California Senator Loni Hancock and Assemblymember Mike Eng have introduced bills to let counties use Instant Runoff Voting for special elections for U.S. House and state legislature. If these bills pass, they would save money for election administrators. Almost all California special elections for those offices require two rounds of voting. Although the existing law says there should be only one round when someone gets at least 50%, it is very rare for anyone in the first round of a special election to get 50%. Virtually by definition, there is no incumbent in a special election, so it is rare for anyone to get a majority in the first round.
If the U.S. House district, or the state legislative district, is in two counties, then both counties would need to agree to use Instant Runoff Voting. The bills are AB 2732 and SB 1346 They are the first bills in California to provide for Instant Runoff Voting in partisan elections. Thanks to Dave Kadlecek for the bill numbers.
If passed they MAY save money; not sure if the voting machines used in every CA county support IRV.
(Blah blah, approval and score voting better than IRV, yada yada. 😉
Dale, special elections are frequently held on days when no other election is being held. That means that equipment already owned by San Francisco and Alameda counties could well be available for rental by the county or counties administering the special election. (Counties sometimes do rent equipment from each other for other reasons.) Also, the cities of Los Angeles and Long Beach are seriously considering IRV. If adopted there, then Los Angeles — either city or county — would be buying the equipment. This is where many special elections happen.
Legislative bodies –
Candidate rank order lists for replacements during a term of office.
NO very costly special elections are needed.
Long Beach is not considering IRV. They talked about it. Went nowhere.
That’s like saying the Republicans are seriously considering the Public Option.
There’s difficulty in tallying IRV because it is not additive – you can’t just add up 2nd or 3rd choice votes – you have to reallocate and eliminate. IRV must be centrally tallied, presenting a logistical challenge as well as a systems challenge.
Maybe tallying IRV -could- be simple, but so far its a struggle
In Pierce Co Washington – their new RCV/IRV precinct scanners could not handle tallying IRV.
In Aspen CO, the voting vendor mistakenly installed the wrong counting rules (Cambridge)instead of the rules agreed upon by Aspen.
In Cary NC, in Oct 2007, election officials were unable to accurately count just counting 3,000 IRV ballots by hand
San Francisco – numerous tallying problems. For the 2007 election, they were still counting votes on Nov 16. Worse, SF uses a combo system of both optical scanners and DRE/touchscreens. In 2004 SF had major problems because of software. On top of that a flaw in the algorithm was later discovered.
Don’t forget the problems that Scotland’s new STV voting systems had. “Scottish poll probe: e-counting gets ‘hold off until safe’ verdict”. Oct 2007.
US ballots are far more complex than those in other countries.
Wouldn’t this have resulted in Audie Bock not being elected – which was because the voters had an opportunity to reevaluate Bock and the Democratic nominee Elihu Root between the special primary and the special general?
Wouldn’t this violate Article II, Section 5 of the California Constitution? What happens if a political party demands that its right to exclude members of other parties from participating in its primary be enforced?
If the 3 preference cheapy version of IRV is used, doesn’t it harm parties that have more than 3 candidates by forcing voters to guess which candidates would be nominated for the instant general election?
#5 Re: Scotland. You quote a headline of a column by Lucy Sherriff which misrepresents what the Gould Report actually did recommend. The Gould Report recommended that electronic counting (of paper ballots) continue for local (STV) elections, but that electronic voting not be introduced in 2011.
#5 Re: Scotland. You quote a headline of a column by Lucy Sherriff which misrepresents what the Gould Report actually did recommend. The Gould Report recommended that electronic counting (of paper ballots) continue for local (STV) elections, but that electronic voting not be introduced in 2011.
The use of electronic voting was a recommendation of the Arbuthnott Commission, which apparently believed it would facilitate use of open lists for the regional seats of the Scottish Parliament.
Joyce’s cherry-picked anecdotes don’t include Ireland or Australia, where they have been successfully counting IRV and STV for decades. If you have so much trouble figuring out how to count in North Carolina, why don’t you ask Burlington how they did in 2009? They got it done in barely an hour.
#5 Re: Scotland, you are mistaken. It was not the STV-PR voting system used for local government elections that caused the e-counting problems in 2007. Those problems were caused primarily by the voters’ mistakes on the combined ballot sheet used to record the two “X” votes for the AMS (= MMP) elections to the Scottish Parliament. The voters’ mistakes caused much larger numbers of ballots to be queued for adjudication than anyone had expected. Those very long queues exacerbated some problems arising in the Microsoft database software that no-one then knew existed.
There are no problems at all in counting STV-PR ballots – we now have over 100 years of experience of doing that. One problem for some US jurisdictions is that STV ballots cannot easily be “summed” in the precincts. That has never been a problem for us in the UK because we always take all of our ballots to one central counting hall for the whole of the local authority area, no matter what voting system is being used. I am aware that some US commentators attach great importance to precinct processing, but it comes down to a simple choice – do you want precinct “summability” or do you want to elect a properly representative city council?
Edinburgh, Scotland
# 10 All sorts of rotten history in the U.S.A. about stuffing ballot boxes that were out of sight.
See the recent so-called election in Iran with its central counting places – alleged counting of votes done in top secret — with — amazing — the incumbent regime winning.
The appearance of Democracy is barely hanging on in lots of regimes that are de facto EVIL party hack monarchies / oligarchies.
P.R. and A.V.
What I want to know is what the “professional investment managers” are telling their retired customers to do about their retirement income? What is being said to retirees that hold these bonds? What will the federal gov do if these start to fail? Bail them out through inflation?
I’ll paraphrase a couple of points I made in an email to Gautam Dutta, of the New America Foundation, here:
http://groups.google.com/group/electionsciencefoundation/web/gautam-dutta-letter-1
The notion that IRV will “elect a majority” winner is highly misleading. In the last mayoral election in Burlington VT, the Democrat was preferred head-to-head against every rival, but did not win. And he beat those opponents ALL by a larger margin than the Progressive beat the Republican in the final round.
Now perhaps some would counter in typical fashion (ala Rob Richie) that, “IRV ensures a majority between the final two candidates”. But in that case
1. So does this method (which, it should be obvious, is terrible):
* Voters rank the candidates.
* Two candidates are picked at random.
* The randomly chosen candidate that is preferred by a majority to the other randomly chosen candidate is declared the winner
2. Even then, you still don’t always get a majority because of “ballot exhaustion”, like we’ve seen up here in my home of San Francisco.
The claims about IRV cost savings are similarly specious.
History says those projections usually are unrealistic, and IRV ends up costing MORE money. See these links:
http://scorevoting.net/VermontIrvCost.html
http://www.instantrunoffvoting.us/costs.html
Warren Smith, who has been extensively studying voting methods for years and holds a doctorate in applied mathematics from Princeton, also notes:
Yes, one round is cheaper and easier than two, but with IRV, that one round is more complicated and it cannot be done on ordinary “dumb totalizing” voting machines, whereas both rounds in delayed runoff can be done with such machines; and IRV is non-additive (no such thing as “precinct subtotals”) and non-monotonic; and the second round in delayed runoff often does not happen. (Top-two runoff also is non-monotonic, but each of its two rounds, in isolation, of course is monotonic.) In view of those facts, it is not at all clear to us that IRV actually saves money. And in any event, the money spent on elections is negligible compared to other government expenditures, so it is more important to get quality in elections, than to save money. Thus “saving” money would be a false economy that surely would actually cost more in bad government than it saved in election expenditures. For example (2006), a pro-IRV group was recently arguing that Oakland California should switch to IRV because each runoff election under the old delayed-runoff scheme cost Oakland “hundreds of thousands of dollars,” which was their way of saying $200,000. However, they did not mention that Oakland’s annual budget is over $1 billion so that the “cost savings” they were lobbying for was of order 0.02% fractionally. Surely there are superior ways to save Oakland’s money! Also they did not mention that it cost (neighboring, comparable size) San Francisco $1,600,000 to upgrade its voting machines to run IRV two years before. So the payback time required to justify this cost “savings,” as you can see, would be very large, perhaps 30-40 years assuming elections every 2 years and runoffs required half the time. Quite probably Oakland would be re-replacing its machines before that time, in which case the costs never would be repaid.
— http://scorevoting.net/HonestRunoff.html (specifically, see point #3)
Score Voting (aka Range Voting) and Approval Voting are far simpler and superior, especially with regard to tactical voting (since most voters use the strategy of maximially opposing the front-runners according to their preference, rather than maximally supporting their overall favorite candidate(s)).
There are records of 61 special elections since 1989 on the SOS web site, 25 assembly, 20 senate, and 16 congressional seats.
20 of the 61 were resolved in the primary (33% is not very rare).
26 of the 61 (43%) could plausibly have had a different result under an IRV election, including 3 of the elections that were resolved by the primary (when all candidates are from the same party, a majority is not required).
All California implementations of IRV to date have restricted voters to at most expressing 3 rankings. California special elections often have numerous candidates from major parties. The 1993 congressional special election to replace Leon Panetta had 26 candidates, including 11 Democrats and 10 Republicans. If rankings are limited to 3 choices, partisan voters may not all transfer to the party favorite, though typically there is a clear favorite from a party. Voters may have to guess who will do well if they want their vote to be counted.
SB 1346 would let county supervisors decide whether or not to use IRV after the vacancy occurs.
Under current law, the governor is required to call a special election within 14 days of the vacancy. Under SB 1346, county election officials have 30 days to decide whether or not to use IRV, and only then may the governor call the election. Because of this delay, IRV special elections may not actually fill the vacancy much sooner than the current system, and will take longer in those cases (33%) where a winner is determined in the special primary.
Worse, if county election officials decide not to use
IRV, or make no active choice, then the governor’s call will be delayed. And since the timing of the special election is based on when the governor calls the election, the special election will occur later than under current law when IRV is not used.
So you have the possibility of the county supervisors making a political decision on the use of IRV, based on who may run; there will be a delay in the election schedule even when IRV is not used; and candidates may have pressure put on them to not run if IRV is adopted.
SB 1346 requires that a voter be able to rank all candidates. However, it permits the SOS to make an exception if the voting equipment can not feasibly accommodate that many choices. But this introduces a chicken-and-egg problem. The county supervisors can not make a determination anticipating how the SOS will act, since the language is permissive with respect to the decision by the SOS, and the number of candidates will not be known until after the filing deadline.
So what happens when the SOS decides not to permit deficient voting equipment to be used?