On March 17, the Minnesota Supreme Court granted expedited review in the case on whether the Minnesota Constitution permits Instant Runoff Voting. A lower court had ruled on January 13, 2009, that nothing in the State Constitution prevents cities from using IRV for their own elections. Opponents of IRV had then appealed. The State Supreme Court wants the brief of opponents submitted by March 27, and the brief of supporters of IRV to be submitted by April 6. The case is Minnesota Voters Alliance v City of Minneapolis, A09-182.
Any lawyers with ANY brains able to detect that IRV for a single office ignores most of the votes in a place votes table ???
How many Stalin/Hitler type extremeists WILL BE elected via IRV and claim a mighty IRV majority *mandate* to cause death and destruction ???
P.R. legislative and Approval Voting executive/judicial NOW.
OK, someone was telling me that it is false that IRV makes recounts less likely. Is that true?
IRV makes so much sense in Minnesota because it regularly has multi-party electoral choices in key races, with winners fall well short of half the vote.
In 2008, the state may well have eliminated the need for the statewide recount, as that recount was focused on less than 83% of votes cast (the rest for third party candidates and independents)and, with IRV, the remaining 17% may well have tipped it clearly to Franken or Coleman. But that’s not always going to be the math.
On the legal side of this, IRV repeatedly has been upheld in courts — and the lower court ruling here was a slam-dunk affirmation of its legality.
Under IRV there could be more recounts because there can be several close decision points. If you have 5 candidates, the order of the 3rd, 4th, and 5th candidates could change the result of the election. And even in a case like Minnesota with two major candidates, and a somewhat trailing 3rd party candidate, there is no guarantee that the transfers from the 3rd party candidate won’t make the final result closer, rather than more decisive.
And there may be more ambiguous expressions of voter intent on a preference ballot. For example, in Burlington, VT; about 0.1% of voters expressed a 1st and 5th preference (among 5 candidates), but no 2nd, 3rd, or 4th.
If a voter voted:
[1] Beef
[ ] Chicken
[ ] Pork
[5] Tofu
[ ] Veal
Does that mean that they want Tofu, if Beef is not available; or does it mean that in no uncertain teams they don’t want Tofu? Or does it mean that we can’t even be sure that the voter can count to 2?
An ordinary senate runoff would have been completed in Minnesota several months ago.
Jim – one needs to have standard rules for dealing with ambiguous ballots in any system. The standard rule with IRV is that if you miss a ranking, the ballot stops before the skipped ranking. Sometimes the rule is to allow one skipped ranking (e.g, if 1st, 3rd, 4th, then you do treat the 3rd as a second).
There’s a reason we have so few runoffs in the U.S. — great costs to taxpayers, nearly double the costs for running for office if you’re in the runoff, doubling of what wealthy people can give their favorite candidates and a typical big drop in turnout.
IRV is pushing its way through the inertia of our system so we can have a national norm that accommodates voter choice. Minnesota is one of the states leading the way.
The reason that there are ambiguities under IRV is that the motivation for filling out preferences varies so much. A voter may be compulsive; he might believe that completing the ballot is required; he may not understand how the ballot will be counted and is expressing some other value system; he may not have a sincere preference among some candidates.
Conventional runoffs permit voters to take a second look at just the two final candidates, and make a determination between them. It is simply the way that decisions are customarily made. IRV is simply a gratuitous expedient.
The reason we have so few runoffs in the US is not because of the great cost to the taxpayers.
In the top of the ballot races in Louisiana (for senator or governor) turnout for the runoff was quite comparable to the general election. In the case of the Edwards-Duke runoff, it was up about 10%.
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