On November 16, a Minnesota Public Radio/University of Minnesota poll was released, showing that 56% of Minneapolis voters say they prefer Instant Runoff Voting to the old two-round system. Minneapolis used Instant Runoff Voting for its own city elections for the first time on November 3, 2009. See this story.
Ballot Access News
Edited By Richard Winger
As the story points out, the percentage of those who favor IRV are even higher among those that actually used it! As I heard someone comment elsewhere, asking the opinion of IRV from those who didn’t vote is like asking for a movie review from someone who hasn’t seen the movie.
How will the voters react if and when a Stalin or Hitler clone is elected with an IRV mighty majority mandate ???
IRV for single offices ignores most of the data in a Place Votes Table.
Of course — the MORON pollsters do NOT ask the relevant questions in polls.
P.R. and nonpartisan A.V.
Stalin, Hitler
Stalin, Hitler
Stalin, Hitler
Son, the only 2 words I want to hear from you are “job” and “apartment”.
#3 is one more New Age pre-school jerk MORON impersonator — lurking in a rathole under a rock.
How about having the moderator stop the jerk MORON from posting any of his jerk stuff on this list ???
#1 That is not accurate. If you listen to the radio broadcast, it is 56% for those who actually voted. It was 54% against among the majority of persons who did not vote.
I can’t find any evidence that the poll was actually released, other than selective findings from the radio station that commissioned the poll.
11 of the 13 city council races had a majority winner, and the other two were within a couple of percent, such that the runners-up would have had to have a 74 to 75% plurality among transfers to overcome the deficit (eg 87%-13% with no exhausted or 74%-0% with 26% exhausted). In one race, the deficiencies in the ballot design prevented voters from expressing a 4th preference which they might have used to support the challenger.
In the mayoral race, 77% of voters voted for the incumbent. If it had been a conventional primary, the 2nd candidate to advance to the general election ballot would have done so with 10% of the vote.
So those who were polled may have been expressing opinions based on this year’s election in which a primary would have been mostly a waste of time, and in reality, even the general election was (turnout was less than 20% of registered voters).
Had it been a contested election such as the 2001 mayoral election in which no candidate had more than 34% in the primary, voters might have been more dissatisfied about not knowing the winner more than 2 weeks after the election. In 2001, turnout for the general election was twice that of 2009, and even the September 2001 primary had about 1/3 more turnout than the 2009 general election.