San Francisco uses Instant Runoff Voting for most of its city elections. The city chooses a Mayor on November 8. Benenson Strategy Group, a pollster, went to the trouble to simulate the Instant Runoff Voting system in its poll. See this story. The poll shows that after a specified number of rounds, the incumbent Mayor, Ed Lee, has majority support. The poll didn’t reveal how many rounds were needed to produce this result. After just the first round, Lee had 31% support. Thanks to Rob Richie for the link.
Ballot Access News
Edited By Richard Winger
IRV for single offices = THE method to elect Stalin or 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
With IRV, M loses. S has a mighty mandate of 50-49.
How many times will a Stalin and Hitler clone be in the final top 2 ???
Only the mere survival of human life on Mother Earth may be at stake — i.e. some LUNATIC KILLER robot party hack in control of WMD.
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Pending head to head math — Approval Voting.
Hmmm. Who has a mere 99 votes in 1st plus 2nd place in the above ???
I don’t believe the poll.
It claims that Lee had 31% of 1st preferences, but no serious contender had more than 8%. If we assume that there are 8 serious contenders who each received 8% then that would total 95% of the vote (unless there were non-serious contenders or serious non-contenders who received more than 8% of the vote, who weren’t reported because of their status, in which case the whole whole poll is discredited).
But it goes on to claim that the final 4 received 90% of the vote. Either voters were permitted to rank more than 3 candidates, which is illegal in San Francisco; or voters were prompted in a way that they would not be in an actual STV election using the Butterfly by The Bay Ballot.