1. They’re not really pushing for IRV in Santa Monica. Their city council elections have 3 or 4 winners at a time. We should get into the practice of saying ranked choice voting to avoid this kind of confusion. They are calling their campaign “ranked voting,” which is also fine.

2. I have long been interested in acquiring some real-world data on how the various ranked choice methods work in practice. I am suspicious of IRV, and like the Condorcet tallying method better, but I admit that my preference is little more than a hunch at this point; I also know there are some other ranked-choice/multiple-preference methods out there.

   It strikes me that, if jurisdictions could adopt some form of ranked choice voting, and published the raw ballots, we could tally with several methods simultaneously, and see whether the diffence in method led to noticeably different outcomes. After a few major elections, we might be able to tell which method tended to lead to a result that was more indicative of the broad public consensus, or at least we could recognize the electoral circumstances which would cause each method to favor some candidates over others.

   I believe that San Francisco is committed to publishing the raw ballot data in its local IRV contests; their results may definitely provide some insight. But it would be nice to get useful data from statewide or national contests, as well, or at least from elections in other municipalities.

   I hope more communities jump to some form of ranked preference voting, along with a commitment to publish the raw ballot data, so that someday, we can settle on a tallying method after sufficient experience, and with eyes wide open concerning strengths and vulnerabilities of the favored system.

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