On May 15, the Memphis, Tennessee Charter Commission decided to ask the voters whether they wish to use Instant-Runoff Voting for city elections. The Charter Commission has the power to suggest various changes to the Memphis Charter, and added IRV to the list of proposals that will be considered by the voters in November. Other cities that will be voting on using IRV in their own elections in November are Los Angeles, St. Paul, and Glendale, Arizona. Thanks to Rob Richie for this news.
Thanks for flagging this, Richard. Just one qualifier, which is that there’s a good chance those additional cities will vote on IRV this fall, but not a guarantee yet.
IRV is blatantly defective since it does NOT use ALL place votes data.
IRV WILL elect more and more Stalin and Hitler clones who will be claiming IRV manufactured might majority *mandates* for their EVIL stuff — i.e. to make powermad gerrymander monarchs even worse, if that is possible.
P.R. for legislative body elections.
Approval Voting for executive/judicial elections.
— pending advanced head to head math.
In the world of fact, IRV isn’t electing Stalin-Hitler types in the thousands of elections where it’s been used in Australia, Ireland, and big cities in New Zealand, the UK and the U.S.
Note that this “defect” is also true of all runoff elections, which are used to elect the president in the great majority of presidential elections around the world.
With approval voting, voting for a lesser choice will hurt your favorite choice. That means campaigns will want you to bullet vote and strategic voters will. Any system where voting for a lesser choice will hurt a higher choice runs into this straightforward strategic problem.
We’re fine with people pushing for other voting methods, but there are good reasons to push for IRV.
I do agree with Thomas that it would be best to have proportional representation systems for legislative elections, but that IRV is better than plurality.
IRV standard fatal example —
1 2
H 34 16 (from W)
S 33 16 (from W)
W 32 67 (from H and S)
H Hitler, S Stalin, W George Washington
H beats S 50-49. Let Civil WAR II start.
IRV will ignore the mere 67 votes for W as a second choice — if anything a blatant violation of the Equal Protection Clause — treating lots of second choice votes (i.e. the 67) as being worth zero.
Sorry — the U.S.A. AIN’T the rest of the world.
There are SERIOUS leftwing versus rightwing problems in the U.S.A. — just in case no body has noticed the Prez elections in 1964, 1968, 1972, 1980, 1988, 1992, 2000, 2004 and 2008.
The IRV New Age fanatics are really taking the U.S.A. on a ride to DOOM for single offices — with mighty manufactured IRV majorities and the resulting *mandate* thinking in the brains of the leftwing / rightwing powermad winners.
It turns out that IRV is NOT “as easy as 1-2-3”. Rob Richie, in his own words to the EAC in April – admits just one of the big problems with IRV – implimentation.
At the April 24 EAC Roundtable Discussion:
Richie 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….
… Minneapolis passed this with 65 percent of the vote in November 2006 and it’s looking pretty, you know, it’s going to be a tough battle to get them to have an election in November 2009, three years later, even with extremely well organized backers who are trying to get it implemented in the city and that’s because we don’t have a regime that kind of makes it easy for a jurisdiction to make that transition.
…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
If you care about election integrity and having our votes counted as cast, you won’t want IRV – because it makes elections more opaque, not more transparent. Our country has a crises where there are not enough checks and balances in our elections process, and IRV makes elections even less transparent. If you agree to impliment IRV, you will end up having to drop more of your standards in order to make the round peg fit the square hole. And election integrity will be the first thing to be thrown away, so as to allow some people the “joy” of ranking their choices, an excercise in futility. (IRV provides same results as plurality in almost all cases).
There is currently a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of IRV in Minnesota, but proponents continue to try to force the issue anyway.
ST. PAUL Charter panel says no to instant runoff
05/19/2008
The St. Paul Charter Commission on Monday rejected an effort by ballot reform supporters to fundamentally alter the way the city elects its mayor and City Council.
The vote limits the options of the St. Paul Better Ballot Campaign for putting instant-runoff voting to a citywide vote in November. The group now says it will attempt to put the issue onto the ballot via petitions.
If adopted, St. Paul voters would rank their choices. If no candidate wins a majority, second-place votes are tallied until one does. Supporters say the process eliminates the need for primaries and gives voice to more candidates, since they compete with other candidates until Election Day.
But detractors have cited difficulties with implementing new voting systems and questioned whether instant-runoff voting is legal under Minnesota law.
The Better Ballot Campaign has said it is poised to submit about 6,000 signatures to the Ramsey County Election Office. About 5,100 approved signatures are needed to put the question on the ballot.
— Jason Hoppin
http://www.twincities.com/life/ci_9316659
The lawsuit Joyce McCloy cites suggests IRV violates one-person,one-vote, which has definitively been dismissed in the past. The system is also called “the single transferable vote” because every voter has one vote — they just have a back-up if their first choice loses.
Note that the Minneapolis charter commission also opposed IRV, but voters supported IRV with 65% in 2006. See:
http://www.betterballotcampaign.org
Also, Joyce, thanks for reading my EAC testimony. I was stating a simple fact about current voting equipment often not being ready to run IRV elections — although it typically can be adapted to do so, although vendors charge a lot of money for it.. My point was that the EAC should establish standards to help make sure new equipment is ready to do so.
Note, Joyce: North Carolina probably would have IRV-ready optical scan equipment if you had not fought a legislative provision to require it. Now you complain that NC doesn’t have equipment as ready to run IRV elections as you and I would like. A shame, eh?