Hendersonville, North Carolina, used Instant Runoff Voting for its own city elections in 2007. On April 9, the city council voted 4-1 to use it again in this year’s city elections. North Carolina law lets a limited number of cities use IRV on a trial basis if they wish.
Hendersonville participated in the IRV pilot in 2007, but it was a multi seat election, with candidates only needing to get 255 of the vote to win. That is what happened – the IRV votes were never counted.
This may be the only place in the world to use a single seat election method for a multi seat contest, but their entire plan was to avoid runoffs, they didn’t really want to count those 2nd and 3rd choice votes, and they didn’t. The vote data also was never reported to the public.
Sorry, that’s 25% of the vote -threshold in Hendersonville.
As often the case, Joyce McCloy has it wrong.
Aspen (CO) in fact is also using multi-seat IRV right now in city council elections, and it has a history in various forms elsewhere too, particularly in Australia, where the ranked ballot is firmly entrenched as the way to vote.
Note that the threshold in Hendersonville is the same as it was in its previous two-round runoff system. If everyone casts two votes, then winning more than 25% of all votes amounts to winning a majority.
#3 Australia uses a single seat election method for a multi-seat contests? I thought they used STV?
The Australian senate was elected with a majoritarian IRV method for a few decades in the first half of the 20th century, then shifted to its STV system (although STV where the requirement that a valid ballot means you have to rank all candidates, leading to most voters in the senate races ticking a party box and letting the party’s ordering determine their ballot).
But ranked ballots are used for pretty much everything in Australia down ballot and in private organizations, and you see a lot of variations. One dealing with multi-seat races is described at #7 here:
http://www.aec.gov.au/About_AEC/AEC_Services/Industrial_Elections/voting.htm
So why did Australia adopt preferential voting for Senate elections in 1919?
Hendersonville’s city council bought into “Fake IRV”. You see, someone figured that they just fell off the turnip truck.
It makes no sense to use instant runoff voting for multi seat “pick two” contests. IRV is a sngle winner election method. This fake IRV would have voters “pick two” in their first round and then rank 3 more candidates. Having a threshold of 25% is even more ridiculous, given that IRV is touted by proponents of providing a majority outcome. No other place in the world has tried to use Instant Runoff Voting for multi seat contests
Worse, the 2nd and 3rd choice votes will NEVER be counted, its an empty “victory” for IRV. The only thing similar to IRV in what Hendersonville will be doing is having voters rank choices.
Since there will be no reporting of the IRV vote tallies, we will have no way to know if voters did rank the choices.
Hendersonville uses touchscreen voting machines. I personally spoke with some Hendersonville voters who voted in the 2007 IRV election. They weren’t aware that they were ranking choices. They didn’t even know there was an IRV election, and they had voted! With IRV on touchscreens, you see the contest, you pick your candidate, and then go to the next screen. There’s the same candidates again. Well, some voters assumed this was an error on their part or the machines.
IRV is extremely hard to count, and in Hendersonville, officials will be using an uncertified “work around” to tally the votes. Experts advise that this complex work around is dangerous to use in real elections.
IRV advocates are so desperate to sell IRV that they are willing to create a non IRV election method and call it IRV.
See
Monday, April 20, 2009
Mistakes Squared: North Carolina
Prompted by a reader comment, I did some research on North Carolina’s instant runoff voting pilot program, and I am simply stunned. It’s no secret that I’m not an IRV fan; it fails to fix the “spoiler” problem, it fails to help third party candidates, and it fails in a host of other ways. But what they’re doing in North Carolina goes beyond even that. They’ve actually managed to create a system that is even worse than IRV.
http://leastevil.blogspot.com/2009/04/mistakes-squared-north-carolina.html