Los Angeles has a 15-member city council. The city held a special election on December 8 to fill the vacant 2nd district seat. Assemblymember Paul Krekorian was elected. He has pledged to support Instant Runoff Voting for Los Angeles city elections. There will now be six members of the council who support IRV.
As a result of the election, there is now a vacancy in the California Assembly, which will be filled with a special election in the spring of 2010. The district is in the eastern San Fernando Valley.
In other California news about IRV, on December 8 the city council of San Leandro (in Alameda County) voted to postpone a decision on whether to use IRV for city elections until the Oakland city council makes a final decision on using IRV in its 2010 city elections. San Leandro is a charter city so it is free to use IRV for its own elections if it wishes to. The voters of San Leandro have never expressed themselves on the matter.
IRV ignores most of the data in a place votes table.
How often will a Stalin clone and a Hitler clone be in the IRV final top 2 — with the winner claiming a IRV mighty majority mandate for TOTAL communism / fascism ???
— especially for offices like a Prez or a State governor ???
I.E. the IRV math MORON brainwashed lemmings keep going over the political cliffs.
P.R. and nonpartisan A.V.
I believe if this were a real danger, we would have seen it in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which has been using ranked choice voting for its city elections since the 1930’s.
Civilized Cambridge, Mass — home of Harvard University is rather small and AIN’T like the rest of the UNCIVILIZED U.S.A. — with dying inner cities and outer suburbs full of folks hating such inner cities.
P.R. and nonpartisan A.V.
Richard — As an FYI, San leandro in November 2000 voted to adopt a city charter amendment to replace a majority runoff election system for city council with the explicit option to use instant runoff voting when the technology is available.
5 candidates — A to E
Place Votes Table
1—–2—-3—–4—–5
A1 — zz — zz — zz — zz
B1 — zz — zz — zz — zz
C1 — zz — zz — zz — zz
D1 — zz — zz — zz — zz
E1 — E2 — zz — zz — zz
IRV IGNORES all of the zz votes and looks ONLY at the E2 votes to transfer.
i.e. initially looks at 6 of 25 = 24 percent of the place votes — a worse percentage with more candidates.
IRV especially does NOT look at the 9 zz place votes in 2nd and 3rd — especially even if ALL of the A to D zz votes in 2nd place are for E — who may just happen to be the *moderate* of the bunch — in a time of leftwing / rightwing EVIL nutcase extremist party hack candidates.
The political – social – economic CRISIS is coming in the U.S.A. which should be apparent to ANY body with even a few world history brain cells.
P.R. and A.V.
Approval would also be easier to implement in L.A. than IRV as it wouldn’t require a replacement of our current scantron-style ballots. The electorate already has some experience with limited voting for partisan central committees and IIRC some of the school boards, so “vote for as many as you like” would probably be taken in stride.
#6 Approval Voting – vote for 1 or more, highest win — for elective executive and judicial offices.
Child’s play to reprogram vote scanner machines — i.e. ignore any former limit for such offices — Vote for 1 [only], etc.
— pending major public education about head to head math — in about 10,000 years IF humans survive.
P.R. for legislative offices.
I’m an Australian. Australia adopted IRV (we call it preference voting) for federal government elections in 1918. I’ve never voted in an election using anything other than IRV. It isn’t perfect but in my view it does offer a better form of representative democracy than simple first past the post systems. Although for forming a legislature the system which is most represenative of the people would be one based on sortition instead of elections.