On September 10, the California Senate passed AB 1294, the bill to let any city or county use Instant-Runoff Voting for elections for its own officers. This is the first time any bill has ever passed the California legislature to expand IRV or similar alternate ideas. One Republican, State Senator Tom McClintock, voted for the bill; the other 21 votes for the bill were from Democrats.
Ballot Access News
Edited By Richard Winger
Kudos to Californians for Electoral Reform and the broad coalition of organizations they pulled together for this big vote! Hope people know about CFER — a remarkable volunteer-run organization at: http://www.cfer.org/
It would be so satisfying if I could finally feel free to cast my vote for the candidate I really want to win, regardless of his standing in the polls, just because I feel he the best choice. No more fear of “wasting my vote”.
IRV can accomplish that for all of us.
And, it can be done with paper ballots, made out and counted by citizens with no cumbersome electronics involved.
Takoma Park, Maryland, votes on paper ballots and counts them by hand. That’s how it’s typically done overseas. Other places overseas like Australia and Ireland do hand-counts as well. Other places with IRV in the U.S. use optical scan ballots.
High praise to Ballot Access News for staying on top of the progress of this bill. It’s not a ballot access issue, narrowly defined, but in the long run it will contribute to this cause as well as to the closely related cause of electoral reform.
IRV is a step in the right direction, but it shouldn’t be the end game as far as alternate voting methods are concerned.
IRV fails the monotonicity criterion; that is, by ranking a candidate higher, you can cause them to lose. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotonicity_criterion#Instant-runoff_voting
In my opinion, approval voting is better than IRV and the Condorcet method is better still.
Wow, if we could all be like Takoma Park.
They had an IRV election January 2007.
http://fairvote.org/?page=200&articlemode=showspecific&showarticle=2519
Wow! They hand counted the election.
But – there were only 204 ballots cast.
What was this, a family reunion or something?
No wonder the ballots were hand counted, it would be ridiculous to even plug in the voting machine.
And, there was no “runoff” of the 2nd or 3rd choices. (Not sure if there were more choices.