Dopp: 13:Costly.
The two main expenses associated with the
transition to IRV are voting equipment upgrades
and voter education. Both of these are one-time
costs that will be quickly balanced out by the
savings coming from eliminating a runoff
election in each election cycle. In San
Francisco, for example, the city and county
saved approximately $3 million by not holding a
separate runoff election in 2005, easily
covering the mostly one-time costs spent in 2003-2004 to implement the system.
There are some strong assumptions being made
here. There are increased counting costs that are
ongoing. Consider this: there are a number of
jurisdictions, like Oakland, which have "adopted"
IRV "pending implementation." I.e., if they can
get the money to do the conversion and education.
If it saves so much money, one would think it
would be a good investment, that the City of Oakland would rush to do it.
There are a number of issues that get mashed together here.
First, twice FairVote mentioned Robert's Rules of
Order as stating that Preferential Voting was
more fair than Plurality. However, what they
describe is the method of STV with a true
majority requirement, the election will have to
be repeated under some circumstances, i.e.,
where, after transfers, no candidate gains a
majority of ballots cast, due to exhausted
ballots. Robert's Rules doesn't just prefer
repeated balloting if there is no majority found,
it *requires* it. It takes a bylaw to change
that. This is about majority rule, and some think
that important. I know I do. And cities which
have adopted Top-Two Runoff apparently think so
too, and were willing to cover the extra cost for the benefits of that.
IRV does not find those majority winners. It's a
trick, smoke and mirrors, making it look like
there was a majority, if you only look at the
last round, pretending that this was an actual
runoff, where people show up and vote among those
two options. But RCV, with a three-rank ballot,
doesn't even allow some sincere voters that
privilege. Further, in nonpartisan elections, and
the vast majority of these RCV elections are
actually nonpartisan, RCV tends very strongly to
simple ratify the results of the first round,
because the vote transfers tend to happen in the
same ratio as the already existing votes. This is
the point about partisan elections: voters and
candidates aren't neatly organized by political
preference, and, it turns out that, if C is
eliminated, the C votes will be split up in about
the same ratio as A:B already have.
In a real runoff, however, something different
happens. I can theorize as to why that happens,
but the fact is that it does. There are
"comebacks." I found one-third comeback elections
in my small study, FairVote, in a larger one, found 29%.
Let me say what this means to me. In something on
the order of one-third of IRV elections that are
taking place, there is an instant runoff. I think
we can pretty much assume that the same
proportion of runoffs would occur with TTR. And
in a little less than one out of three runoffs
there is a comeback. There are no comebacks
happening in these nonpartisan IRV elections, and
so I conclude that about one time out of ten, IRV
is choosing the wrong winner, i.e., choosing a
winner other than what democratic process, as
recommended by Robert's Rules of Order, would
choose. Robert's Rules of Order specifically
notes this drawback of the STV method. It
*greatly* prefers that there be repeated balloting.
IRV choosing the wrong winner isn't "rare." It's
about one election out of ten. Those comebacks
are important to democracy. And we've been
deceived about them. Top-two runoff gives real
room for third parties, if used for partisan
elections. Consider what happens if a minor party
candidate manages to move up to second place in
the first round. Suddenly all bets are off. There
will be a real campaign where the major party
candidate involved will have to take the third
party seriously. The supporters of the third
party will be highly motivated to turn out to
vote. It becomes a real race. This isn't just
theory, it happens, in France for example.
We already have an advanced election system in
place, it's called top-two runoff. We should use
it more, not less. It can be improved. Using IRV
for the first round would be an improvement, but
pretty expensive. It looks like it would avoid
less than one out of three runoffs. That's why I
suggest Approval or Bucklin for the first round.
Bucklin is probably the most efficient of the
four methods (Plurality, IRV, Approval, and
Bucklin) at finding majorities. The problem with
IRV is that it conceals votes, some votes are
never counted in determining the winner. Some
second rank votes are important, some aren't.
FairVote touts Later-no-Harm as a big feature of
IRV, but, in fact, it is the cause of its
failure, the cause of Robert's Rules criticism of the method.
In my mind, cost is an issue, but is secondary to
democratic values. Majority rule is a basic
democratic value. IRV has been sold as a way to
satisfy "majority rule," but, if those who said
that knew what they were talking about, they were
lying. Most of those saying that are simply
deceived, they haven't looked at the details, and
you know what is said about the devil and the
details. IRV frustrates majority rule almost as
badly, i.e., as often, as Plurality can.
In North Carolina, counties spent $3.5 million
for the Superintendent of Public Instruction
runoff in 2004, an election with a statewide
turnout of only 3%. In 2007, IRV elections in
Cary (NC) avoided the need for a runoff in one
of the city council districts that would have cost taxpayers $28,000.
Runoffs in Cary are held with the November
general election. They are therefore relatively
cheap. Did Cary save money? I haven't seen any
analysis that shows that? They did have a lot of
problems counting their experimental IRV election.
An effective voter education program can also be
done for relatively little money by learning
from what types of education worked well in
other jurisdictions and what types did not
with the biggest factors being a good ballot
design, clear voter instructions and effective
pollworker training, in that order. In a report
to the Vermont General Assembly, the Vermont
Secretary of State estimated that, based on how
well IRV was implemented in Vermonts largest
city of Burlington in 2006, voter education for
statewide IRV in Vermont would cost less than
$0.25 per registered voter. In a city of more
than 100,000 people, Cary spent less than
$10,000 on voter education with highly favorable reactions from voters.
The analysis is coming from someone paid to
promote IRV. Indications I get from North
Carolina is that Cary is not at all eager to repeat the experiment.
But the bottom line is that we could save a *lot*
of money by not holding any elections at all.
Couldn't we? Or how about selecting a random jury
of twelve to make decisions? After all, we allow
juries of twelve to make life and death decisions routinely.
14. Dopp: Increases the potential for
undetectable vote fraud and erroneous vote counts
"
Actually, just the opposite is true, so long as
paper ballots (such as optical scan) are used.
The reason that any attempts at fraud are easier
to detect with IRV is that there is a redundant
electronic record (called a ballot image) of
each ballot that can be matched one-to-one with
the corresponding paper ballot. Cities such as
San Francisco (CA) and Burlington (VT) release
these ballot files so that any voter can do
their own count. Without such redundant ballot
records (which are not typical with vote-for-one
elections) there is no way to know for certain
if the paper ballots have been altered prior to a recount.
Dopp is the voting security expert, against Rob
Richie, the huckster paid for years to promote
IRV, regardless of whether it's an improvement or
not, paying no attention to voting systems
researchers and academics. "Any voter can do their own count"? Try it.
But this is an entirely different issue. Those
ballot "images" aren't images. They are the
result of ballot analysis by the equipment, not
just the results of scans. They have been
altered, that is, they do not show what marks
were made on the paper unless those marks met
certain rules. For example, if there is an
overvote in first choice, but normal votes for
second and third choice, all those subsequent
votes are read by the equipment, I'm sure, but
the equipment is then programmed to put undervotes into the "images."
Isn't that just slightly disturbing?
Continued with:
Dopp: 15. Violates some election fairness principles
."
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