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June 10, 2008 at 18:01:49

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Instant Runoff Voting: a democracy saver

by Tad Daley Page 1 of 2 page(s)

www.opednews.com

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Most of the country was captivated on Tuesday night, June 3, by the apparent nomination for the first time of someone other than a European-American man as a major party presidential candidate. Here in Los Angeles, however, we had a very consequential and quite captivating election of our own taking place on the very same night.

Unfortunately, due to the profound structural flaws in the way America’s antiquated electoral system operates, it ended in a fizzle.

The race was for one of the five seats on the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. Since more than 10 million souls reside now in Los Angeles County, that means that each supervisor represents some two million constituents. That is more than twice as large as the size of the average congressional district in the United States.

The county supervisors, largely under the radar screen of the public in this age of extreme civic disengagement, grapple every day with crucial if unsexy issues. Like law enforcement. Prisons. Fair elections. Homelessness. Trying to build and expand a workable transit system — to ease, if only a bit, LA’s perpetually gridlocked traffic (but having little success in an era when so many American taxpayer dollars end up in the black budgets of the Pentagon or the deep pockets of defense contractors). And, perhaps most crucially, the LA County board of supervisors tries bravely to improve a woefully insufficient local public health system, in an effort to provide a modicum of care to the millions who cannot successfully navigate America’s hyper-profit health care obstacle course.

In addition, because of the overwhelming power of incumbency in American electoral politics today, Tuesday’s race was the first real contest for a single county supervisorial seat offered to Angelenos since 1992.

No less than nine candidates had filed to run. Nevertheless, most local pundits agreed that it was a two-man race, between State Senator and former LA City Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas, and Los Angeles City Councilman and former LA police chief Bernard Parks.

Almost all of my politically savvy friends held strong opinions about the race. Many put in long volunteer hours of blood, tears, toil, and sweat on behalf of one or the other of the candidates. Several ponied up cash donations out of their finite financial reservoirs as well. My wife and I received two or three flyers in our mailbox, every single day, for the last 2 or 3 weeks before the election.

Mr. Ridley-Thomas even showed up knocking on my door on Election Day, two hours before the polls closed, working assiduously to get out every last vote … and caught me watering the garden. I had met him several times before, but never before wearing rainbow-colored flip-flops, Bermuda shorts, and a ridiculous floppy hat. Two million constituents - what are the chances?

At least I was able to tell him that I had already voted.

Several hours later, on election night, in very dramatic fashion, Senator Ridley-Thomas pulled out a solid, hard-fought, five-point victory over Councilman Parks, 45% to 40%.

His reward?

He gets to run against Mr. Parks in November, all over again.

Because this was a non-partisan race, not a party primary — and the winner failed to secure more than 50% of the vote. Therefore, under LA County rules, the top two candidates have to face off again, in a runoff election this fall.

And the only people less enthused than all my politically active friends about going through the same thing all over again are probably Mr. Ridley-Thomas and Mr. Parks themselves.

The democracy fatigue that so many of us are experiencing this week in Los Angeles could have been remedied with one easy modification to the electoral system — instant runoff voting.

The seven lesser-known long shot candidates all undoubtedly possessed imaginative platforms and fine reasons for running. (I did that once myself — put forth a dazzlingly imaginative platform and ran for a rare open seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, along with no less than a dozen other long shots, against a sitting Los Angeles city councilman, a sitting state senator, and the former state senator who won the seat, Diane Watson.) The 15% of voters who chose one of the seven long shots in this race all presumably had fine reasons for doing so.

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www.daleyplanet.org.

Tad Daley, JD, PhD, Writing Fellow International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War Nobel Peace Laureate Organization www.ippnw.org, www.daleyplanet.org "When will there be justice in Athens? ... When those who are not injured are as outraged as those who are." ---Thucydides

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3 comments

Founder of the NC Coalition for Verified Voting.We passed a law to require VVPB on August 2005 after years of work. NC Coalition for Verified Voting is an all volunteer organization that does not solicit or accept donations.
ncvoterFounder of the NC Coalition for Verified Voting.We passed a law to require VVPB on August 2005 after years of work. NC Coalition for Verified Voting is an all volunteer organization that does not solicit or accept donations.

IRV not compatible with US voting systems, says Rob Richie

IRV is very complex to count, computerized voting systems are not compatible with it, and jurisdictions considering IRV in the United States find it too complicated to hand count. IRV makes sense in foreign countries that have single contest ballots on single ballot papers, counted by hand. But we dont have that in the US:

Fair Vote Director Rob Richie's own workds in April 2008

at the April 24 EAC Roundtable Discussion , Rob Richie told the EAC that something needs to be done to make voting systems compatible with IRV. He said: "for instant runoff voting, or preferential voting methods, it often bangs up against the fact that voting equipment isn't flexible enough to handle these voting methods....

It has real life impact. It's also creating havoc for Pierce County, Washington, a county of 800,000 people which have a big county executive race and they don't know if their system is going to be ready. http://www.eac.gov/News/meetings/News/meetings/EAC%20Roundtable%20042408.pdf

MAINE, VERMONT, SCOTLAND AND SAN FRANCISCO. MAINE WOULD HAVE TO GIVE UP HAND COUNTING. Other jurisdictions have not implimented IRV because their voting machines cannot accommodate the vote counting method. Lawmakers pushed IRV in Maine for awhile, but efforts stalled over implementation costs . Maine would have had to purchase voting machines for jurisdictionst that still hand count their ballots and second and third choice votes would have to be counted at central locations. Vermont's Secretary of State ordered a feasibility study , found that their current voting machines could not handle IRV for statewide contests, and further that operational costs such as postage, ballot printing and voter education would increase.

SCOTLAND GAVE UP HAND COUNTED PAPER BALLOTS. IRV incentivizes more complex voting systems. In fact, Scotland switched from hand counted paper ballots to computerized voting machines for the first time when implementing STV another balloting method where voters rank their choices - in May, 2007. Dr. Rebecca Mercuri predicted warned about Scotland switching to a more complicated vote counting method and to computerized voting: Dr. Rebecca Mercuri, internationally known computer scientist advises" "IRV and other proportional balloting methods have been proven to incentivize the introduction of electronic ballot tabulation in places where none previously was needed or has existed, and they further complicate what has become an increasingly closed process for the determination of election results.

EVERYTHING WASN'T JUST FINE IN SAN FRANCISCO EVEN THOUGH THEY HAD OPTICAL SCAN. (NOW THEY ARE LOOKING FOR NEW MACHINES)

2007: Problems reported with San Francisco's IRV tabulating equipment - an anomaly in the RCV algorithm discovered and inaccurate reporting of overvoted and undervoted ballots. San Francisco used this software for 3 years before this was reported. http://www.sfgov.org/site/elections_index.asp?id=62751

Optical Scanners and Manual Sorting Errors. In the Cary, North Carolina "instant runoff" pilot, since the voting machines could not tabulate IRV, the ballots had to be manually sorted for the “runoff”. A few errors cascaded into a miscount, and ballots had to be recounted. The election workers count didn't match the candidates' informal count. An "audit" was done (not in a public meeting) and it resulted in the ballots being recounted and a "correction" of the results. See "Critics Take Runoff Concerns to Elections Board" NBC 17

To “automate” the counting process would mean spending millions of dollars on new voting machines

by ncvoter (17 articles, 1 quicklinks, 1 diaries, 108 comments) on Wednesday, June 11, 2008 at 12:06:22 AM

Election reform activist.
Greg DennisElection reform activist.

IRV works

ncvoter's claims are wrong.

First, there are existing computerized voting systems that count IRV ballots. Cambridge, MA, for example, uses one such system. Rob Richie is right that not enough voting equipment is compatible with IRV, by ncvoter is being completely dishonest to suggest that none of it is.

Second, Maine would not "have" to give up hand counting. Australia, Ireland, and other jurisdictions count all their IRV ballots by hand. It takes a day, and then they're done. As far as "implementation costs", that is the familiar excuse for any electoral reform improvement, particularly by those who were elected under the previous system and therefore don't want anything to change. Same thing was said about voter-verified paper trails. These changes are more than worth whatever the short-term implementation costs may be. And with an ever-increasing number of juridictions adopting IRV, expect those costs to fall.

As for Scotland, ncvoter is being deceptive because they actually enacted a proportional representation system STV that is far more complicated to hand count than the single-winner IRV.

Furthermore, ncvoter is being completely contradictory. First she complains that there is no electronic equipment to electronically count IRV, then she cites an experts who claims use of IRV leads to adoption of electronic voting. Well, ncvoter can't have it both ways. And unless she intends to rid the world of computerized tabulation, then it's not clear what she's getting at. We can have secure elections and fast computerized tabulation at the same time -- with voter-verified optical scan ballots and mandatory random audits after the election, as is required by several states in the US already, like California.

The issue of securing the vote and auditing elections for accuracy is, as ncvoter knows, not limited to Instant Runoff elections, but to all elections. This needs to happen regardless of what voting system we use.

by Greg Dennis (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 1 comments) on Wednesday, June 11, 2008 at 1:33:09 PM

Rob Richie is executive director of FairVote - The Center for Voting and Democracy in Washington DC.
Rob RichieRob Richie is executive director of FairVote - The Center for Voting and Democracy in Washington DC.

IRV works

As Greg Dennis points out, instant runoff voting is working well, and is very popular in the cities that have adopted it. See surveys and other information posted at www.instantrunoff.com and www.fairvote.org/irv

Note that Ms. McCloy is from North Carolina, where she has vigorously opposed instant runoff voting. Yet last month at its biannual convention the League of Women Voters of North Carolina unanimously adopted a position in favor of IRV in NC elections. Why? Because they studied the issue and experienced it directly in elections in Cary and Hendersonville in their state.

Given that I AM Rob Richie, let me just say that the point of my testimony to the EAC was to urge the EAC to establish standards to ensure that voting equipment manufacturers prepare to run instant runoff voting elections. I would hope that Joyce McCloy would join us in ensuring that such manufacturers are ready to implement instant runoff voting when voters ask for it -- that would be a constructive step to take.

In the meantime, places adopting IRV are getting it done -- we just shouldn't let manufacturers get away with not doing what they're fully equipped to do: prepare their equipment to run majority elections that accommodate voter choice.

As to various specifics in Ms. McCloy;s email, she is telling at best an incomplete story. For exampleL

1) The Vermont Secretary of State supports instant runoff voting in her state. That support helped explain why the state legislature this year passed legislation to use instant runoff voting for congressional elections this fall. A Republican governor vetoed it, but the bill will be back.

2) All places getting ready to run instant runoff voting elections are planning to run them on optical scan machineswith paper ballots - every single one, including San Francisco as Ms. McCloy well knows.

by Rob Richie (4 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 16 comments) on Wednesday, June 11, 2008 at 5:52:53 PM