On February 2, the Rules Committee of the Pierce County Council voted 2-1 to repeal ranked choice voting in county elections. If the full Council approves the measure, then the voters would be asked whether they wish to amend the County Charter to make this change. See this newspaper story.
Pierce County is a populous county that includes Tacoma. It used ranked choice voting for the first time in November 2008.
Any reasoning given? If this does succeed it would be definietly be a blow to IRV adovcates like myself.
Is ranked choice the same as IRV? Or is it that top two system used in Washington?
It is indeed IRV, just by a different alias.
The WA Top Two system is not IRV aka RCV. It is composed of a primary election, and a separate general election with only the top two canidiates who received the most votes in the primary election on the ballot.
If WA instead used Ranked Choice Voting, they could have a single election with all the candidates listed on the ballot, and ensure that the winner received a majority of the vote. No primary election necessary.
I’m also interested in hearing the reasoning. Between this and the top two system, it seems that WA officials are rather hostile to (good) electoral reform.
As usual — IRV ignores most of the votes in a place votes table.
Result — if the moderate middle is divided, then some Stalin or Hitler clones WILL BE elected and claim IRV mighty majority *mandates* for their EVIL stuff (aka *changes*).
Pending major public education (if that is possible with the rotted public schools aka Skools) regarding head to head math, then Approval Voting for executive / judicial offices.
Vote for 1 or more, highest win.
IRV or ranked choice is a very bad idea.
It sounds good on paper to the simple minded.
Actually, it does not result in getting the people’s first choice. It is another system for choosing a winner, but it ignores the real preferences of the voters and creates an artificial system that makes it impossible for some voters to make their real preferences known. It precludes outcomes that are possible and preferable to voters in a primary and general election system.
Finally, although it is a simplistic system and does not achieve the goals its advoctes claim, it is at the same time too complicated for about half of all voters to utilize, causing them to be intellectually disenfranchised.
Perhaps that’s the general plan. At least 80% of the general public is too dumb to vote anyway, they are totally clueless about the issues. Perhaps the IRV supporters want to confuse and obfuscate the electoral process to make it easier for the socialists to bamboozle their way to victory.
IRV or ranked choice is a very bad idea.
It sounds good on paper to the simple minded.
Actually, it does not result in getting the people’s first choice. It is another system for choosing a winner, but it ignores the real preferences of the voters and creates an artificial system that makes it impossible for some voters to make their real preferences known. It precludes outcomes that are possible and preferable to voters in a primary and general election system.
Finally, although it is a simplistic system and does not achieve the goals its advoctes claim, it is at the same time too complicated for about half of all voters to utilize, causing them to be intellectually disenfranchised.
Perhaps that’s the general plan. At least 80% of the general public is too dumb to vote anyway, they are totally clueless about the issues. Perhaps the IRV supporters want to confuse and obfuscate the electoral process to make it easier for the s o c i a l i s t s to bamboozle their way to victory.
LP, Although IRV or RCV is not the end all, it is the introduction to accepting and implenting other forms of ranked voting (approval, condorcet, etc.).
The argument that people won’t understand how to use ranked voting is getting old. Most if not all the places IRV has been enacted, a voter education program was previously established for that purpose.
Regardless of the voter education, if people don’t know how to rank, then what hope is there that we’ll adopt the other forms of ranked voting?
The Pierce County political leaders have been uncomfortable with ranked choice voting from the get-go. It was put directly on the ballot by a charter commission in 2006, when it won, and the county council in 2007 quickly put measures on the ballot to repeal it and delay it in 2007 — voters kept it and kept it on schedule by a two-to-one margin.
Last year, an independent won the county-assessor race in an upset. In addition, by eliminating the partisan primary, ranked choice voting cuts the amount of donations that the biggest donors can give in a year in half — incumbents don’t like that either. Finally, they are playing up the costs of implementing RCV, but those costs have already been done — it will save money in 2009.
I suspect Pierce County voters will keep it going with another slap in the face of political insiders trying to limit their choices in November.
The Pierce County election officials included a survey in their mail ballots. 2/3 of those who returned the survey indicated they were opposed to IRV.
Pierce County in part adopted IRV in response to the elimination of the blanket primary, the ill-advised veto of the Top 2 primary legislation by Gov. Gary Locke, and the long court challenges after the People of Washington overwhelmingly voted for Top 2. Now that the US Supreme Court has affirmed the constitutionality of the Top 2 primary (kudos to Sam Reed and Rob McKenna), there is no particular advantage to the use of IRV. The open-to-all-citizens-and-candidates primary will be in August, with the general election deciding the winner in November.
Pierce County used its IRV in conjunction with the presidential and gubernatorial elections, using a optical scan system designed for a FPTP election. The traditional ballot has 3 columns which are used for different races, and are intended to be visually separate and distinct (one problem in Florida 2004 was optical scan ballots in which the presidential candidates were split between two columns).
So in Pierce County, voters were forced to switch from reading down the columns to reading across the columns, as they were presented 3 separate “elections” each with a complete list of candidates and parties. They were also limited to 3 preferences. There were huge numbers of voters who did not express a 2nd or 3rd preference.
There were 3 races where the leading candidate did not have a majority of 1st preferences.
One was a district race where excluding write-in votes, the leading candidate was one vote short of a majority, so it was really a trivial case for ranked voting. If it would have been counted in a traditional manner, it might have only been necessary to redistribute the 65 write-in votes (0.16%).
In the race for the executive officer there were 4 candidates: 2 Democrats, 1 Republican, and 3 party candidate (Executive Excellence party). The 3rd party candidate was eliminated first, with 24% not having a 2nd preference. At this point the Democrats collectively had a 50,000 vote lead. After the last place Democrat candidate was eliminated, and his votes redistributed, the other Democrat won by 4,000 votes, as 25% of mostly Democrat voters did not express a preference between the Republican and the other Democrat. Basically, IRV almost cost the Democrats an election that they most likely would have won under a blanket primary, a pick-a-party primary, or a Top 2 primary.
Since Pierce County permits the political parties to determine who may use their party labels, I would suspect that in the future, Democrats would prevent more than one candidate from running, so the IRV election would degenerate to a ranking of two hand-picked candidates selected by party insiders and perhaps a minor party or independent candidate.
The 3rd race was a wide-open, non-partisan 6-candidate race for County Assessor-Treasurer, with 1st preferences split 25.02%, 19.16%, 19.06%, 19.00%, 10.94%, and 6.42%. After 4 rounds, the final result was 37.4%, 36.4%, and 27.9% exhausted or overvoted (and this ignores the 16% of voters who skipped the whole race – perhaps because it was on the same ballot page as the county executive race). 53% of voters for the last eliminated candidate either did not express a continuing preference or were prevented from doing so.
The wide scattering of transfers suggest that voters were picking preferences almost at random, and in any case may have been prevented from expressing preferences which may have had an effect on the outcome. Had the election been conducted under a traditional non-partisan primary followed by a runoff if needed, voters could have concentrated on which candidate they preferred most in the first election. And then made a 2nd choice between two finalists in the general election.
Because most Pierce County voters voted by mail, and Washington accepts ballots based on their postmark, valid ballots continued to be received after the election. Since all ballots must be counted before transfers can be determined in an IRV election, the election was anything but instant. If preliminary runs were done, there could be dramatically different outcomes based on the order of eliminations. Instead of announcing that Candidate A led by 2% but with lots of votes yet to be counted, you could have a report that candidate B appeared to lead candidate A by a 60-40 margin after all transfers had been made, followed by a later report that candidate A had defeated candidate C by 5%. Such dramatic changes would likely lead to loss of confidence in the system by voters.
#10 Rational States require absentee ballots to get to the regime NOT later than election day — regardless of the U.S. Postal Snail.
WA is one more IRRATIONAL State doing its stuff — par for the course in the New Age mystification of everything related to elections by the EVIL MORONS in control of regimes.