On November 3, the voters of St. Paul voted in favor of using Instant Runoff Voting for future city elections. On November 4, opponents of IRV filed a lawsuit to overturn the election results. They claimed that supporters of IRV had said that President Barack Obama and the League of Women Voters supported the St. Paul measure, and that therefore the election should be overturned.
When President Obama was a State Senator, he supported IRV in the Illinois legislature. The League of Women Voters has supported IRV in other states. But, President Obama and the League of Women Voters didn’t specifically endorse the St. Paul measure. See this story.
Pro IRV. Sure they know exactly what they are doing.
St Paul Better Ballots broke the law by sending out campaign mailers claiming the endorsement of St Paul LWF, Minnesota DFL party, and President Barack Obama.
The St Paul LWV publicly asked St Paul “Better Ballots” to correct their material and LWV Publicly stated they did not offer an endorsement.
Better Ballots can’t claim an endorsement unless they have written permission to do so, according to Minnesota state law:
211B.02 FALSE CLAIM OF SUPPORT.
A person or candidate may not knowingly make, directly or indirectly, a false claim stating or implying that a candidate or ballot question has the support or endorsement of a major political party or party unit or of an organization. A person or candidate may not state in written campaign material that the candidate or ballot question has the support or endorsement of an individual without first getting written permission from the individual to do so.
So many of the claims favoring IRV tend to be either false, inaccurate, misleading or plain wrong.
Worse, Instant runoff voting really screws up election transparency because IRV cannot be tallied at the polling places, you have to haul the ballots off to a central location. In between anything can happen to the ballots, and there is no reason to be confident in the outcome of the election. IRV requires a complex algorithm that is not understandable by the average person.
If IRV is so good, then tell the truth about it – The US has the most complex ballots in the world. Australia can do IRV because they have from 1 to 2 contests on a paper ballot, easily sorted but still complex to aggregate the results. And Australians are forced to rank all choices, even if they don’t have a choice.
IRV is blatantly defective since it does NOT use ALL of the data in a Place Votes Table.
How often will a Stalin or Hitler clone get elected using IRV ???
It only takes ONCE for a Prez Stalin or Hitler clone.
P.R. and nonpartisan A.V. — regardless of ALL IRV math MORONS.