On January 12, the city manager of Berkeley, California, sent a letter to the city manager of San Leandro, California, indicating that Berkeley will use Instant Runoff Voting for its own city elections this year. There will be no June primary. Instead, the only city election will be in November 2010. The letter was sent to San Leandro because San Leandro is pondering whether to also use IRV this year.
Berkeley and San Leandro are both charter cities, so they are free to decide this matter for their own elections. Cities in California that are not charter cities do not have that freedom. The voters of Berkeley voted in 2006 to use IRV whenever the vote-counting equipment was ready, and a few weeks ago the Secretary of State certified the vote-counting machines used in Alameda County for that purpose. Oakland, Berkeley and San Leandro are all in Alameda County.
Berkeley holds its city elections in November. At one time any runoff was in December, but in 2006 another charter change was approved that changed the victory threshold to a 40% plurality and set the runoff for February. Since Berkeley switched to single-member districts, there has never been a race where the leading candidate failed to get 40%, and most of the non-majority cases were immediately after the switch to single-member districts. Since the 2006 charter change, there has been one non-majority election, and under the current charter no runoff was held.
The Berkeley charter also requires that the Berkeley city council determine that “instant runoff elections will not result in additional City election costs”, before they are implemented. Perhaps Alameda County has certified that any additional costs or overruns will be charged back to Oakland and San Leandro.
IRV is a FRAUD.
IRV ignores most of the data in a place votes table.
How often will Stalin and Hitler clones be in the final top 2 if IRV is used (after middle *moderates* get wiped out) — especially in extreme times such as NOW ???
Never say/write *never*.
P.R. and nonpartisan A.V.
Jim @1, The city is obligated to budget for runoff elections even though they might not happen in any given year. The text of the findings made by the city council when it adopted the ordinance implementing the 2004 charter amendment can be found here (page 2-3). It contains an explicit recognition that runoffs are not always required as part of the comparison of immediate and long-term costs.