On December 4, the results of an exit poll in Hendersonville, North Carolina, were released. Hendersonville has used Instant Runoff Voting for its last two city elections. The State Board of Elections funded an exit poll to ask Hendersonville voters if they like IRV or not. Here are the results. One link within the press release lead to the full results. Another leads to the questionaire. The results are based on responses from 322 voters. Henderson is in the western end of the state.
Were the folks asked about the FACT that IRV ignores most of the data in a place votes table ??? Duh.
P.R. and A.V.
A minor correction: Hendersonville is in Henderson County, but Henderson is a different town NE of Durham. We have this amusing habit here of having cities and counties with the same name being in completely different parts of the state. Durham city actually being in Durham County, for example, is an anomaly.
I’d like to see some attempt at Single Transferable Vote, STV!
I’m with you Jordon. Any time you can have at large seats you should, and then make it single transferable vote. ALL single member seat voting systems are non proportional. ALL. That cannot be repeated enough. And a large number of votes go towards electing no one (or at least not towards people you’d like). An STV election with at least 5 seats, preferably, does a very nice job of getting things proportional.
It also helps to do away with the idea of the “wasted vote” syndrome as well, and could encourage people to more deeply consider third party candidates from my understanding. All around, STV seems like a wonderful system to me.
Hendersonville permitted expression of full preferences using optical scan ballots with a 3-column format. I wonder why San Francisco or Minneapolis haven’t figured that out?
As someone who’s voted in his share of runoffs, I think this would be a great idea if done statewide. It would save money and avoid runoffs were the turnout is poor to non-existent.
Jim Riley was incorrect, Hendersonville used ES&S iVotronic touchscreens for in person voting. Optical scan ballots were only used for absentee by mail voting.
Jordon Greene is incorrect in this case, in Hendersonville, the 2nd and 3rd choice votes were indeed wasted. By wasted we mean – Never Counted, never reported. Never used.
The mainstream media didn’t look at the exit poll data, they just parroted the press release sent by the pollster.
According to the actual data, only 15% of voters polled would be upset if they didn’t use IRV for council or mayor in future elections, 35% would NOT be upset and 39% DIDN’T CARE AT ALL..
In Hendersonville, only 322 people responded to the poll, but 3,367 cast votes. The election had the low turnout of 12.15 percent out of 23,790 registered voters according to the State Board of Elections website.