On February 15, the Hawaii House Judiciary Committee passed HB 638, unanimously. It would provide that Hawaii use Instant Runoff Voting in special elections. Currently, Hawaii holds special elections without any procedure for parties to nominate candidates. Candidates merely qualify. This led to a 2010 special election for U.S. House in which two prominent Democrats split the normal Democratic vote, so that a Republican was elected with less than 40% of the total vote cast.
39.4%
The method specified in the Hawaii legislation could have resulted in election of Charles Djou, subject to the discretion of the election officials. Would that violate due process?
If used in San Francisco, Lynette Sweet would be supervisor for District 10.
This is at least an honest example of who benefits from IRV, and why: It’s the larger of the two major parties. They fear the occasional split vote (like occurred in this special election) which breaks their usual easy win. The smaller of the two major parties (in this case, the Republicans) will oppose, because that occasional split vote is their best chance for an electoral victory.
Third parties? Not a factor.
#2 It is also an example of trying to base the rules on a single election. In the 2010 special election, there were 14 candidates, but 11 received less than 1%. So the legislation has a provision for mass exclusion of those with less than 1% at the discretion of the election officials. Otherwise tabulation stops after four counts.
Ballots would permit 4 rankings, and the drafters may be confused between rankings and counts.
So if you stopped after 4 counts, you would eliminate the last 3 candidates, who collectively had 269 (of 171,000 votes). So then the election official could decide to use the 1% rule and eliminate the 11 also-rans in one fell swoop. This gets you down to 3 candidates after two counts, and would produce the result preferred by the supporters of the plan.
But there is no guarantee that candidates or voters would behave the same way in an IRV election. There might have been more serious candidates, or voters might have been willing to vote for less known candidates. So suddenly you have more candidates who meet the 1% threshold.
BTW, Hawaii counts undervotes and overvotes in determining the percentages of votes received by candidates. Will they do the same for exhausted ballots. Or will they change the procedures in order to produce a “majority”?
If the monarchy were to be restored none of this would be necessary! To the barricades…
Candidate/incumbent rank order replacment lists for legislative bodies = NO moronic special elections are needed.
IRV would allow for same result. IRV allows spoilers to split the votes and win. IRV will not eliminate spoilers; it actually helps them. IRV is unAmerican and undemoctratic; it hurts people with language problem and miniorities; just ask the black population in Oakland, Calif. They are now working on repealing IRV. My recommendation: work against adoption of IRV. Tony Santos, San Leandro, Calif.