On May 24, the city council of Cary, North Carolina, voted 4-3 to use Instant-Runoff Voting for its city council elections on October 9. Four seats are up, two district and two at-large.
Cary’s official slogan is “The Technology Town of North Carolina.” It is near Raleigh. The town is responding to a bill passed last year that permits any ten cities or counties use IRV to elect their own officials. Cary expects to save $62,000, since it will not need to hold an old-fashioned run-off in November 2007.
Good flag on this, Richard. Cary’s numbers are rising quickly — more than 100,000 people. They seem eager to make this work well, as it has in other cities adopting IR (see http://www.fairvote.org/irv)
If reader know other cities that might be up for using IRV this fall, send a note to irv@fairvote.org
This is really unfortunate, considering that IRV increases the rate of spoiled ballots, and impedes the necessary switch to 100% hand-counted paper ballots. IRV’s complexity is conducive to the use of (electronic!) voting machines, the fraudster’s best friend. And IRV ultimately degrades toward plurality voting – because voters are strategically “forced” to top-rank their favorite front-runner, not necessarily their favorite candidate. See http://rangevoting.org/TarrIrv.html
The use of better simpler voting methods, namely Range Voting and its simplified form Approval Voting, would help reduce spoiled ballots, and eliminate the third-party spoiler effect, and pick better winners, and would simplify the abandonment of voting machines.
Shentrup is wrong about voting equipment, as he so often is about this issue. If he spent a tenth of his time actually working to promote range voting that he spends trashing IRV (watch out if you ever get on the end of the phone for one of his 20-minute monologues), who knows, maybe he might get something useful done.
IRV has been used on paper ballots with hand-counts in all kinds of elections, including right now in Takoma Park, Maryland. On optical scan in Burlington, VT, the valid ballot rate was 99.9%. In San Francisco, it was 99.6%. And he’s simply absurd to suggest that IRV degrades to plurality voting and turn around and suggest approval voting, which is MUCH more likely to do so.
For more on issues with range voting that should trouble Clay more than they do, see http://www.fairvote.org/rangevoting
I know that the state of North Carolina was wanting a couple cities to try this out as a canary. They were trying to get my city to do it but the local NAACP protested cause they thought this was some way to disenfranchise blacks. Maybe they thought blacks were too stupid to figure out IRV. That is their implied position, not mine.
Cary is a predominantly white city made up of a lot of transplanted northerners. City is very rich but has a reputation for being very heavy-handed and the city as far as its laws is a bit of a homeowner’s association on steroids.
I am an aspiring northern transplant current living south of Indianapolis in a town that is lax on enforcement. As a result many yards are virtual carlots and bikers increasingly dominate the landscape. From what I have seen, a city that is a homeowners association on steroids sounds like a town that understands the implications of an increasingly bifurcated society! Make room for one more Yankee please.
I was just in Indianapolis for the race. Indy is much nicer than Cary.
If you want laws that mandate no neon signs and the most inane City Council ever created in the sun that will sue a person if they leave their car outside, move to a fascist country.