Saturday, October 16, 2010

Instant Runoff Voting - yet ANOTHER majority failure!!!

I wondered when someone would set up a "demonstration", "mock" or "fake" IRV election.  Kudos to Mike Ashe for doing it - because it showed the major problem with IRV:  It doesn't deliver majority winners!  In fact, in a 13-way IRV race, the winner had only 4% more votes than in the 2004 Supreme Court race that IRV replaced.

In instant-runoff race, your third vote's a charm

Published Sat, Oct 16, 2010 05:43 AM

Modified Sat, Oct 16, 2010 05:44 AM
In a field of 13 candidates, Abraham Lincoln edged Thomas Jefferson 27-26, but that was beside the point.
Wait, I thought that the whole point of IRV was to elect a candidate with majority support? 
Rather, the contest that Durham County Elections Director Mike Ashe staged the other day was meant to demonstrate a new twist in this fall's state elections: "instant-runoff voting."

"It's not complicated," Ashe said.
Oh no?  Did you ask anyone who witnessed the counting?  Sorry I wasn't able to be there, but I was a little under the weather that night.   
It's not that simple, either - as evidenced by the special voters guide the state elections board mailed out last week and the how-to fliers that will be posted in voting booths on Election Day. For those who count the votes, as well as those who cast them, the race for a seat on the state Court of Appeals is going to be a new experience.
Yes - I was first in line on Thursday at 8:30 AM when Early Voting started in Wake County at the BOE HQ.  Other than me, my buddy Paul (7 times around the "Ring") Collins, and a Teabagger who claimed that he was the victim of voter fraud in 2008, none of the other 30 people in line even knew they were expected to rank their choices (90%).  And when I explained IRV to them, they all gave me that "what the hell are you talking about" look. 

Oh yes - IRV is as simple as "1-2-3"! 
In that election there are 13 candidates, all listed in three columns side by side, and voters vote three times.
That is a good experiment - duplicates the 13-way Court of Appeals race.  
"You vote in column one for the person you want the mostest," Ashe said, "in column two for the second best, in column three for the person you can live with."
What if you can't live with any of the other candidates, or you don't have enough information to make that decision? 
Eventually, one candidate ends up with a majority, sort of.
"Sort of" a majority doesn't even begin to get close! 
Here's how:

Ashe's demonstration started with 13 candidates "running" for favorite president and 100 ballots to be cast. Voters, in this case the handful of Durham citizens who attended, marked their first, second and third choices. Then the ballots were counted. In the real election, that will be done by machine.
But not on election night - it will take a week (or longer) for the State and County Boards of Elections to determine who the top-two winners will be.

Side note:  won't IRV be a big improvement on how we currently elect a President through primary contests and the Electoral College.  Can you see how well a 13-way or larger race for President made up of all the candidates on the ballots in January of 2012 would go?  If you think Florida 2000 pissed off lots of voters, can you imagine the HOWL of protest that would rise up when someone claimed to have won the race for President with only 27% of the vote?

Remember the 4-way primary race for Democratic Labor Commissioner in May 2008?  Mary Fant Donnen came in first right away, but it took almost 3 weeks to determine who the 2nd place finisher was.  Then and only then could the top-two proceed to the traditional runoff election on June 22.

Had that been an IRV election, election officials wouldn't have known how to sort the ballots and which 2nd and 3rd place votes to count until May 23rd of so, and then wouldn't have been done tabulating the IRV race (due to the record 36% turnout) until July 14th (Bastille Day) - two and a half weeks AFTER the results of the traditional runoff had been known.  
No candidate got a majority, so the top two - Jefferson and Lincoln, with 13 votes each - were in the "instant runoff." Ballots on which neither Jefferson nor Lincoln got a first-place vote were discarded, then the second-place votes were counted for each. In the real election, that will be done by hand.
Get it right!  None of the 1st place votes were discarded.  They just weren't considered anymore.  The first round votes for anyone but the top-two aren't considered beyond the 1st round.  But they do consider the ballots where 1st round votes were not cast for the top-two winners.  Otherwise, how would they count the 2nd and 3rd choice votes?   
In the second round, Jefferson picked up four more votes and Lincoln, 12.
OK - this gives us a total of Jefferson 17 and Lincoln 25 - Lincoln wins.  Why bother going on?  
Those ballots were discarded and third-place votes for each tallied up - nine for Jefferson, two for Lincoln.
No - dammit - those ballots were NOT discarded - otherwise how could you count the 3rd place votes?  If IRV is that hard for what I presume to be a college-educated reporter to describe correctly, how well do you think that voters with literacy problems will be able to understand it? 

Have you taken a look at the literacy levels across the state lately?  The levels were not good nor were they getting better ten years ago.
Adding all together gave:

Jefferson: 13 + 4 + 9 = 26
Lincoln: 13 + 12 + 2 = 27
Lincoln won.
Wait!  What kind of a majority is 27 out of 100 votes?  How is that better than the 23% Mewby got in the 8-wawy race in 2004?  Why go to all the trouble?  Or is the only thing IRV was good for in this election was to resolve a tie?  OK - Lincoln beat Jefferson in the 2nd round.  Why even bother with the 3rd round?

Usually in an IRV race, there is no tie in the 1st round.  That's because there not many IRV races around our country - and be thankful for that!  In all but ONE IRV race I have ever seen, the candidate with the highest vote total in the 1st round goes on to eventually win the race.  That's because the 1st round margin was too high for any extra votes to overcome.

So in reality, the 2nd round of this practice IRV election gave us the winner in the 2nd round that was confirmed in the 3rd round.  Why go to the extra trouble to sort, stack and tabulate those extra votes?  We already don't count all the other 2nd and 3rd round votes!

Here's why:

State law requires the instant-runoff method when an office is vacated after the candidate-filing period for the next election has closed. The General Assembly passed the law in 2006, after state Supreme Court Justice Bob Orr unexpectedly retired too late for a primary. A special filing period ended with six candidates running, and the winner got only 23 percent of the vote.
And 27% is so much better? 
This year, Appeals Court Judge Jim Wynn was appointed to the federal bench after the filing period, leaving a vacancy to be filled this fall. Thirteen candidates signed up, making an instant-runoff mandatory.
No - we could have had a traditional runoff election and gotten a real majority winner.  Or the State Board could have stated we weren't ready to do statewide IRV in November 2010 (and they were right) and just do plurality because it will result in the same winner - as this election proved.  There are already laws on the books to resolve ties - so why jam an unfunded mandate to use jury-rigged IRV? 
Early voting opened Thursday and runs through Oct. 30; regular Election Day is Nov. 2. If one of the 13 Court of Appeals candidates has a majority once all the votes are in and certified Nov. 12, the election is over.
A 1st round 50% plus one vote majority winner in a 13-way race?  That ain't gonna happen - you read it hear first! 
If not, the state elections board will determine who is No. 1 and No. 2. Then each county counts up those candidates' second-place votes; and then the third-place votes; and reports them. A winner will then be certified.
 A winner with a larger plurality than in the 1st round.  But it damn sure won't be a winner with 50% plus one of all the 1st column votes.   
In relatively small Durham County, Ashe said, hand counting could be done in two days or so; in a large county such as Wake, it could take a week or more.
Bull - Wake BOE Election Director Cherie Poucher was heard at a BOE meeting a few weeks ago telling people to  cancel or postpone their turkeys.  If the November 2010 turnout is the same as the May 2008 turnout, we could be looking at getting a winner in the statewide IRV race on the 12th day of Christmas!

And it will be just as easy to count those IRV votes as it is to keep track of all the stuff your true love gives you in that song!
jim.wise@nando.com or 919-641-5895

Friday, October 1, 2010

More lies about IRV in NC - this time in the New Republic!

Here's a hint - if you want to make sure Florida 2000 never happens again - don't use IRV!

Nicholas Stephanopoulos
October 1, 2010 - 12:00AM
The memory is still enough to give Democrats the shakes: In 2000, George W. Bush won Florida (and thus the presidency) even though 50.5 percent of the state’s votes were cast for Al Gore or Ralph Nader. Bush won, in other words, despite the fact that an outright majority of voters preferred somebody else. In a two-way Bush-Gore race, there is virtually no doubt that Gore would have prevailed: The 100,000 or so votes that Nader received would have gone heavily to Gore, handing him the presidency.

Bush claimed the Sunshine State because, by law, the candidate who gets a plurality of votes there wins, even if no one gets a majority. This is the election norm in most jurisdictions across the country—but it borders on the undemocratic. As in Florida, it can allow a candidate preferred by a majority of voters to lose a race. It also ignores the reality that voters often have opinions of all the candidates running; they have a top pick, sure, but they may also prefer a second candidate to a third.
The author is ignoring the fact that it just wasn't Nader's presence on the ballot and his 100K votes that cost Gore the election. It was:
  • hanging chads in punch card voting systems
  • the poorly laid-out butterfly ballots that had older Jewish folks in Palm Beach (who typically vote Democratic) vote for Pat Buchanan
  • haphazard election administration system with vote counting methods that varied across the state
  • deliberate voter caging in Democratic districts
  • deliberate lack of maintenance of machines in select districts
  • deliberate failure to provide enough working voting machines in Democratic districts
  • conflict of interest by an elected Secretary of State who was also active in the Bush Campaign
A solution to this dilemma is what’s known as instant-runoff voting (IRV). Under IRV, voters are able to rank their choices on their ballots (for example, Nader first, Gore second, and Bush third). If no candidate receives a majority of first-place votes, the candidate with the fewest such votes is eliminated. The second-place votes of the people who ranked the eliminated candidate first are then allocated to the remaining candidates. The process repeats until someone gets an outright majority. In other words, all three candidates still could have run in Florida, but Gore, not Bush, would have won the election.
IRV is no solution to this dilemma if you still have the election administration (vote counting and voter registration) problems in places like Florida). IRV is more confusing for voters and more complex and expensive to administer than simple single-column elections. And do you really think that an statewide IRV election would be easy to count with three columns on butterfly ballots and handing chads where you couldn't determine the voter intent on ONE column? Please - get real!

But it’s not just the specter of 2000 that makes IRV so appealing. It’s also a fair and straightforward system that could alleviate a number of the problems plaguing U.S. elections.

There is nothing straightforward about IRV - it will make the casting of votes more confusing for voters and counting of ballots more complex for election administrators and less transparent for observers - therefore the process will do more to erode not build up public confidence in elections.
Ten years ago, IRV didn’t exist anywhere in the United States. In the past decade, though, 16 cities and one state (North Carolina) have embraced it. Two courts, in California and Minnesota,  have recently rejected a series of challenges to it. (And abroad, the Brits are planning a May 2011 referendum to decide whether to elect the entire House of Commons using IRV. The Australians and Irish, meanwhile, have had it for the better part of a century).
North Carolina has not embraced IRV.  We only had a pilot program in two communities in 2007 and in one community in 2009.  The only community to use IRV to tabulate votes beyond the 1st round in our entire state in 2007 chose not to be a guinea pig in 2009 - they dumped it!

As the Chair of our State Board of Elections stated in an SBOE meeting the other day, the legislature forced IRV down our throats without providing any money to properly administer IRV elections. It's an unfunded mandate from the NC General Assembly.
Why the recent flare of interest in IRV? 
It's not that recent - FairVote has been pushing this turkey since 1992 when they were founded to promote proportional representation.  What's behind the interest is most likely lots and lots of money from tax-exempt foundations given to non-profit groups like FairVote.  What's behind the motivations of the foundation board members is beyond me!
The system’s core appeal is that it promotes majority rule. No one can triumph with, say, 25 percent of the vote—as occurred in North Carolina in 2004, prompting its switch to IRV.
The author has it wrong - NC isn't switching to IRV.  After the 8-way NC Supreme Court election, the Legislature got tricked into using it for judicial elections under special circumstances.  When the law was finally passed in 2006, the state did NOTHING for 4 years to get ready for the very real possibility of statewide IRV.  Then when Judge Wynn accepted an appointment to the US 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, we got statewide IRV shoved down our throats. 

We are not ready for it. Our voting machines won't count all the votes at the precinct polling places nor will they provide over-vote notification as required by both state and federal election law. Our state doesn't even have procedures in place for transparent and verifiable tabulation of the votes and early voting starts on October 14th!

IRV does not promote majority rule because IRV does not really deliver majority winners - IRV just delivers winners with slightly larger plurality winners. In all of San Francisco's IRV elections, no one who won office without votes being allocated from other columns won a real 50% plus one vote majority.

NC had one pilot IRV election in 2007 which used the IRV method to determine a winner. Out of the original 3022 1st column votes cast, a winner would need 1512 first-round votes to win. Since no one hit that in the first column, the 2nd and 3rd column votes were counted. The winner was declared with only 1401 votes - hardly a majority. In over 95% of IRV races in our country, the winner was the same candidate who won the 1st round. So why go to all the time and trouble and expense for the ILLUSION of a majority winner?
But there are more good reasons why IRV would be an improvement over the status quo. For starters, it eliminates third-party “spoilers.” According to recent reports, Republicans have been recruiting homeless people in Arizona to run on the Green Party ticket, hoping to siphon off Democratic votes and propel their own candidates to narrow plurality victories. Such ploys would be pointless under IRV, since the votes of Green Party supporters (who tend to be liberal) would most likely end up being allocated to the Democrats anyway.
The author is making generalizations about which other party candidates Green or Libertarian voters would vote for because they knew their guys didn't stand a chance in hell of winning. The author also assumes that a significant number of voters would fully rank all available choices, and that the machines would actually record the votes as the voters cast them. That's several big assumptions that the author is not providing enough evidence to support.
IRV would also squash the anxiety many people feel about voting for third-party candidates. In 2000, for instance, Nader’s fans wouldn’t have had to worry that, by voting for their hero, they might land Bush in office. Since their second-place nods would have gone to Gore, they could have voted their conscience and gone to sleep easy. (It’s for precisely this reason that the Liberal Democrats in Britain made a referendum on IRV their price for joining the Tories’ coalition. The Lib Dems don’t want their supporters to keep having to choose between following their hearts and voting for the lesser of two evils.)
Look - either third parties are "spoilers" or they offer people a real alternative choice to the two main parties. You can't have it both ways! Turns out, IRV doesn't really help third party candidates unless those so-called third parties actually won elections without the use of IRV - like the Progressive candidates in Burlington VT, who have been winning elections since Bernie Sanders.
Another benefit of IRV is that it tends to discourage vitriolic campaign rhetoric. Granted, elections will always include argument and criticism. But, when voters are able to rank their choices, harsh attacks can backfire because supporters of the assailed candidates may then list the attackers lower on their ballots. So, under IRV, candidates often try to get along, at least publicly. In San Francisco, for example, negative ads funded by independent groups have declined significantly since the city adopted IRV in 2002. Instead, candidates have complimented one another and even held joint fundraisers.
Actually the lack of vitriol and real choices might drive turnout DOWN - as happened in the 2009 Minneapolis RCV election.

IRV doesn't discourage negative campaigning and vitriol - it just drives it underground like in San Francisco. However, the recent Burlington VT campaign - the last to use IRV before the city repealed it - was full of vitriol. Here in NC, the 2007 Cary IRV race ran off half the candidates in a 4-way race for a Town Council seat. Two of them just quit the race and endorsed the incumbent candidate (who was an incumbent because he had been appointed to fill a vacancy). IRV scared away the competition!
Under the right circumstances, IRV can also help moderate politicians prevail over extremists. To get this result, a single IRV election needs to be held in place of both the primary and general elections, with voters going to the polls only once and ranking their favorites among all the candidates from all the parties. In this case, the parties’ bases are no longer able to dictate who the nominees will be, and it is the entire (more centrist) electorate that decides the winner. For instance, in Washington, which employs a related “top-two primary” system, the Tea Party has effectively been thwarted. A few months ago, California copied Washington’s approach, with the aim of moderating its famously polarized politics.
Replacing both a primary and a general election with IRV robs political parties the chance to volunteer for one or the other candidate in the primary election, then get together and volunteer for the party nominee in the general election to provide voters in the general election more distinct choices to vote for. And don't you worry about the Tea Party - they've been hijacked by GOP power brokers much in the same way they have run Green Party "ringers". But even still - many Tea Party candidates have made good use of the primary process to offer voters a real distinction between their candidates and those of the mainstream GOP. The same goes for more progressive Democratic candidates who have challenged the DLC/DINO-Dem establishment.

Sometimes a little partisanship goes a long way - but IRV discourages it and blurs differences between candidates - lessening real choice!
Unsurprisingly, IRV has its critics, most of whom are Republicans. Some of their resistance probably stems from the fact that Bush never would have made it to the White House if Florida had used IRV in 2000. Republicans may also believe that they benefit from the status quo since, in recent years, there have been stronger third-party candidates on the left, like Nader. (But even if this view used to be accurate, the recent rise of the Tea Party means it probably isn’t anymore.)
IRV has many critics who are Democrats and UNA voters who can think for themselves and see that IRV math doesn't work out. They don't buy the BS that "if you're a progressive or a liberal, then you HAVE to like IRV!"

But IRV couldn't have been used in Florida in 2000 because the final vote total is cumulative - and the courts prevented all the first column votes from being counted properly. Do you really think that the solution to Florida's problem would be IRV with even more hanging chads and butterfly ballots?
On the actual merits, opponents often argue that IRV violates the principle of one-person, one-vote. Several courts, however, have rejected this claim and let IRV stand, reasoning that, because every person has the same ability to rank candidates, and every ballot is counted under the same rules, IRV is not unfair. Skeptics have also said that people will find the system confusing and be deterred from voting. But exit polls in cities using IRV show that 86 percent to 95 percent of voters understand it. And turnout is relatively high in IRV elections, while the runoffs that are held in some jurisdictions when no candidate wins an initial majority draw far fewer voters. As for cost—another point critics like to harp on—IRV does require some moderate one-time expenditures, but it then produces steady savings for governments that otherwise would have to stage runoffs days or weeks after the first vote.
Boy - this law school "fellow" has really been drinking the IRV koolaid!  He's hit all the FairVote talking points on why IRV is the greatest thing since sliced white bread!

Exit polls?   Like those run by pro-IRV advocacy groups, where employees of pro-IRV advocacy groups did both voter education on the way into the ballots and then polled voters on their way out? Where one such employee admitted in writing that she deviated from her voter education instructions (in Cary in 2007) to create a better outcome for the exit poll - and faked a southern accent when interviewing voters?   Even though she faked a southern accent and deviated from her instructions, the Cary exit poll showed that 25% of Cary voters showed up at the polls not knowing in advance that they'd be expected to rank their choices.  33% of Hendersonville voters didn't know about IRV in advance either.  And in 2005 - the second year of RCV in San Francisco - nearly half the voters showed up to the polls not knowing in advance they'd be expected to rank their choices. 

IRV disenfranchises way too many voters!

Confused Voters?  RCV was confusing for Minneapolis voters - the spoiled ballot rate was over 3 times higher for 2009 than in 2005.  The Town of Cary did a survey in 2008 that showed that over 30% of voters didn't understand IRV

Turnout is relatively high? Define "relative"? Voter turnout in San Francisco is down since they started using IRV.  Voter turnout in the the 2009 Minneapolis RCV election was the lowest in over 100 years.

Cheaper elections?  Peirce County WA reported a doubling of their election costs during their single attempt at doing IRV. Minneapolis reports spending $365K more with one RCV elections in 2009 than they spent (adjusted for inflation) in 2005 for two elections (a primary and a general election). 

Other states that have considered IRV have not proceeded based on cost alone. The Maryland legislature determined that IRV would cost between $3.10 and $3.50 (not including the cost of election systems and software that did not exist at that time) and that voter education would cost a minimum of $0.48. San Francisco was spending nearly $2 per registered voter and was told even that wasn't enough. If you do an honest accounting of all election administration costs - including voter education - IRV costs more than traditional elections and rarely used runoffs.

If North Carolina tried to implement IRV on a federally certified election system (which BTW does not yet exist), it could cost us over $20 million to implement and over $4 million for voter education each and every year the method is used. At that rate, we'd never save money with IRV over using primary elections and runoffs.

There are other ways to solve the problem with low-turnout primary elections (and runoffs) as well as low-turnout general election runoffs. One solution would be to just go to straight plurality elections, since IRV does nothing but give the 1st round winner a larger plurality win.

Another solution to low-turnout runoffs is to raise the threshold to 50% plus one for all elections. Turnout in NC runoff elections is lower when there are fewer runoff contests, and turnout is higher when there are more runoff elections. Runoff elections give voters a real choice among candidates, not a simulated runoff. And runoff elections are more democratic - since in a real runoff, the 2nd place winner in the 1st round goes onto win the runoff 33% of the time. Compare that to the 95% or greater chance of the 1st round winner winning the IRV election in the end with only a slightly larger plurality win. Traditional runoff elections are much more democratic than IRV elections!

Primary elections provide a valuable service - they allow different candidates from the same party to compete for the support of all the party voters during the general election. Not having that party support actually requires more money to get a candidate's message across - not less - because you can't depend on party volunteers to do GOTV work on behalf of the party candidate (since there is none).
IRV is an idea whose time has come. Its advantages are indisputable, while the arguments against it fall flat. Cities and states across America should embrace it—and soon, so that a nightmare like Florida in 2000 never occurs again.
The author's contentions only hold water if he only considers information provided by FairVote - the nation's leading IRV advocacy organization. And he might very well only be considering the FairVote talking points.

If you look at the real-world experiences that US communities have with IRV, you will see that the advantages hold little water, and the arguments against it are compelling. In fact, if you consider the arguments against IRV and the real-world evidence supporting those arguments, you have to wonder how so many elected leaders got conned into supporting IRV. If you are elected to high office, you have to do more research than you can do by just googling websites put up by FairVote and affiliated groups.

The only way to prevent a Florida style election nightmare is to develop tough standards for verified voting like we did in North Carolina in 2004, after we had our own Florida-style election nightmare. Folks were trying to push IRV on us back then, but legislators realized that there was no way to make our elections verifiable and transparent AND implement IRV. So they dumped IRV requirements that were snuck into another bill that got forced to a vote by powerful legislators. Interestingly enough, the legislator who forced IRV on our state is silent now that the state and county boards of elections are running around at the last minute trying to make this turkey work. Election administrators freely admit they don't like IRV and can't figure out a way to make it work without violating our other state and federal election integrity laws - so they are trying to violate the fewest laws possible. That's not the kind of elections we should be striving for.

Nicholas Stephanopoulos is a fellow at Columbia Law School, where he specializes in election law.

Hmm - a "fellow" at Columbia Law School. Who is paying his fellowship in election law?  Is this the same Nicholas Stephanopoulos who blogged in the Huff Post (perhaps where Rob Richie "trolled" for him?) in the following article:

Resurrecting Bush v. Gore

To the extent Democrats think about Bush v. Gore these days, they remember it as the worst Supreme Court decision in decades -- a nakedly partisan ruling by five conservative justices hell-bent on installing George W. Bush in the White House. Bush v. Gore was all this and more, but it also recognized, for the first time, a powerful progressive principle: that all voters in a state, and all ballots they cast, should be treated equally whenever elections are held.
Interesting that he pays lip service to this principle but fails to realize IRV does not treat all voters equally.   
It was precisely because Florida's recount procedures varied dramatically by county, and thus did not treat all voters and ballots equally, that the Court ruled for Bush and ordered a halt to the vote-counting.
And this moron feels that a more complex voting method like IRV would have made the 2000 Florida election simpler?  It would have meant more and longer recounts of all the votes in all the columns!

Then he compares what happened in Florida to the Coleman-Franken recount:
Second, a judicial victory for Coleman would be a short-term setback but a longer-term win for both Democrats and the country. American elections are radically decentralized, with each state making its own rules and typically devolving a great deal of authority to counties and even towns.
Yes - he is right about this.  Our elections are radically decentralized.  Which is another reason why it's not fair to claim that IRV methods used in one community would work the same in another.  
This system gives rise to endless complexity and confusion, while also tending to disadvantage Democrats.
Yes - more complexity and confusion would tend to disadvantage Democrats - see below:
After all, it is poor, minority, and elderly communities (all of which lean Democratic) that typically have the oldest and least reliable voting machines, the longest lines, and the worst-trained election officials.
Bob Hall and Rob Richie - tell me again how IRV will make an already more complex and confusing situation  BETTER instead of WORSE?
A ruling for Coleman would have no immediate impact on these pervasive disparities, given the relative narrowness of the legal issue being decided. But it would likely make other courts more receptive to Bush v. Gore-style challenges, and fearing judicial scrutiny, state legislatures might be motivated to enact fairer and more uniform election administration policies on their own.

I can already see how a Court of Appeals race with 3 candidates for judge - all of whom are lawyers - could cause the General Assembly to change the judicial IRV law. Just hope that someone sues the hell out of the State Board of Elections (with DemocracyNC as co-defendants) before then!

Sunday, September 19, 2010

Are IRV elections outcomes publicly-verifiable?

OK - county and statewide mandatory county and statewide IRV elections are here. Our own State Board of Elections knows that we don't have software that can count the votes.   We have some idea how the paper ballots will be counted, but not how the DRE votes will be counted.  So whatever schemes they have to count the votes, will the outcomes be verifiable? What are the criteria for deciding?

Check out Kathy Dopp's paper:

11 Fundamentals of Auditing Elections

All of the following procedures are necessary to avoid certifying incorrect election outcomes:
1. Use independently-auditable voting systems — voter-marked paper ballots.
70 of North Carolina's 100 counties use voter-marked paper ballots for election-day voting.  Many use them for Early Voting.  All 100 counties use paper ballots for Absentee By Mail voting.  But unfortunately, almost 40% of NC ballots are cast on DRE touchscreen voting machines.  Although they do have a thermal paper trail, not all voters check the thermal paper trail which can fail to print out up to 9% of the votes.

2. Publicly report all vote tallies (audit units) used to tally overall election results prior to randomly selecting a sample for auditing.
Verified Voting advocates in NC fought very hard to come up with a method to randomly select a sample for auditing.  But since NC law requires the audits before the results of the canvass are certified, and there is no way to tally IRV in a reliable way, this won't happen in the Court of Appeals race. 
3. Allow meaningful public observation and participation in manual audits and in security and transportation procedures for electoral records, including ballots. Prohibit ballot and electoral record access between the time of public posting and manual audits.
How will the IRV races be audited?  Ballots will be moved and the first round will be counted, canvassed, certified and audited before the 2nd and 3rd column votes will be counted.  Will there be audits of the 2nd and 3rd column votes, and if so, when?  Will the same race be audited across the entire state AFTER there is a winner declared?  Or will this race just be an example of "faith-based" voting?  
4. Use sampling methods designed to allow the public to verify that the risk of certifying any incorrect initial election outcome is less than 1%, based on within audit unit upper margin error bounds and the overall reported contest margin. Assume that outcome-altering vote fraud could be well-hidden in the smallest number of audit units possible. If maximum within audit unit margin error is assumed to be less than the upper margin error bound, then allow candidates to select discretionary units for manual auditing in addition to the random sample.
There is no way to do a meaningful hand-to-eye audit of the IRV race without counting the whole thing by hand from Murphy to Manteo. 
5. Use publicly-verifiable random selection methods, preferably weighted by upper margin error bounds of audit units rather than using a uniform sampling distribution.
6. Conduct polling place and jurisdiction-wide reconciliation of printed, used, unused, and spoiled ballots with absentee ballot and polling place records.
We really won't know which ballots are spoiled in the 2nd or 3rd columns by voter confusion, since our voting machines can't count the 2nd or 3rd columns, much less find over-votes.  The 2009 Minneapolis IRV election had a spoiled ballot rate 300% higher than the rate in their 2005 General Election.  And ABM voter won't even have anyone to ask questions of while they cast their votes - and if they make a mistake (which they are 3 times more likely to do) they won't be able to get a new ballot.  
7. Provide timely public access to electoral records necessary to evaluate the accuracy and integrity of reconciliation and manual auditing processes.
We don't provide public access to those records anyway.  We can't tell how many over-votes or under-votes we have even in the 1st column votes unless we run around to each and every precinct and get the totals off the tapes. 
8. Use voter intent as the standard for manual counts during audits.
9. Publicly report any discrepancies found during the audit and use the manual counts to correct the initial reported results.
10. Expand the sample size, perhaps to a full recount, or certify the election using an algorithm based on the premises of the sampling method. Treat any missing paper ballots as discrepancies when deciding whether to expand or certify.
11. Complete the audit prior to certifying election results.
Does the state you live in follow all these procedures?

North Carolina voters were sure we could do this with single column votes, but it remains to be seen if the State Board of Elections will adopt procedures that can be verified or even observed by candidates and their representatives, or even interested members of the public!

Saturday, September 11, 2010

Statewide IRV voter education?

I attended the most recent SBOE meeting on September 1st and they dealt with IRV quite a bit.   Gary Bartlett stated the special modified voter guide for IRV should cost $485,000 - that is once they figure out how folks will be doing their IRV voting around the state.  

Larry Leake mentioned that Anita Earls showed him a voter guide from Washington State that we should "steal" for our voter guide.  By "steal" I think he meant we should imitate most of it and adapt it to our situation in NC.  Because, as we all know, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.  

So after the meeting, I asked Ms. Earls where in Washington State that voter guide came from.  She told me it came from Peirce County.  They had one single IRV election in 2008.  

Problem is - so many people had problems with IRV and hated it after that one single time in 2008 that they turned out in record numbers and 66% voted to DUMP IRV.  

So while it may be a great voter guide, the IRV process was still a turkey for them.  Knowing all this, non-profits were still pushing IRV, and legislators didn't want to consider what would happen to our elections if we got caught in "perfect storm" and had to use IRV in a statewide election before it was properly tested? 

Could we ever properly test and evaluate IRV?  The non-profits who have been pushing IRV will claim that it works no matter how badly things turn out this November.  

No wait - we won't be able to start counting the 2nd and 3rd column races until every other election contest is settled.  With a contested election at damn near any level (city, county or state), we won't be able to tie up the ballots for a normal IRV tabulation until that contest is settled.  Or do we wait to settle non-IRV contests until the IRV race is tallied (assuming there will be no recounts)?

What is the value of the person-hours will it take in each and every county election board across the state to sort/stack and tabulate all these IRV votes?  How many person-hours will the candidates and parties (and their observers) have to spend watching each and every tabulating team at the county BOE for the weeks and possibly months it will take to tabulate IRV?  

Keep good track of your time - because the IRV "pimps' sure won't be doing that!

Thursday, September 9, 2010

So how will IRV really play out?

I went to the Wake BOE meeting on Teusday, September 7, 2010. It was about what I expected - an announcement about IRV.

I saw sample 17" ballots with the 13 candidate IRV race at the bottom of the back side of the ballot. They still don't know the procedure for tabulating the votes with counting the 2nd and 3rd columns.

After counting the 2nd column votes, why would anyone need to go into the 3rd column of votes unless there is a tie? This is where IRV makes no sense.

Our state law doesn't require a 50% plus one majority of the 1st column votes to win the top-two IRV election. What settles the election is the largest vote getter of those top two - the winner will have a majority of the total of the top-two. And here is where IRV is a waste of time.

Let's look at the 2004 Supreme Court (Orr seat) as an example. With 2,578,576 votes cast in that race, the falloff was around 24% from the top-ticket races. The top two winners were Newby at 582,864 votes, with 74,268 more votes than James Wynn at 508,416 votes. In that field of 8, Newby had 22.59% and Wynn had 19.71%.

But let's look at just the top two. The total votes for the top two was 1,091,100 votes - Newby with 53.40% and Wynn with 46.60% - Newby up by 6.8% Newby leading by 74,268 votes. Under our current IRV rules, if neither of them got a single 2nd or 3rd column vote in IRV, Newby would already be the winner.

So how likely were either of them to get additional votes - and would it really matter? Let's look to the 2007 Cary IRV race for some clues.

Out of 3022 total 1st round votes cast, Don Frantz got 1150 and Vicki Maxwell got 1075 in the first round. Don was leading, but he didn't have 1512 votes, so the race went to IRV.

But among the top-two, Frantz already had 51.69% to Maxwell's 48.31% - a 3.38% margin - half the margin between Newby - Wynn. Had there been no 2nd or 3rd column votes to transfer, Frantz would have been the winner anyway. So why bother with IRV?

But Frantz was up by 75 votes. Just considering the top-two candidates, the percentages flipped from the 1st column to the 2nd column. Frantz got 52% of the 1st round top-two total, and 48% of the 2nd round votes. Maxwell got 48% of the 1st round top-two total, and 52% of the 2nd round votes. But Maxwell couldn't overcome Don's 1st round lead. At the end of the 3rd column, Don still led Vicki by 48 votes.

Not all of the 793 voters who cast votes for other first round candidates had valid 2nd and 3rd round choices.  But let's say they did.  And 52.49% of those 793 voters cast 2nd round votes for Vicki - that would give her 416 votes to  Don's 377 in the 2nd column. Which would have brought the totals to 1527 for Frantz to 1491 for Maxwell. Don would have not only had the largest number of votes, but he would have gone over the 50% plus one vote threshold set by the first column votes.

Frantz had a 1st round lead that Maxwell couldn't overcome through IRV. But Frantz didn't really need 2nd or 3rd round votes. Someone always starts out being the leader in a top-two IRV runoff. And the 1st round plurality winner has a greater than 95% chance of winning the Instant Runoff according to analysis of all IRV races around the country.

How does that apply to the results of 2004's Newby-Wynn had it gone to IRV?; Newby had an even greater margin over Wynn than Frantz had over Maxwell. Would Wynn ever have been able to flip Newby's lead? Even if the same percentage of voters who participated in the instant runoff in Cary participate in the Newby-Wynn race, and the 2nd round vote distribution flipped in Wynn's favor like it flipped in Maxwell's favor, Wynn would still have lost.

So if the IRV winner is the 1st round winner in greater than 95% of IRV elections, why bother with the ENRON math?

Wednesday, September 8, 2010

So I attended yet another pre-train wreck SBOE meeting....

...in Raleigh on September 1st.   And boy - is IRV ever making a mess of our elections so far!

First off, we can thank Larry Leake for stating yet again that there is no certified software we can legally use to do IRV on our election equipment.  Hopefully that also means there will be no more discussion of using un-certified MC Excel spreadsheets to tabulate IRV elections - the method Hendersonville developed for their two IRV pilot elections but never had to actually use.  

There was discussion whether or not our election law requires hand counted votes from the actual voter verified paper trail (the "Real Time Log"), or could DRE counties use the "audit log", or ballot images?  

Funny thing - at this meeting someone said that Hendersonville was seriously thinking about cutting up all the thermal paper trail rolls and tabulating IRV by hand that way.  A collective groan (or a chuckle) rose from the room from all but two people - and they know who they were!  No one could possibly imagine anything good could come from counting an election from thousands of thermal paper receipts that would get scattered if someone sneezed, or would be ruined if they were cut in the wrong place. And I wonder if anyone realized how long it would take to properly ID each separate vote and cut them all up?  Can you say "carpal tunnel"?

Owen Andrews of PrintElect was there, stating that his company wouldn't be responsible for any election screw-ups caused by the state using IRV, a tabulation method not included in the EAC certification process for the voting equipment we purchased back in 2005.  

Left unanswered is - who will be responsible if there is an election meltdown due to IRV?  Who will one (or more) of the losing judicial candidates (all lawyers by the way) sue if things get screwed up?

Will we be using normal election methods (DRE or op-scan) for early and precinct voting like we did in recent elections?  

In the paper counties for in-person voting, and for Absentee by Mail in all 100 counties - what size ballots will we be using?  14", 17" or 19"?  Will we be able to get enough of the right paper to use for printing ballots?  When will the Absentee By Mail ballot styles be settled on and distributed around to the counties so they can start sending them out to voters?   

Also it appears SBOE will follow our recommendations to canvas all votes before tallying second round. Meaning that we won't be starting to count the IRV votes until all the Absentee By Mail and Provisional Ballots are counted. 

There is simply no way to do IRV in NC that doesn't in some way break other NC and Federal election laws.   This is something that NC Rep. Paul Luebke and others who claim that IRV is as easy to use as 1-2-3 ought to have thought about back in 2005-2006 when they pushed this through the General Assembly. 

And to be honest and fair - this is something that ALL the Legislators should have thought about.  I mean - COME ON! - what were you thinking by not questioning or pulling the section mandating IRV judicial elections in the same bill where you created IRV pilots to test the concept?  Didn't it ever occur to you that we could statewide IRV elections before we had piloted them in smaller elections?  Perhaps some of our legislators need to eat more fish to increase their critical thinking skills?  Or perhaps they just shouldn't trust everything that non-profit groups push across their desks?

Friday, September 3, 2010

There's only one way that IRV reflects NC - ONLY ONE WAY!

It's gonna be a 13-way ClusterF@#K to the Court of Appeals (Wynn seat)!  Got a little something cleared up from my last posting - there are now three UNA candidates for this seat. 


COURT OF APPEALS JUDGE (WYNN) (WYNN SEAT)
BLOSS, JOHN F (U-W)
John F. Bloss

CASTEEN, JOHN WESLEY JR (U-W)
J. Wesley Casteen

DILLON, ROBERT CHRISTOPHER (R-W)
Chris Dillon

FARLOW, JEWEL ANN (R-W)
Jewel Ann Farlow

GARNER, DANIEL E (R-W)
Daniel E. Garner

HAMMER, STANLEY F (D-W)
Stan Hammer

KLASS, MARK E (D-W)
Mark E. Klass

MCCULLOUGH, JOHN DOUGLAS (R-W)
Doug McCullough 

MIDDLETON, ANNE (D-W)
Anne Middleton 

PAYNE, HARRY E JR (D-W)

Harry E. Payne, Jr 

SULLIVAN, JOHN C (D-W)
John Sullivan

THIGPEN, CRESSIE (D-B/AA)
Cressie Thigpen
 
VESPER, PAMELA M (UNA-W)
Pamela Vesper
 
Let's look at some stats:

D - 6 - 46.1% (Dems are 44.82% of NC voters)
R - 4 - 30.8% (Repubs are 31.59% of NC voters)
UNA- 3 - 23.1% (UNAs are 23.45% of NC voters)
So this is the only way that IRV reflect the make-up of our state. 

But are people registered as UNA because we don't have a political party that reflects their personal beliefs, or because they have a job where they need to be non-partisan, or because they just don't care? So perhaps this is one way that IRV just doesn't really matter? 

Men -10
Women -3
% of women in NC in 2009 - 51%,
% of women in the Court of Appeals race - 23.1%

White - 12 - 92.3%
Black - 1 - 7.7%
Hispanic - 0
Black/African Americans make up 21.6% of the population

Tuesday, August 31, 2010

NEWSFLASH: Is "13" a lucky number?

It won't be for the statewide IRV Court of Appeals race.  As of the close of business today, we now have a 13-way ClusterF@#K!

COURT OF APPEALS JUDGE (WYNN) (WYNN SEAT)
BLOSS, JOHN F (U-W)
John F. Bloss

CASTEEN, JOHN WESLEY JR (U-W)
J. Wesley Casteen


DILLON, ROBERT CHRISTOPHER (R-W)
Chris Dillon

FARLOW, JEWEL ANN (R-W)
Jewel Ann Farlow


GARNER, DANIEL E (R-W)
Daniel E. Garner

HAMMER, STANLEY F (D-W)
Stan Hammer


KLASS, MARK E (D-W)
Mark E. Klass


MCCULLOUGH, JOHN DOUGLAS (R-W)
Doug McCullough 

MIDDLETON, ANNE (D-W)
Anne Middleton 

PAYNE, HARRY E JR (D-W)

Harry E. Payne, Jr 

SULLIVAN, JOHN C (D-W)
John Sullivan

THIGPEN, CRESSIE (D-B/AA)
Cressie Thigpen

VESPER, PAMELA M there is no Pamela Vesper registered to vote in NC
Pamela M. Vesper

There is a Pamela Vesper Millward registered as (UNA-W) 

Let's look at some stats:

D - 6 - 46.1%
R - 4 - 30.8%
UNA- 2 - 15.4%
unknown - 7.7%

Men -10
Women -3
% of women in NC in 2009 - 51%,
% of women in the Court of Appeals race - 23%

White - 12 - 92.3%
Black - 1 - 7.7%
Hispanic - 0
But blacks make up 21.6% of the population

There is no way this race is gonna be settled in the first round. It's gonna go to IRV.

Problem is, there is no certified software to count the second and third column votes.  I don't even think that these races can go on a single ballot with the non-IRV races and not violate both state and federal laws.

You can't determine overvotes between columns, and the 2nd and 3rd column votes won't be counted where they are cast.   And I don't see the DRE folks wanting to port all these votes over to an MS Excel spreadsheet like they planned to do in Hendersonville in 2007 or 2009.  Luckily, Herndersonville never had to actually do that - they got winners in every first round election.  Which meant that IRV was a waste of time for their voters.

The only way I can see doing this with the least amount of law-breaking and troubles would be to put all the IRV races on one 14" ballot for all 100 counties for ABM, early voting and precinct voting.  That way the races will be counted the same way across the entire state.

If IRV races are put on the regular ballot, you won't be able to start counting IRV races until each and every single-column race is settled - meaning if there are any challenges to any race, calls for recounts, etc. - you can't start doing IRV until you are done with everything.

Then there are three counties that have Superior Court IRV races. If any of them need tabulation of the 2nd and 3rd column votes, which race will they count first - the local Superior Court race or the statewide IRV race?  And they will have to handle that first race and make sure that no one wants a recount before starting to tabulate the other IRV race, since you can't disturb the tabulation piles in one race until you resolve another IRV race. 

What a train wreck this is gonna be!

8 candidates filed so far....

...as of Monday, August 31, 2010.  Governor Perdue appointed Cressie Thigpen to the seat!  Thigpen filed for the seat, so it's now an 8-way "ClusterF@#k"!

COURT OF APPEALS JUDGE (WYNN) (WYNN SEAT)
CASTEEN, JOHN WESLEY JR (U-W)
J. Wesley Casteen


DILLON, ROBERT CHRISTOPHER (R-W)
Chris Dillon

FARLOW, JEWEL ANN (R-W)
Jewel Ann Farlow


HAMMER, STANLEY F (D-W)
Stan Hammer


KLASS, MARK E (D-W)
Mark E. Klass


MCCULLOUGH, JOHN DOUGLAS (R-W)
Doug McCullough 

MIDDLETON, ANNE (D-W)
Anne Middleton 

THIGPEN, CRESSIE (D-B/AA)

Cressie Thigpen

Let's look at some stats:

D - 4 - 50%
R - 3 - 37.5%
U - 1 - 12.5%

Now you know IRV is supposed to do wonderful things for minorities.  Does it?

Men - 6
Women - 2
% of women in NC in 2009 - 51%,
% of women in the Court of Appeals race - 25%

White - 7 - 87.5%
Black - 1 - 12.50%
Hispanic - 0
But blacks make up 21.6% of the population
Still think IRV helps minorities?

Friday, August 27, 2010

Five candidates filed so far....

...as of Friday, August 27, 2010.  Governor Perdue appointed Cressie Thigpen to the seat!  Thigpen has announced that he will file for the seat, but he hasn't done so yet.  So if Judge Thigpen files for the seat, it'll be a 6-way "ClusterF@#k"!

COURT OF APPEALS JUDGE (WYNN) (WYNN SEAT)
CASTEEN, JOHN WESLEY JR (U-W)
J. Wesley Casteen


DILLON, ROBERT CHRISTOPHER (R-W)
Chris Dillon


HAMMER, STANLEY F (D-W)
Stan Hammer


KLASS, MARK E (D-W)
Mark E. Klass


MCCULLOUGH, JOHN DOUGLAS (R-W)
Doug McCullough

Let's look at some stats:

D - 2 
R - 2
U - 1

If Judge Thigpen runs, there will be 3 Dems.

Now you know IRV is supposed to do wonderful things for minorities.  Does it?

Men - 5
Women - 0
% of women in NC in 2009 - 51%,
% of women in the Court of Appeals race - 0%
With Thigpen, there will still be 0% women running.

White - 5
Black - 0
Hispanic -0
% of whites - 100%
% of blacks - 0%
% of blacks if Thigpen runs - 16.67%.  But blacks make up 21.6% of the population

Still think IRV helps minorities? 



Thursday, August 26, 2010

Time to learn something new!

It's time to learn a new way of voting statewide - it's called IRV which is short for Instant Runoff Voting.

Our State Board of Elections knows and has admitted that we have no software to count IRV ballots on our voting systems. The staff knew it in 2007, and the board knew about it in 2008.  They admitted it on Tuesday in Asheville.

They know and have admitted that the Instant Runoff method conflicts with state and federal elections laws and rules that contributed to our state being ranked #1 in election integrity in 2006 - only two years after the 2004 General Election (a Florida-style election meltdown) that led to the passage of our Public Confidence in Elections Act in 2005.

So now our SBOE is going to dump an new and untested election method on NC voters that more likely than not will result in confusing among voters, contested elections because no one is sure how they will be counted, if the count is right or even legal (since the contest in question is a judicial race where all candidates will or should be lawyers).

So it's time to learn the meaning of a new word that applies to IRV anywhere, but especially to our elections under the circumstances: "clusterf@#k"

The Urban Dictionary has several definitions for "clusterf@#k", according to the Urban Dictionary:
  1. Military term for an operation in which multiple things have gone wrong. Related to "SNAFU" (Situation Normal, All F@#ked Up") and "FUBAR" (F@#ked Up Beyond All Repair). In radio communication or polite conversation (i.e. with a very senior officer with whom you have no prior experience) the term "clusterf@#k" will often be replaced by the NATO phonetic acronym "Charlie Foxtrot."
  2. Traditionally/originally of military origin. Today, however, "clusterf@#k" is commonly used to descriptively generalize any situation with a large scale of disarray. Possibly synonyms: mess, disaster.
  3. A combination of things going extremely wrong in a short period of time within the same general activity -- caused by stupidity and/or ineptitude. A polite term using the same initials would be "compound fiasco".
The word has been integrated most successfully by Jon Stewart on the Daily Show in their segment entitled  "Clusterf@#k to the White House!"

So I hope I have peaked your curiosity about North Carolina's Instant Runoff Voting method that will foisted on the voting public in two months.  Come on back and learn more about IRV and get ready for the "ClusterF@#k to the Court of Appeals"!