On April 20, the Honolulu city council passed a resolution, urging the Hawaii legislature not to pass HB 638, the bill to use Instant Runoff Voting in special elections. It is ironic that the resolution was initiated by the member of the city council who was elected in a special election and who got only 14% of the vote. It is also telling that one city councilmember praised the 2005 election in Iraq, because that election used Proportional Representation. See this story.
HB 638 has passed both houses of the Hawaii legislature and is in conference committee on April 21.
Are they scared of third party candidates?
Do you mean the Honolulu city council? No, I don’t think so. Honolulu has non-partisan city elections.
IRV = THE method to elect Stalin/Hitler clones when the mystified muddled Middle is divided.
34 S–M–H
33 H–M–S
16 M–S–H
16 M–H–S
99
—-
P.R. — used in most of the *civilized* free world.
DARK AGE gerrymanders in the U.K., Canada, U.S.A., India due to the Brits — with the resulting worse and worse extremist politics.
The top party hack robot New Age Donkeys and Elephants do NOT like each other
— with both top groups being suicidal powermad — undeclared wars, insane accumulated national debts, insane annual deficits, stunt projects, etc.
P.R. and nonpartisan App.V. — before it is too late.
@Vaughn
You think IRV helps elect third-party candidates? It doesn’t.
The Republicans, being the 2nd largest party in Hawaii, are against it because their best chance of winning elections is when two Democrats split the vote. Since the assumption is all Democratic voters will rank all Democratic candidates above all Republican candidates, IRV removes “hope for vote-splitting” as a viable Republican strategy.
And in states where the Democrats are the 2nd largest party, they are the ones who oppose IRV.
But IRV doesn’t help third parties at all. Where IRV has been adopted, the only third parties who have won are the ones who were ALREADY winning elections under first-past-the-post. San Francisco: one Green on the board before IRV, one Green after. Burlington, VT (which has since eliminated IRV): Progressives first won the mayoral election in 1989 (earlier if you count Bernie Sanders as a Progressive.) I could go on.
The main reason IRV helps minor parties is that it removes the incentive for Democratic and Republican state legislators to pass ballot access laws that keep minor parties and independent candidates off the ballot. Major party legislators do this because they are terrified of “spoilers”. Having IRV in place eliminates that.
Richard Winger is Un-American!
What happens when a Stalin/Hitler clone is elected via IRV to be a Prez, Guv, Mayor, etc. ???
END of freedom ??? Duh.
Doesn’t matter if you kill them when they file for their candidacy, or if you kill them when you tally the votes. They’re still dead. Neither way actually helps 3rd parties win.
And actually, IRV doesn’t even eliminate spoilers. As long as Al Gore (or Democrats like him) lives, IRV won’t help the Green party win an election, even if they manage to get more votes than the Democrats:
4 voters: R > D > G
Al Gore: D > R > G
Another Democrat: D > G > R
3 voters: G > D > R
In this example, D is preferred over R 5:4, and D is preferred over G 6:3. But who wins? R. Because G spoiled the election for D: Remove G from all ballots, and D wins.
IRV is no help. Honolulu’s REASON is wrong–IRV doesn’t violate “one person, one vote”–but they’re conclusion is correct: IRV isn’t worth the trouble.
#5 There is no difference between a conventional runoff (or a Top 2 Open Primary) and an instant runoff in that regard.
But a conventional runoff allows the voters to focus on the leading candidates, and to consider endorsements of the candidate that a voter originally favored. IRV often leaves voters guessing and simply marking their ballot at random.
In the November 2010 District 10 Board of Supervisors race in San Francisco, 20% of IRV ballots were irregularly marked.
#9 — Jim suggests massive voter problems with ranked choice ballots, but it’s deceptive. For example, San Francisco, also had at-large races last year, for three seats on its school boards – a very common method of voting in the US that folks like Jim don’t seem to spend much time criticizing. But in the San Francisco precints with contested IRV races last year, there was a higher percentage of invalidating overvotes in the school board races than in the IRV races. Furthermore, Jim doesn’t mention how many of the the irregularly marked ballots didn’t count, but the great majority of them did.
He may have been listening too much to another IRV hater named Terry Reilly. Reilly has been spreading lots of highly deceptive information, using a range of names, sometimes even his own. (As an FYI, last year he apparently pretended to be a volunteer who wanted to help IRV advocates out in Burlington, Vermont and this year he allegedly pretended to be a potential big donor to the Fort Collins IRV campaign, both times seeking and indeed getting inside information — nice company for the IRV haters to keep, if it’s indeed true.) Reilly likes to suggest that IRV disenfranchises Oakland voters and makes videos and presents testimony about how low-income, mostly African American precincts had higher rates of voter error than whiter, richer neighborhoods. But what Reilly fails to mention is that these lower-income neighborhoods had a HIGHER rate of ballots counting in the final round than the richer neighborhoods — and that his (and Jim Reilly’s) preferred system of June first rounds that limit the field to two have electorates that are heavily whiter, wealthier and older than November electorates.
Meanwhile, you have Dale Sheldon-Hess going on about the worthlessness of IRV. What he really should be for is proportional representation to expand the spectrum of representation, which is what most IRV advocates like me are for legislative elections, but instead he focuses on approval voting, which has zero evidence of working well in the limited number of places where it’s been used in hotly contested elections — in fact, I’ve never seen it work well over time in races for candidates that really matter to people. Dartmouth student elections this year are the latest miserable failure for approval voting, just as it failed in Dartmouth’s alumni trustee elections and was voted out 82% to 18%.
Onward to get some real work done!
Hi Rob, how’ve you been?
Proportional representation would be great. So far, no government anywhere has ever enacted IRV and then subsequently enacted PR; instead, most places that enact IRV go back to plurality–and I’m not just talking college alumni associations, but in elections that “really matter”: Burlington, VT; Aspen, CO; Pierce County, WA.
(And no one’s fingered the voting system for why Dartmouth’s student elections were crappy this year; seems they’re pissed about a reduction in rights/powers for the council and a ballot-access scandal that kept a popular candidate out. And you may want to go look at, for instance, the Papal Conclaves (1294-1621) for an example of approval voting working. I can furnish more examples when you’re done checking that out. But I digress.)
I’d love to see PR. IRV won’t get us there.
See you around, Rob.
Good. Glad you like proportional representation and hope you do something to win it more than going around bashing IRV on the internet.
As FYI, Australia Senate started off with IRV, then went to PR. It won’t necessarily happen, as they are separate cases to be made — one is for better winner-take-all races, one is for more representative elections.
The Papal conclaves with in-person voting with a relatively small number of people voting in repeated rounds as a meaningful example of how approval voting might work in major elections? Please. Keep digging.
What sayeth IRV lovers about the clear and present DANGER in #3 ???
Sorry – NOT ***ALL*** IRV elections will have some *moderate* in the final 2 top positions.
But of course this is the New Age of Math MORONS — with quick fixes for everything — IRV, NPV, provisional votes, etc. etc.
#10 I notice that Rob Richie does not dispute the fact that 20% of ballots in 2010 District 10 race were irregularly marked.
Instead, he launches into personality attacks and obfuscation and misdirection. Of what relevance is it whether “persons like Jim” spend a great deal of time, or no time at all criticizing the at-large election of the board of education in San Francisco, even if it is a “very common method of voting in the US?” I’m looking for some substance here, but all I can find in Rob Richie’s comments are soap bubbles.
Does Rob Richie really believe that it is OK for 20% of ballots in the 2010 SD 10 election to have been irregularly marked, because “persons like Jim” don’t “seem” to spend much time criticizing at-large elections?
But we’ll go ahead and fact check Richie’s assertion.
In Supervisor Districts 2, 6, 8, and 10, there were 1005 ballots with first preference overvotes. In those same districts there were 374 over voted ballots in the Board of Education race. That is 2.69 times as many in the Board of Supervisors race. I excluded Supervisor District 4, since Carmen Chu was unopposed.
Moreover, there were 5.32 times as many first preference overvotes in the Board of Supervisor race SD 10 as there were on Board of Education ballots; and 3.03 times as many as in SD 6. Only in SD 8 were there fewer Board of Supervisor overvotes than Board of Education overvotes. But in SD 8, there were only 4 supervisor candidates.
Rob Richie is simply wrong, just as he is when he claims that voter turnout in San Francisco in 2005 was due to IRV, or when he divides the number of statewide races over a 7-year period by 6 to get a per-year average.
(as an aside, when San Francisco was considering electing its school board, the League of Women Voters argued that appointed boards were essential to a democracy).
Lots of New Age voters can barely understand that 2 is more than 1 — due to the EVIL rotted to the core public schools.
i.e. putting an X or 1 in a box is a MAJOR event.
P.R. and App.V. – before it is too late.
@ Richard
The vote splitting in IRV can be a little harder to see than voting splitting under Plurality because IRV is a more complicated system. True, IRV does mitigate spoilers when those candidates get small amounts of support. But the story changes when those irrelevant losing candidates get more support. IRV still splits votes because the first-choice votes split. And that can split the first-choice votes of the most popular candidate so that they get eliminated.
And this vote splitting has happened in real elections. This happened in the 1992 Louisiana Gubernatorial runoff election where the incumbent governor had his votes split. This would have likely been the same with IRV because the election was between only three candidates. It’s clear this vote splitting happened because polls showed the incumbent as soundly defeating his opponents in one-on-one match-ups. (See here: http://rangevoting.org/LizVwiz.html)
This vote splitting also happened in the Burlington, VT election. There, the Republican candidate split the vote. Albeit, it’s strange to think of the Republican as a third-party candidate. But a Republican indeed played the role in that election. (See here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKCWNNYOOkw)
This vote splitting can be a little tricky to see on the first look. And even then, we don’t always have all the information from IRV ballots to see what’s going on. I’ve used a visual aid using an application created by Ka-Ping Yee to demonstrate this. (See here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQxlM-P6ONs)
@14. Don’t know where you’re getting your data on San Francisco, Jim, but check it again. There were 1,122 overvotes in the Board of Education race in District 2,6,8 and 10… As to your concerns about ballot errors, note that the great majority of such errors don’t keep a ballot from counting. In Oakland’s mayoral race, for example, more than 70% of the “ballot error” ballots counted in every round of counting in that election.
So sure, I’d like fewer ballot errors, just as I’d like higher voter turnout. But It’s important to look at the whole picture, and your preferred system of June first rounds to eliminate almost all candidates has serious issues involving voter turnout disparity and sometimes-perverse dynamics from cutting a field to two in one cut.
As to the 2005 SF analysis, we’ve never said that IRV “caused” the November 2005 turnout. What we’ve said is that the winner in the instant runoff round in that year’s citywide race won with a far greater number of votes than he would have in a December runoff — e.g, IRV allowed the winner to be determined in a single high turnout election.
@16: For Aaron Hamlin, the Republican in the 2009 mayoral elections is a “spoiler” despite almost winning the final election? Few people are going to see it that way — certainly his voters wouldn’t have been happy if the most weakly supported of the three major candidates e had defeated him…. As to Ka-Ping’s simulations, they are __highly __misleading as they assume that voters will all vote like computers with approval voting. They’ll bullet vote, just like they largely did in the election for president in Dartmouth’s recent first-use of approval voting – a true failure of an election, where the the only candidate on the ballot just cleared 40% of votes, barely beating several write-ins who split the majority vote. Hope Aaron and other approval voting enthusiasts take a look at that election.