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INSTANT RUNOFF VOTING NEWS ARTICLES:
North Carolina lawmakers passed SL 2006-192 for an Instant Runoff Voting Pilot Program in August 2006:
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"AN ACT to authorize the state Board of elections to conduct a pilot program in which the INSTANT RUNOFF METHOD OF VOTING WOULD BE USED IN LOCAL ELECTIONS;"
What is IRV? "Instant runoff voting" means a system in which voters rank up to three of the candidates by order of preference, first, second, or third. If the candidate with the most first-choice votes receives the threshold of victory of the first-choice votes, that candidate wins. If no candidate receives the threshold of victory of first-choice votes, the two candidates with the greatest number of first-choice votes advance to a second round of counting. In this round, each ballot counts as a vote for whichever of the two final candidates is ranked highest by the voter. The candidate with the most votes in the second round wins the election. More on the Pilot Program here
North Carolina adopted an instant runoff voting "pilot program for use in the 2007 and 2008 elections for local offices in volunteering jurisdictions. The pilot program instructs the State Board of Elections to select up to 10 cities for the 2007 elections and up to 10 counties for the 2008 elections. "The State Board of Elections shall closely monitor the pilot program established in this section and report its findings and recommendations to the 2007 General Assembly."
The North Carolina cities of Asheville, Atlantic Beach, Raleigh and Rocky Mount chose not to participate in the IRV pilot program. Cary Town Council members voted 4-3 to move to instant-runoff voting after (even though) Mayor Ernie McAlister, Councilwoman Jennifer Robinson and Councilman Jack Smith called for (and were refused) a public hearing. The city of Cary , North Carolina used IRV for the District B city council election in October 2007 , and the city of Hendersonville used IRV for city council elections in November 2007 but an "instant runoff" was not required.
There was a Public Forum Thursday, January 17, 2008 regarding the Pilot Program for Instant Runoff Voting in the Town of Cary. The information learned from this forum will be sent to the State Board of Elections for perusal and report to the General Assembly.
Several advocates in Wake County spoke publicly at the public hearing in Cary about IRV:
You can email comments on the IRV Pilot Program to Cherie Poucher, director, Wake County Board of Elections (856-6245) e-mail cpoucher@co.wake.nc.us
Previous articles about IRV in North Carolina:
Oct 19, 2007 Voter finds new system frustrating By Harrison Metzger Times-News. Hendersonville: Bill Modlin wasn't happy with his first experience with the new "instant runoff" voting when he cast his ballot for Hendersonville City Council on Thursday. ..."It doesn't make any sense to me, and I can guarantee you because of the way they have it set up there are people in this town that are going to lose their vote," he said. ..."I call it instant confusion," he said. (Cached)
By Jordan Schrader, USA TODAY. CARY, N.C. - October 17, 2007 Winning candidate Frantz said he heard from many confused voters on the campaign trail ."I found myself, when I was at some places, that's all I was doing … explaining the new voting system," he said. (Cached).
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HOW TO COUNT THE IRV BALLOTS IN NORTH CAROLINA and the LAW
North Carolina's voting machines do not have the software to tabulate IRV ballots. In fact, there are NO federally certified voting systems that are compatible with IRV.
Neither the hardware or the software of North Carolina's new optical scan machines can accommodate IRV. The touch screens can accommodate IRV with the use of an illegal work around. If IRV became permanent, counties would either switch to touch screens and use an illegal work around , thus weakening the Public Confidence in Elections Law, or end up looking for a source for optical scanners certified to do IRV.
Optical Scan & IRV: With optical scan there will be sorting and re-sorting and manual tabulating of the second or third rounds. This increase the chances of mistakes and risk that all of the ballots won't all be counted. (It will be harder to detect).
In the Cary, North Carolina "instant runoff", election workers had to manually sort and stack the paper ballots in order to count the second round of votes in the contest for District B City Council.
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
Touch-screen machines & IRV: Instead of making the Instant Runoff Voting Pilot fit our law, a "work around" has been crafted that will in effect gut key sections of the law to fit IRV. Because there is no software to accommodate IRV, and perhaps to make IRV attractive to the touch-screen counties like Henderson County, an uncertified work around was created to avoid the approved legal method of manually sorting and counting of the 2nd and 3rd rounds. Since Hendersonville did not have to hold a "runoff", this uncertified method was not tested. With this illegal work around, the State BoE has made touch-screens a more attractive option than optical scanners.
Do you understand how the IRV ballots are counted?
INSTANT RUNOFF VOTING in NORTH CAROLINA
2007 PILOT PROGRAM M100 (OPTICAL SCAN) METHODOLOGY (like used in Cary)
Instructions on counting optical scan IRV ballots are on pages 1- 3, and sample ballots are on page 5 (provided by the Rocky Mount Telegram)
See how the IRV ballot will appear on Henderson touchscreen machines - it is very confusing:
A sample ballot shows how instant runoff voting will affect the way voters choose Hendersonville City Council members this year. (105 KB) Asheville Citizen Times
With IRV, the 2nd and 3rd choices are uncounted and unaccounted for unless there is a "instant runoff" -
Doesn't the letter of the law require that all votes be counted on election night? Are we dropping our standards some more for a fast food style voting method? All votes are to be counted upon closing of the polls and all unofficial vote totals are to be reported, but will they with IRV?
§ 163-182.2. Initial counting of official ballots.
(a) The initial counting of official ballots shall be conducted according to the following principles:
(1) Vote counting at the precinct shall occur immediately after the polls close and shall be continuous until completed. (From page 171 - 175 from NC Election Law posted online)
The whole reason for 161-182.2 (a)(1) is for transparency and fraud prevention
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Learn from San Francisco - the largest IRV jurisdiction in the US - they have used IRV since 2004
The Los Angeles Voter Empowerment Circle recommended touch screen voting machines for IRV to the state of California in 2003: "touch screen machines for DRE systems are also better able to ccommodate alternative voting methods such as Instant Runoff Voting. We therefore believe that DRE systems are preferable to paper-based systems, such as punch cards or optical scans.
Touch screens were recommended to San Francisco: From the San Francisco Dept of Elections report on IRV in 2004. ES&S realized that its current paper ballot system could not provide voters the opportunity to rank all candidates that qualified for the ballot. For instance, if 22 candidates qualified for one contest, the system could not accommodate voters making 22 selections in order of their preference among the candidates. Touch-screen systems could most likely accommodate the ranking of all candidates.... For absentee voting, however, the formatting for the paper ballots for the current optical scan system limits the number of choices. The RCV Charter amendment allows for voters to have no less than three selections for an RCV contest if it is not technically feasible for the system to allow for voters to rank all of the candidates on the ballot. Thus, the City agreed to have its system modified to allow voters three rankings among the qualified candidates appearing on the RCV ballot.
IRV software relies upon complex algorithms that could be faulty without anyone realizing it. San Francisco used software that had a flawed algorithm for several years before it was detected by a review of the voting machines:
California's former SOS McPherson letter to the Board of Supervisors describes the anomaly in the RCV algorithm,in a report dated June 20, 2007. .The Secretary of State’s staff report from 2006 explains the issues experienced during testing which caused Secretary McPherson to approve one-time use of the system. Some of these issues are noted below:
...An anomaly in the RCV algorithm concerning the elimination of the lowest ranking candidates who are tied.
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Instant Runoff Voting Costs and Feasibility
Proponents are right that if you have IRV, you dont have a runoff election, not usually. But it is arguable as to whether IRV decreases costs to elections departments, and with some consistency.
But look at San Francisco, the largest real life example of IRV in the United States:
San Francisco forecasts doubling their budget in 2007-2008. San Francisco’s higher expenses include special voting software, special poll worker training, more laborious and costly recounts, and IRV related voter education costing about $1.87 per registered voter.
Fact: The Department of Election’s proposed $19,809,917 budget for FY 2007-2008 is $10,683,599 or 117.1 percent more than the original FY 2006-2007 budget of $9,126,318.
San Francisco had 418,285 registered voters in Nov 2006. Their current budget is almost 10 times that of Wake County North Carolina's budget with 460,821 reg voters in 2004.
Compare that to Wake County North Carolina, which has been in at under $2 million a year subtracting income from expenditures) from 1999 to 2004. See actual Wake NC Budget
San Francisco may not be paying for traditional runoff elections, but they have new costs. San Francisco’s new expenses include special voting software, special poll worker training, more laborious and costly recounts, and IRV related voter education costing about $1.87 per registered voter. San Francisco is also seeking a replacement voting system, and recently considered spending about $12 Million on Sequoia Voting machines.
San Francisco had 421,094 registered voters in 2004, spent $776,000 on IRV related voter education , with $210,000 specifically allotted to the community organizations for their efforts. 700 public outreach events were held.
Maybe IRV saves money, but there isn't a solid cost savings analysis using actual election department's net annual expenditures.
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Take a look at some of the findings in these studies of San Francisco’s 2004 & 2005 IRV election, conducted by the Public Research Institute at San Francisco State University:
An Assessment of Ranked-Choice Voting in the San Francisco 2004 Election
SUMMARY
The majority of voters appear to have made the transition to Ranked-Choice Voting with little problem: about seven out of eight we surveyed said that, overall, they understood it "fairly well" or "perfectly well." However, that leaves one in eight who expressed some lack of understanding.
…We found differences across racial and ethnic groups in regard to their prior knowledge of RCV, their overall understanding, and their propensity to rank candidates on the ballot.
Non-Hispanic Whites and Asian Americans came to the polls more aware of RCV than others. Whites and Asians also reported a higher level of overall understanding than other groups.
African Americans reported less understanding than other racial/ethnic groups, a difference that grows once other influences are considered.
2005 was worse for voters than 2004:
An Assessment of Ranked-Choice Voting in the San Francisco 2005 Election
IRV was re-named Ranked-Choice Voting because it can take days or weeks to get the results.
Prior Knowledge of Ranked-Choice Voting (RCV)
- A narrow majority of voters surveyed (54%) knew before voting that they would be asked to rank candidates for City Treasurer and Assessor in the 2005 election.
- The proportion of voters who had prior knowledge of RCV was lower in 2005 (54%) than in the 2004 election for the Board of Supervisors (67%).
- Those with lower rates of prior knowledge tended to be those who were less educated, reported having lower incomes, and spoke a primary language other than Spanish.
- African Americans were considerably less likely than other racial and ethnic groups (41.9%) to know they would be ranking their choices for these offices.
-The majority of voters reported ranking three candidates in the race for City Treasurer (57%), while 33% reported selecting only one candidate.*
*That means that in the event the first choice does not win, 33% do not participate in the "run-off".
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See this analysis of "Spoilage and Error Rates with Range Voting versus other Voting Systems" from http://rangevoting.org/SPRates.htm Valid votes, overvotes and undervotes (also known as DROP-OFF) in IRV races:
Overvote means a voter selected two or more candidates for the same office. Undervote/drop-off means voter selected no candidate for that race. In either IRV or plurality voting, undervoting has the same effect as not voting at all in that race.
So from this we see that the overvote error rates in San Francisco ranged from 3 to 11 times higher with IRV than with plurality voting, typically 7 times higher. (If double-ranking a non-top candidate in IRV were also considered – we haven't – then IRV overvote error rates would have been even higher.) And this conclusion is fully statistically significant.
Meanwhile, the undervotes and dropoffs probably mostly were "intentional" rather than "errors," but anyhow were comparable for both Plurality and IRV.
___________________________________________________________ When IRV first premiered in San Francisco, it was not smooth:
Instant Runnoff Voting in US:
First used in San Francisco in Fall of 2004.
[Note: The San Francisco Department of Elections
( link ) prefers the term "Ranked Choice Voting" because "the word 'instant'might create an expectation that final results will be available immediately after the polls close on election night."] The new system did not work as well as was hoped due to software and logistical difficulties; it took several days to produce definitive results. Article : (Wikipedia)
November 4, 2004. Mysterious malfunction with the custom computer software, some votes not counted, results skewed.
When the San Francisco Department of Elections on Wednesday tried to test run the program that is supposed to redistribute voters' second and third-place preferences among candidates who weren't eliminated in the first round, some of the votes didn't get counted and skewed the results. News Target article
November 4, 2004. "you don't really know who you elected until several weeks or longer after the election," said Eric Jaye, a political consultant to two candidates who ran for supervisor on Tuesday. AP News article
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Sunday, January 09, 2005. Programming problems. |
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Despite promise, ranked-choice voting gets fouled up in California. Ranked-choice voting is the only sane voting system around: it's an instant runoff election that opens up the possibility of third-party competition for major elections.
Unfortunately, in an example that proves bureaucrats hardly ever have the brains to do anything right, the San Francisco Department of Elections muffed this one up. Apparently, their programmers forgot how to count. Someone needs to teach them the old "fingers and toes" method, apparently. News Target article
December 31, 2004 Claims of minority disenfranchisement:
But David Lee from the Chinese American Voter Education Committee argues that the system disenfranchised minority voters. The organization released a poll saying that only 49 percent of Chinese-speaking voters found the system "easy to use." San Francisco Examiner article
November 16, 2004 Don't Toss Out System Yet - Leader of Voter Ed Group suggests scrapping ranked choice voting:
LAST WEEK, THE head of a San Francisco voter-education group said he was considering options including working to repeal The City's new ranked-choice voting system because the system was too difficult for Chinese-speaking voters.
In RCV -- used to select city supervisors for the first time Nov. 2 --
voters may list three candidates for supervisor in order of preference,eliminating the need for a separate runoff election.
The Chinese American Voter Education Committee's interest in educating and protecting voters whose first language is not English is well placed. These voters are as important as any others, and making sure they understand their rights and the mechanisms by which they cast their votes is a good goal. Unfortunately, when it comes to the idea of potentially filing suit or attempting to repeal ranked-choice voting at the ballot box CAVEC's aim is off the mark and premature. The Examiner: Article
November 11, 2004 Voting Group says IRV esp difficult for minority group.
A voter education group charged Wednesday that The City's new voting system was especially difficult for Chinese-speaking citizens but concluded it may take more than one election to see if those citizens are being disenfranchised. San Francisco Examiner article
November 4, 2004. Machines fail to count votes correctly for second and third votes.
Ranked-choice results delayed due to glitches.
The voting system had cleared state and federal testing, and Arntz said the failure to get a proper tally of second and third votes was a surprise.
"I think we can fix this," Arntz said. "A hand count is something I really don't want to do..."
Lillian Sing, who came in second in District 1, said the delay leads her to question the count.
"The system is completely untrustworthy and therefore nothing is accurate as far as I'm concerned," she said...
"The department also has yet to count and release tallies for as many as 60,000 absentee and provisional ballots from Tuesday's election. Arntz said he plans to release those tallies
daily over the next two weeks, and that he's confident the ranked-choice result will be complete and accurate before the statutory deadline at the end of the month."
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Pierce Co, Washington - switch to IRV forces change to all mail voting, auditor cites increased complexity, increased ballot styles and papers, and affect on integrity of election.
Pierce County elections chief wants to switch to mail-only voting
SEAN COCKERHAM; The News Tribune
Published: June 21st, 2007 01:00 AM
Voting at the polls in Pierce County could soon go the way of cheap gas and vinyl records. The county’s top elections official is proposing to switch to all-mail voting starting next year.
“It is with a heavy heart I have done this,” Pierce County Auditor Pat McCarthy said in an interview this week. “I love my polling places.”
McCarthy said the county’s new instant runoff voting system, also known as ranked-choice voting, will require at least one additional ballot for each voter in the 2008 election. That could overwhelm poll workers in what will be a high-turnout election....
McCarthy argues the situation is different here than in San Francisco and Burlington.
Burlington is a lot smaller than Pierce County, McCarthy said. And San Francisco hasn’t consolidated polling places like Pierce has. That means each polling place in San Francisco serves only a single precinct, unlike in Pierce County.
Poll workers here manage multiple kinds of ballots at each polling place based on what council district, water district and fire district – among others – that a voter lives in.
McCarthy said the South Prairie Community Center polling place is the most complicated, with up to 22 different ballots for a poll worker to manage. That could turn into a stack of 44 under ranked choice.
Moreover, she said, poll workers will also be managing sophisticated voting equipment and issues such as provisional ballots, which are issued to people who don’t have identification and will be checked out later.
“I need to ensure we have an election that we can carry out with great integrity,” she said... |
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Articles, News, Reports & Opposition positions
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Dr. Rebecca Mercuri Internationally respected computer scientist and e-voting expert warns - "potential gaming" of the ballot set that may not be independently detectable or auditable, these run-off styles must be prohibited."
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Raleigh, North Carolina City Counsel tabled IRV, city council members explain why .
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Assessment of Ranked-Choice Voting in the San Francisco 2004 Election – Pros and Cons, data.
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Asessment of Ranked-Choice Voting in the San Francisco 2005 Election - Pros and Cons, data.
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Brad Friedman of www.bradblog.com gives his opinion on Instant Runoff Voting in email to Rob Richie, Director of Fair Vote (shared with permission)
----- Original Message -----
From: Brad Friedman
To: Rob Richie;
Sent: 1/2/2008 6:29:03 PM
Subject: RE: Burlington and Cary optical scan IRV ballots RE: [election_leaders] RE: [HR811] RE: Happy New Year- here'ssomething we're doing in St. Pete on Jan 3
More to the point, let me put it this way, Rob: Until America is able to assure that every vote is counted and counted accurately, in the plain old vanilla winner-take-all system, and develop protocols and a citizenry to own it, and make sure that it's 100% transparent such that we can all have confidence in the results, we do not deserve any of the perceived benefits that may come from alternate forms of voting and tabulating such as IRV, etc.
If all of those, such as yourself, spent as much time on ridding the country of unusable voting systems such as DREs and inaccurate, uncounted, unaudited paper-ballot systems such as op-scan, as we do on other perceived improvements to the voting system, we might be at a place where we could consider such things.
As I see it, we are nowhere near that place. For the record (and not a trick question either, but one I'm trying to get a sense of) does FairVote call for a ban on all DRE voting systems?
Brad ______________________________________________________
News in North Carolina
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Frantz wins Cary runoff Don Frantz was declared the winner Tuesday from last week's hotly contested vote for the Cary Town Council, District B. The Wake County Board of...Published: Oct 17, 2007 12:30 AM |
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Close race tests new instant runoff Despite a tight race as a test case and even the reservation of a winner, advocates for instant- runoff voting say CaryÂ’s pilot program went well....Published: Oct 16, 2007 12:58 PM |
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Cary satisfied with instant runoffs Cary voters gave the recent instant runoff election high marks, according to a survey conducted by a professor at N.C. State University. Michael Cobb, an...Published: Oct 16, 2007 12:30 AM
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Frantz looks like winner Some double-checking of votes Friday in Cary's razor-thin District B Town Council election showed that Don Frantz is likely the winner after all. The Wake...Published: Oct 13, 2007 12:30 AM
A day after the North Carolina's first count of the instant- runoff ballots and three days after Election Day, it appears that Don Frantz has won...Published: Oct 11, 2007 05:23 PM
District B race is a cliffhanger North Carolina's first "instant runoff" election still hasn't produced a clear winner. Wake elections officials counted ballots in the Cary Town Council District B race...Published: Oct 12, 2007 12:30 AM
Weinbrecht, slower growth win in Cary Slower growth - or better-managed growth, anyway - is in again in Cary, where voters ousted their mayor Tuesday and gave his replacement several supportive...Published: Oct 10, 2007 12:30 AM
Cary vote test may cut costs Elections officials and leaders of election-reform organizations call the instant- runoff voting in Cary on Tuesday a possible way to give more power to voters and...Published: Oct 06, 2007 12:30 AM
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Instant Runoff Voting 1-2-3 Once again Cary is a pacesetter. The Town Council has agreed to pilot Instant Runoff Voting (IRV) in the upcoming Oct. 9 election. This is...Published: Oct 05, 2007 01:43 PM
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Word getting out about Cary's new ballot When Cary voters step into the booth on Oct. 9, they might end up making decisions that would have waited another four weeks in an...Published: Sep 18, 2007 09:30 AM
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Your Letters Sept. 19 Re-elect McAlister My history with the Town of Cary goes back to when I became a “frequent visitor” to see my son and his family....Published: Sep 18, 2007 04:33 PM
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Your Letters Online Sept. 19 Response to Carroll’s letter I would like to clarify some misinformation presented in Mr. Joseph T. Carroll’s letter [Roseland did homework, Sept. 12]. Yes, I...Published: Sep 18, 2007 04:39 PM
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‘Instant runoff’ gets a tryout
Asheville Citizen-Times, NC - Aug 11, 2007
The General Assembly in 2006 agreed to let up to 10 cities and towns this year and 10 counties next year become pilot projects for instant runoff voting.
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Council votes to change runoff election process The Cary Town Council has given a thumbs up for Cary to be a pilot community for the Wake County Board of Elections Instant Runoff. ..
Published: May 25, 2007 12:17 PM
“This is not a ballot, this is a portal into hell.” — Asheville City Council member Carl Mumpower on instant-runoff ballots, in ”Votes and Slopes,” May 16, 2007
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Rocky Mount: More resist new runoff voting idea By Zach Ahmad Rocky Mount Telegram Monday, April 23, 2007. TARBORO – As Twin Counties elections officials prepare to decide on instant runoff voting for Rocky Mount, the list of those opposing the experiment is growing. Article cached here |
What Raleigh NC City Council Members said about Instant Runoff Voting:
City Council member Dr. James P. West opposed IRV: “I indicated that I have some concerns about this especially in disenfranchises certain segment of voters…especially those of lower socio economic level…”
Council member Thomas Crowder: “Just like blackjack in Las Vegas, we are going to see a lot of game-men's-ship trying figure out the odds on putting people into office…”
Council member Tommy Craven: “To me this is something that would certainly serve the convenience of the board of elections… but it's certainly not in the best interest of the voting public.... read the full account of the city council meeting
Rueben Blackwell, Rocky Mount City Council Member and co-chair for the NC Justice Center advised that: "To cast out an instant runoff speculative experiment in communities that have had historic voting rights violations issues is absolutely wrong.." ___________________________________________________
Logistical issues
Ballots in IRV cannot be easily summarized. (Political scientists call this the Summability criterion.) In most forms of voting, each district can examine the ballots locally and publish the total votes for each candidate. Anyone can add up the published totals to determine the winner, and if there are allegations of irregularities in one district only that district needs to be recounted.
With IRV, each time a candidate is dropped, the ballots assigned to them must be re-examined to determine which remaining candidate to assign them to. Repeated several times, this can be time-consuming. If there is a candidate X who got more votes than all of the candidates who got less than X put together, then all of these candidates who lost to X can be dropped simultaneously without affecting the final outcome, which can speed up counting.
If counting takes place in several places for a single IRV election (as in Australia), these counting centers must be connected by a securely authenticated channel (historically the telegraph was used) to inform them which candidate has come last and should be dropped. Centralizing the counting to avoid this problem can add opportunity for tampering. Wikipedia article
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Australia uses limited IRV, but also is using e-voting machines now.
Benefits and drawbacks on IRV (called preferential voting) as used in Australia. This system is used in the House of Representatives and the lower house of every Australian State Parliament, aside from the ACT and Tasmania.
According to ,www.AustralianPolitics.com
Disadvantages of the Preferential System
It is more complicated to administer and count.
It can produce a higher level of informal voting.
It promotes a two-party system to the detriment of minor parties and independents.
Voters are forced to express a preference for candidates they may not wish to support in any way.
(The use of optional preferential voting, as used in New South Wales State elections,
is a solution to this problem.) Link:
Australia began using electronic voting:
The ACT's electronic voting system, which was first used at the October 2001 election and was again used in the October 2004 election, is the first of its kind to be used for parliamentary elections in Australia.
The system uses standard personal computers as voting terminals, with voters using a barcode to authenticate their votes.
Voting terminals are linked to a server in each polling
location using a secure local area network.
No votes are taken or transmitted over a public network like the Internet. Link:
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ABOUT THE CENTER FOR VOTING AND DEMOCRACY (Fair Vote.org) : from www.guidestar.org
They earn income from paid for "ballot service contracts" pertaining to IRV
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The Center for Voting and Democracy
6930 Carroll Ave
Ste 610
Takoma Park, MD 20912 |
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The Center for Voting and Democracy is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to fair elections where every vote counts and all voters are represented. Its signature reform proposals are instant runoff voting and full representation.
If you register (for free) at Guidestar, you can inspect the tax filings of The Center for Voting and Democracy.
For their 990 (tax filing) for the year 2002 - on page 1 of 30:
It says they took in $414,297 in "public support"
It says they took in $146,016 in program revenue for a ballot service contract (see page 6 for detail) ,
on Page 23 they stated:
"We provided advice to various individuals and non-profits. We received significant compensation for these services when helping to structure and run elections for a major accounting firm
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