ony if done with paper ballot records and with laws that allow equal treatment for third parties, which is far from the case in many states. 

But be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. IRV or something like it must happen to rid us of the two party system.  

by Rob Kall (869 articles, 4001 quicklinks, 344 diaries, 1840 comments) on Monday, October 22, 2007 at 8:30:54 AM
 

if you support hand counted paper ballots, read this

If you are advocating for Hand Counted Paper Ballots, then you should know about this:

IRV requires (incentivizes) more complex voting machines/technology -

Fair Vote, the national organization promoting IRV advises that voting machine technology is an obstacle  to their goal of "Proportional Voting", at least for the "Instant Runoff Voting" system. More complex systems are needed and are not readily available.  This demonstrates that IRV incentivizes more complex voting systems. In fact, Scotland used computerized voting machines for the first time when implementing STV this past May.  That was disastrous - see May 7, 2007 "Not so much an election as a national humiliation  - Scotland's voters were treated with arrogance and contempt".  The voters had two different types of ballots, names were handled differently, they had voting machines that didn't work right.

"Building Proportional Voting Infrastructure

One major obstacle currently in the way of proportional voting systems in many localities is the difficulty of adapting existing voting machines to new types of ballot.  Many voting machines are unable to cope with more sophisticated ballot designs, and in particular with the ranked ballots which systems such as choice voting and IRV require.  Even when machines are theoretically compatible with ranked ballots, machine manufacturers will often charge huge amounts of money for upgrades to localities looking to put ranked systems into place. 

As states upgrade their voting equipment in line with the Help America Vote Act, FairVote works to ensure that they certify and purchase equipment that can be used to implement proportional voting systems.

We also seek enabling state legislation explicitly allowing communities to select proportional voting."

by ncvoter (17 articles, 1 quicklinks, 1 diaries, 108 comments) on Monday, October 22, 2007 at 6:10:17 PM
 

range voting and approval voting

You might want to consider range voting (http://rangevoting.org) and approval voting, its simplified form. Both are simple.

With range voting, voter gives a score from 0 to 9 to each candidate and highest average score wins, (like the olympics). With approval voting, voter makes an "approve" or "not" decision on each candidate, most-approved wins. Both can be run on old-style "dumb" voting machines. IRV is commonly falsely claimed to eliminate "spoilers" and the "wasted vote" problem. With range and approval, voting your true favorite top is never strategically unwise. With IRV there are examples where voting your favorite top causes him and your 2nd favorite both to lose. Thus IRV still is artificially biased against 3rd parties. That is presumably why every IRV country has got 2-party domination in IRV seats.

So anyway: bottom line: IRV does NOT cure the spoiler problem, does NOT cure the wasted vote problem, forces sophisticated voting machines down our throats and was implemented poorly and confusingly in NC. Approval and range voting are better in those respects.

by Warren D Smith (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 4 comments) on Monday, October 22, 2007 at 9:40:12 AM
 

IRV

Ms. McCloy is mistaken. Using the new rank-choice ballot for IRV is simple. My city (Burlington, VT) uses it and in the first election with IRV we had 99.9% valid ballots. Voters overwhelmingly said they preferred it in exit polls in every U.S. city that has used it. In Cary, NC, which just had its first IRV election, exit polls showed that 96% of voters said it was easy.

IRV does not require unverifiable touch screen voting...Every city in the US. that has used IRV so far used paper ballots (either hand-count or optical scan). Hendersonville, NC, that is about to use IRV already uses touchscreen, so you can't blame IRV.

 As for the other comment about Range Voting..It has problems of its own (such as the fact that a candidate that 80% of voters think is the BEST choice can lose under Range Voting rules), but as with IRV it may be better than current plurality elections, or two-round runoffs that have a huge drop in voter turnout.

IRV is a pro-democracy reform that deserves to be spread nationally.

by Terry Bouricius (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 5 comments) on Monday, October 22, 2007 at 11:04:07 AM
 

valid ballots claim what San Francisco's elections dept

The Fair Vote talking points that are used include this strange brag - about valid ballots. Being in the election reform community since 2003, I had not seen this terminology before and not heard it from election officials either.

So I contacted Frances Matthew with the San Francisco Elections Department and asked her about it, and this is her reply in an email dated 10.03.2007 :

To get some idea of the "valid" (not a term I've heard used in-house) number of ballots for RCV, have a look at the result from November 2006 at

http://www.sfgov.org/site/elections_index.asp?id=61497 and click on the RCV races for District 4 & 6 which show (and define) eligible, exhausted and total ballots. (All even-number districts were up for election; Districts

2,8, 10 had a majority winner in the first round, so there was no "instant run off" to compute.)

Have you asked the IRV/RCV folks where they got their data?

Hope this helps.

/fm

Frances Matthew

Pollworker & FED Training Supervisor

Dept of Elections

San Francisco

If you go to the links you can see the charted raw vote data. 

Observations of raw vote data for District 4 : 

• There were 2,253 undervotes, for 10.25% of the 21,985 ballots cast.
• There were 193 overvotes, for .87% of the 21,985 ballots cast,
• In just the first pass alone, 2,171 ballots were exhausted, or 9.87% of all ballots cast.
• By the fourth pass, the number of exhausted ballots was 6,010, or 27.34% of all ballots cast.

by ncvoter (17 articles, 1 quicklinks, 1 diaries, 108 comments) on Monday, October 22, 2007 at 3:18:11 PM
 

The IRV myth machine

On the contrary, Mr. Bouricius, it is you who are mistaken. I would actually go a step further and say that you are intentionally misleading the public. Your clever use of language tip-toes around the fact that IRV can easily elect X, even though Y is preferred to X by a huge majority. This is effectively the same "flaw" you cite with Range Voting, except that with Range Voting it typically happens in favor of increased voter satisfaction; whereas with IRV, it's a random chaotic phenomenon. No wonder Bayesian regret figures show IRV to be one of the worst voting methods, and Range Voting to be essentially the best (discounting some less feasible, but mathematically superior methods).

Maybe IRV seems simple to you, but it generally results in about seven times as many spoiled ballots. This is true here in San Francisco, where I live.

See: http://rangevoting.org/SPRates.html

But Range Voting, and especially Approval Voting, decrease spoiled ballots. And when it comes to the tabulation process, there's just no comparison. IRV is much more complex to count, which is why election integrity experts like Rebecca Mercuri fault IRV for incentivizing the adoption of fraud-conducive electronic voting machines. IRV is so erratic that candidate X can win in all precincts, but lose when the ballots are summed together. This mess equates to a loss of transparency, and is the fraudster's best friend.

Voters who said they preferred IRV are generally going on their feelings about the experience of expressively ranking their choices, with little knowledge of the alternatives to IRV, nor the severe pathologies of which election experts are keenly aware. What a monumental feat of spin it is for you to present the gut instincts of the lay voter as evidence against deep analysis by credentialed mathematicians who devote their lives to this stuff. This is why many devoted reformers and academics have not a kind word to say for FairVote and their allies. They wrecklessly and unabashedly spread this misleading and even false information without even blinking.

IRV is one of the worst voting methods. Approval Voting is vastly simpler and better. This is supported by overwhelming scientific evidence, analyzed by the likes of Princeton math Ph.D. Warren D. Smith. Here's a bit about the consensus of experts in the field. I'll let the rational readers be the judge of what this tells us:

Clay Shentrup

San Francisco, CA

415.240.1973

clay@electopia.org

by CLAY SHENTRUP (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 4 comments) on Monday, October 22, 2007 at 2:03:41 PM