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IRV: Dead or alive?
St. Paul lets voters petition to put a measure on the ballot. This year, the requisite number of voters signed petitions to put Instant Runoff Voting (IRV) on the ballot. The city attorney wants to keep it off, and the city council might just vote to deny the petitioners their chance to bring IRV to a vote. The issue is neatly defined in a Park Bugle article.
Proponents of IRV say it will offer voters more choices and open up races to third parties shut out of the current system, as well as save money by eliminating the need for primaries.Detractors say voters will only be confused by longer ballots and the need to memorize more candidate choices, and that there’s nothing wrong with electing candidates by a plurality rather than a majority.
Instant-runoff voting lists all candidates on a single ballot and lets voters rank their choices. A voter can rank only a top choice, rank all the choices or stop anywhere in between.
If a candidate gets a simple majority (50 percent plus one) of first-place rankings, then that person is the winner. If no candidate gets a majority, then the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated and that candidate’s votes are reassigned based on those voters’ second choices.
The recounting continues until someone has a majority, hence the term “instant runoff.”
Minneapolis voters passed IRV in 2006, but it has not been implemented yet. Minneapolis is looking for voting machines that can handle the procedure, and responding to a court challenge by Minnesota Voters Alliance.
IRV backers include the Minnesota League of Women Voters, the DFL party, the Minnesota Council of Nonprofits and a long list of local political figures.
The St. Paul Better Ballot Campaign, which ran the successful petition drive, may sue to have the measure put on the ballot if the city council refuses to do so.
St. Paul city attorney John Choi write an opinion for the city council saying that, based on a 1915 Duluth case, he believes IRV is not constitutional. The Star Tribune reports that six of the seven St. Paul city council members have signed a draft resolution to keep the measure off the ballot. The city council is set to vote on the resolution on July 2. The council meeting is scheduled to begin at 3:30 p.m. at St. Paul City Hall.
What do you think? Weigh in on the question by posting a comment below.
Comments
IRV is well intended but has consequences
Its like the unconstitutional traffic cameras that Minneapolis voted for. The city will have to eat that mistake, and paying attention to the constitution might have saved taxpayers a bundle. St. Paul avoided that disaster too.
Now Minneapolis has committed to replacing good voting machines with either new machines or experimental software for their current machines, so that voters can be part of a big experiment with unstable software.
There is a precedent where IRV adoption in the US has forced the “emergency” approval of uncertified, untested IRV software in the United States:
1. San Francisco used uncertified software and after 3 years was notified that the algorithm was flawed. A study by Greg Dennis reveals unintended consequences that IRV caused in San Francisco’s IRV elections and the affect of overvoted contests on next contests on ballot.
2. The Secretary of State of Washington granted “emergency” permission in May 2008 for Pierce County to use uncertified software on Seqouia machines, even though flaws were found in the WinEDS (central tabulating system). Touchscreens were certified on an emergency basis, but not the precinct optical scanners. All optical scan ballots will be hauled off to the county office to be tabulated.
3. Burlington Vermont uses some sort of uncertified software to tabulate the results from their Diebold machines.
http://www.instantrunoffvoting.us/votingsystems.html
Pierce County, Washington
The Secretary of State of Washington has procedures in place for provisional certification of software that has not been federally certified. This procedure was used in 2004 for software for all of the jurisdictions in the state. There were no IRV elections in the state of Washington in 2004. The procedures used in the state of Washington were on place before IRV became the law in Pierce County.
The federal certification process appears to be broken since no software has been certified in years. The Secretary of State in 2004 was required to change our method of electing people at the last minute due to changes in the law. No county had federally certified software due to the last minute nature of the change and the broken federal certification process.
During the state review of the Sequoia software, a flaw was discovered in one of the machines. Sequioa has been able to put together a fix. However, Pierce County will NOT be using those machines in counting ballots in 2008. The Pierce County Auditor is being very conservative in the implementation of Ranked Choice Voting.
Those of us in Pierce County are looking forward to a historic election. Ranked Choice Voting and other factors has led to some very competitive elections. In one race in particular, I would not want to have to list just one choice as we have several strong candidates. Ranked Choice Voting is improving democracy in Pierce County.
IRV elections use optical scanners with paper ballots
IRV does not require touch-screens. Paper ballots that are optically scanned (and saved for auditing purposes) work great for IRV elections. Most cities with IRV elections use optical scanners, like the ones used in Minnesota.
San Francisco and Berkeley (CA) and Pierce County (WA) are scheduled to use new IRV-capable optical scanners with paper ballots this November. These machines, made by Sequoia, are in the process of receiving state certification.
Jeanne Massey
FairVote Minnesota
It's not the same thing as actually having that certification
Wishing for something isn’t the same thing as actually having it. It’s the same for certification – applying for certification isn’t the same thing as actually having it. And there simply is no federally certified software or election systems (software and hardware) that will tabulate IRV. It’s just that simple.
There is no guarantee that those machines will work as advertised. There are already problems with those machines counting a limited number of votes in the testing process, so anyone who is relying on equipment and software to count votes that isn’t yet certified and tested in real-world situations is putting their elections at risk.
That is the big problem with IRV in American-style long ballot elections. It’s all been done in small boutique-style elections with uncertified software borrowed from someone else on the cheap or tweaked to make IRV appear easier than it really is.
FairVote’s own Rob RIchie testified in April that a lot of optical scan systems don’t capture ballot images that they would need to do in order to tabulate IRV in the machines – instead of doing 100% hand tabulation.
So your community runs the risk of requiring IRV and possibly not having the elections systems to tabulate IRV – which means hand tabulation. And if your community holds off on doing IRV until the system is ready – FairVote will threaten to sue your ass. They did that in San Francisco, so there is no reason to assume they wouldn’t do it in your community.
http://gopetition.com/petitions/oppose-instant-runoff-voting.html
IRV
The city attorney’s opinion is faulty. He wrote an opinion that matched the results his client — the City officials — wanted. The legal test is clear. When 7,000 citizens (more than voted in the last St. Paul primary) sign a petition for a ballot measure and enough signatures are verified by the election officials, the amendment proposal MUST be put on the ballot by state law. The ONLY exception is if the proposal is “manifestly unconstitutional” — that means “clearly”. The city attorney’s opinion — based on a 93 year old decision by a divided Supreme Court dealing with a wholly different type of system — is according to him a “best guess”. It obviously does not meet the test. The City Council’s conflict of interest is also apparent. The whole reason state law and the City Charter authorize petition by citizens is to give the people an opportunity to make Charter decisions when City Councils refuse to.
McCloy distorts my paper
This is Greg Dennis, the one whom wrote the study which Joyce McCloy referred. Unfortunately, Joyce is a dishonest campaigner against IRV, and she has been distorting the results of my paper on a variety of websites to suit her agenda.
My paper found nothing about the effect of “overvoted contests on next contests on the ballot”. That is a compete (intentional?) misreading. The issue is how ranks that follow an overvoted rank (where all ranks belong to a single IRV contest!) are counted. San Francisco rules, rightly in my estimation, interpret those ranks as blank. There is no evidence of any effect of overvotes on subsequent contests.
By the way, the undervote rate (the ballots left completely blank) was cut in half in the IRV municipal election compared to the previous non-IRV municipal election.
voters have right to IRV
The consequences of going ahead with a vote on whether to use IRV for Saint Paul’s municipal elections, even if the voting system were to be found unconstitutional, are minuscule. A couple of lines on an all ready long ballot this November; no implementation till 2009 when the constitutional issue will have surely been decided.
What’s more, the voters have the right to petition the government for this expansion of democracy and the Council does not have the right to arbitrarily decide that they don’t want it on the ballot….no matter what their personal opinions.
Ellen Brown
Better Ballot Campaign
McCloy also distorts San Francisco's use of IRV
Joyce McCloy previously wrote:
“San Francisco used uncertified software and after 3 years was notified that the algorithm was flawed. A study by Greg Dennis reveals unintended consequences that IRV caused in San Francisco’s IRV elections and the affect of overvoted contests on next contests on ballot.”
As the leader in San Francisco who has worked with four Secretaries of State, two vendors and the county election admin folks to implement IRV here, I can tell you that this statement of Joyce McCloy’s is completely false. San Francisco’s software always has been certified, in fact in the state of California it is illegal to use uncertified software and SF has always abided by the law. It’s an insult — and potentially libelous — for McCloy to suggest that all the good election people in SF who worked to implement IRV did so in an illegal fashion, and I demand that McCloy retract that statement or face the legal consequences.
Secondly, the algorithm was not flawed at all but has worked well in all four years — and over some 19 races — in which IRV has been used. What McCloy may be refering to (in a distorted fashion) was that in the Nov 2007 election problems developed with the ES&S optical scan equipment used in SF that had nothing to do with IRV. Instead, the problem was releated to an “invisible ink” problem whereby it was alleged by the Sec of State that the ES&S optical scan equipment that SF had been using since 2000 (well before IRV, which wasn’t implemented until 2004) could not read certain color inks, esp red, green and light blue. As a remedy the SOS required SF to do a larger than usual post-election manual audit so as to detect any ballots that were not being counted due to the voter using the wrong color ink (esp prone were absentee voters, which in SF can amount to 45% of voters in any given election).
But this had nothing to do with IRV, and proof of that is that SF was going to have to follow these same procedures for the Feb 2008 presidential primary election in CA even though there were no IRV races on the ballot. That prompted the SF Board of Supervisors to approve a contract with another vendor, Sequoia Voting Systems, and to get rid of ES&S and their flawed equipment.
So Joyce McCloy is wrong on both counts. With the previous denunciation from Greg Dennis about how she manipulated data from his study, that’s “strike three” for Joyce McCloy.
Steven Hill
Director, Political Reform Program
New America Foundation
How to stay on Steve Hill's good side....
If you really wanna know how the FairVote people felt about the “good election people of San Francisco”, you owe it to yourself to check out this link – it’s one complaint after another from FairVote about how San Francisco election administrators were getting ready for IRV – check it out here: http://instantrunoff.blogspot.com/2008/07/all-for-instant-runoff-how-fai...
You can read for yourself that FairVote admonished the “good elections people” for not going to them for expertise on IRV. You can read how the FairVote people sued the “good elections people” for not implementing IRV fast enough.
The FairVote people repeatedly admonish ED Arntz for not going with central op-scan tabulators or touchscreens – something they now claim they never wanted for IRV anywhere.
You can read how FairVote claims that the Arntz process (counting the first column in the precinct and then subsequent columns in a central location) was a poor decision – but that is exactly what they are recommending for IRV elections in NC and probably elsewhere.
This piece – taken directly from the FairVote website – shows once and for all that FairVote knows that IRV works best on op-scan with central tabulation or DRE touchscreens – that is what they recommended after all. But that is not what they are telling voters in North Carolina, and I bet that is not what they are telling voters up where you live.
So if your elections officials want to stay on FairVote’s good side, you had better implement IRV really fast, even if it’s illegal or unconstitutional. That is the only way for you to become and remain “good people” in FairVote’s opinion.
1915 Bucklin voting was a different system
Apparently lawyers (or ones that cities can afford) are not so smart if they can’t understand simple differences.
The judged unconstitutional voting system used by Duluth was the Bucklin system, where second choices were ADDED to first if there was no majority winner in the first round.
IRV never adds votes. Every voter gets one vote for their top remaining choice every round of counting like any standard runoff process. See: http://www2.mnbar.org/benchandbar/2002/oct02/voting.htm
I see no good reason that voters in St Paul ought to wait to vote. The funny thing is it is the interest of the IRV-detractors to let IRV go forward, as long as seeds of doubt of constitutionality can be pretended. The advocates have more to lose if the referendum fails.
Let the people vote!
John Hotinger . . . Your
John Hotinger . . . Your observations are faulty and rather reckless in my opinion. I know many people who work on the St. Paul City Attorney’s Office and your characterization of the City Attorney’s motivations and his legal judgment is really faulty and reckless. I think the legal opinion is pretty solid.
IRV voting is *not* fair or economical & would create problems
Please read this research report on IRV:
Realities Mar Instant Runoff Voting – 17 Flaws and 3 Benefits, June 10, 2008, Version #2– updated June 25, 2008
http://electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/US/RCV-IRV/InstantRunoffVotingFla...
IRV sounds enticing to voters who can express their preferences, but IRV does not solve the problems it is promoted as solving and causes significant new problems.Instant runoff voting is a threat to the fairness, accuracy, timeliness, and economy of U.S. elections. The U.S. needs to solve its existing voting system problems and then carefully consider the options before adopting new voting methods.
The report accurately rebuts all the claims by IRV proponents, including the misnomered “Fair Vote” organization.
Correcting inaccuracies
Joyce McCloy and Kathy Dopp are adamant opponents of instant runoff voting, seemingly based in their misapprehension that IRV will lead to touchscreen voting. Perhaps that explains McCloy’s odd suggestion that Pierce County will rely on touchscreen voting — odd in that more than four in five voters their vote by mail on optical scan ballots, and the plan is focused on counting ballots on optical scan machines.
Our election equipment industry — and that word “industry”, sadly, is what we have to rely on for electing our political leaders — isn’t easy to work with when promoting the public interest over profit. But all three major vendors have produced optical scan equipment that has been used to run ranked choice voting elections and call can do so once required. I would hope that McCloy and Dopp would join in ensuring this process is done well, as we know it can be.
On Dopp’s “report,” it’s a moving target, but to show how her charges (and those of McCloy) can be answered, see http://www.fairvote.org/dopp — and realize that groups that have studied this issue closely (including the League of Women Voters of North Carolina, which just a few weeks ago overwhelmingly voted to endorse IRV at its state convention despite hearing a great deal from McCloy) agree that IRV promotes better elections for voters — and voters are the ones we should keep remembering in this situation.
You know that's not true Rob!
The NC League of Women Voters never heard a great deal from Joyce McCloy. Can you prove the accuracy of that statement?
They probably heard from your fellow-traveler Bob Hall or other folks from DemocracyNC, or maybe even someone from FairVote (or your local affiliate FairVoteNC). I know for a fact that the NC State Board of Elections was running around NC promoting IRV like some carnival huckster selling patent medicine at the county fair – claiming it’s the remedy for whatever ails you.
And what’s wrong with being an opponent of IRV? There are two sides to every issue. Why do you feel you have to badmouth people who don’t agree with you?
And I do remember that the LWV at one time endorsed sticking with paperless touchscreen voting machines even after we had experienced election meltdowns in Florida and even here in NC in 2004. I guess it all depends on who they do and do not have access to. And so if they only listen to one side of the issue – as apparently they did in NC – it’s only natural they would vote to endorse IRV.
That’s what happens when a group like FairVote sucks all the oxygen out of the room.
LWV of North Carolina
My post in fact is true.
One cannot be doing anything relating to instant runoff voting in North Carolina and not hear a lot from Chris Telesca and Joyce McCloy, fixated on the inaccurate belief that establishing IRV in NC will mean a return to touchscreens.
Collections of “facts as you see them” from Chris and Joyce get out to everyone. The NC League of Women Voters went through a careful process of coming to a decision on IRV over several months, well aware of everything you and Joyce say. It overwhelmingly — and rightly — rejected your concerns.
THe NC League never contacted Joyce McCloy
Rob – you know it’s simply not true. The NC League of Women Voters never talked to Joyce McCloy, never asked her to make a presentation about how IRV threatens verified voting and election integrity in NC.
If you have some proof of your statement that they contacted Joyce or actually considered the verified voting point of view, please post a link to the minutes of the NC LWV meeting where those concerns were dealt with. I’d really like to see them myself.
If you have any proof of that statement – like maybe a report from the NC LWV that shows they did discus the verified voting issues relating to IRV, please share them with us.
Various local LWV chapters in NC have invited FairVote and DemocracyNC and even the State Board of Elections to make presentations to their groups – but I am not aware of one invitation that Joyce received from any of the chapters in NC. Can you prove that any such invitations were extended?
Hell – I’ve taken a look at the material that my own SBOE has sent out to various people across the state along with their meager 3 page executive summary of IRV, and of all the 60 pages that typically get sent out – there is nothing that looks like an objective report from election officials in the two counties who administered the IRV pilot elections in their counties.
Most of it looks like pro-IRV propaganda – hell even the exit poll was not without bias. Your own IRV America director Diane Russell admitted on a IRV Maine yahoo newsgroup that she traveled from Maine to Cary to work on IRV in our elections and faked a southern accent when she interviewed our voters. I got the screen captures if anyone wants to e-mail me for copies.
IRV
If IRV is unconstitutional, then the constitution needs to be changed. IRV is the only way to insure fair and impartial elections. I’m tired of voting for the slightly better of the two bad candidates for fear my vote will be ‘wasted’ on the candidate who really represents me. It’s clear the City Council Doesn’t Represent ME! They represent big business and the status quo. Additionally, The city attorney is making a stab in the dark on this one. I say let it be on the ballot. I’ll be there to watch my City Council NOT represent me AGAIN!
Now there is a statement that cannot be proved!
IRV is NOT the only way to ensure fair and impartial elections. Here in Cary, IRV was used to declare a winner with less than a majority of the vote – despite the fact that IRV advocates claimed that IRV ensures a winner gets a 50% plus one vote majority win.
Our Cary IRV race involved 3022 first column votes. 50% of that number is 1511, and 50% plus one vote is 1512. No one crossed that threshold after all the first column votes were counted. By the time the second and third column votes were tabulated, no one had 1512. But they declared a winner anyway.
But there was a discrepancy between the final vote count the Wake BOE and observers (me included) had come up with. The next day, the BOE claimed to have done an audit – but it wasn’t done in public. They claim the discrepancy in the previous day’s vote count was due to a calculator error. Then they claimed that they missed a few votes in the previous day’s tabulation, but not enough to make a difference.
But the thing that bothers me the most is that the “audit” took place out of the public eye. The observers caught the numbers problem – but we weren’t notified of or allowed to observe the retabulation of the ballots. For all we know, one person could have locked themselves in their office and counted the ballots in secret. That is hardly fair or impartial.
Do you want to trust that for our elections? In my experience, as someone who has actually attended my county BOE meetings and seen how our county handled the Cary IRV election, I can say that IRV leads to lower standards for election accountability.
The Wake County Board of Elections sees it differently
Past experience suggests that Chris Telesca has a great deal of time for robust debate. As typically the case, his points have good answers. In this case, the Wake County Board of Elections vigorously defends its procedures in Cary. See a letter from its leadership linked here:
http://www.newsobserver.com/opinion/letters/story/1127466.html
NCVotes123.com is a coalition effort that is a good reflection of the strong degree of support for instant runoff voting in NC. A visit to its site could be of interest.
Actually that is up for debate
Wake BOE chair John Gilbert has always been a big advocate for IRV. It was a good hire getting his daughter-in-law to be your IRV Director for FairVoteNC.
The other Wake BOE members I am not sure about that. Sharon Everett was not a Wake BOE member during the Cary IRV election. Debra Goldberg was on the Wake BOE – and she has a different take on IRV – check out this site for her comments http://noirvnc.blogspot.com/
NCvotes123.com is a website set up by Elena Everett when I presume she was your IRV Director for FairVoteNC. So it’s hardly a coalition effort when one of your paid employees sets up a website. And Elena was IDed as the IRV Director for FairVoteNC in three op-ed pieces that were submitted by Elena and three people (a different submission partner for each piece) in three different papers in NC. Problem is – she claims she wasn’t on your payroll beyond May 29 – and two of the three articles appeared in June. So what happened – did she submit slightly different versions of the same article all at the same time and ask her friends on the paper to publish them every two weeks?
That’s good PR, but hardly grassroots. It’s more like astroturf positioned and maintained by FairVote. Why not at least be honest about it.
All is not well with san Francisco IRV elections
A new report on the conditions of San Francisco’s elections dept as just released on July 3, 2008. That report also noted several problems with their IRV program after 4 years of doing IRV:
-their new Sequoia machines for RCV still haven’t been certified by the state (not federally certified either)
-they need a contingency plan for counting the RCV ballots if the new machines aren’t certified in time for the election,
-and they need more “public outreach” (voter ed) on ranked choice voting.
This is partly because there is no federally certified software yet. San Francisco is following California law that voting systems have to be federally certified.
...Another problem, according to the report, is the lack of certification by the California Secretary of State of San Francisco’s new Sequoia voting machines for ranked-choice voting, instituted in 2002 for elections to some city offices in order to avoid runoff elections. State certification was still pending at the time of the report.
With a high voter turnout expected for November’s presidential election, the Elections Department needs a contingency plan, an alternative method of counting ranked-choice ballots, in place in case the Sequoia machines are not certified by the election, the report concluded.
The report also said additional public outreach efforts are needed on voter registration requirements, ranked-choice voting and absentee voting.
The full report can be viewed at http://www.sfgov.org/site/uploadedfiles/courts/divisions/Civil_Grand_Jur...
http://cbs5.com/localwire/22.0.html?type=bcn&item=SF-ELECTIONS-REPORT-ba...
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Sign the Petition to Restore Election Integrity in NC by opposing IRV
http://gopetition.com/petitions/oppose-instant-runoff-voting.html
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