2. Dopp: Requires centralized vote counting procedures at the state-level
"
IRV creates no need to centralize the counting
or the ballots themselves, although that is one
possible counting procedure -- and indeed a
central count is often sensible for smaller
jurisdictions. But all that is required to
implement IRV is central coordination of the
tally. If ballot images are recorded on optical
scan equipment, the data from those images can
be collected centrally for an IRV ballot. If a
hand-count is conducted, vote totals need to be
reported to a central tallying office in order
to determine what step to take next in the
count. In Ireland, for example, there are 43
counting centers in the presidential race.
Election administrators count ballots and report
their totals to a national office that in turn
instructs the administrators at each counting
center on what to do next. The entire process
takes less than a day even though more than a million ballots are cast.
Dopp overstated it, I think, but she is still
technically correct. Counting must be centralized
in some way. What FairVote describes is a system
where actual ballot counting takes place in
regional centers, but the counting is coordinated
and controlled centrally. The results of each
round of counting can be found locally, once the
result of the previous round is known, and then
transmitted to the central facility. All ballots
must be counted for each round, in some cases,
before the next round can be counted. (Consider
absentee ballots. IRV creates many opportunities
for ties, and so it becomes far more likely that
a few votes can turn a round result, and then
*the next rounds must be recounted.*. With a
summable method, a few votes will ordinarily not
turn a result. Such an effect becomes far more likely with IRV.
Now, as to Ireland's elections. There are not a
lot of examples to look at. The Irish President
is largely a ceremonial office. The last
President was elected in 1997, and the elections
take place every 7 years. What happened in 2004?
She ran unopposed. That ought to give you a clue.
Now, with some searching, I found some
information on the counting of the ballots. It
took one day to count one round. Not the whole
election. Because no candidate got a majority in
the first round, the result, though predictable,
wasn't clear until the next day. So call that two
days, not one. Now, a lot of mischief has been
done by using the same name for what is a whole
family of methods. What is good about one can
then be attributed, even if falsely, to all of
them. And what is bad about one can then be
blamed on the peculiarities of that one.
Inventing the term "instant runoff voting," not
used with any frequency to speak of before 1996,
was brilliant as a political move.
The method used in Ireland is the Contingent
Vote. There cannot be more than two rounds of
counting, because all but the top two are
eliminated in one step, if there is no majority in the first round.
But it isn't so fast, necessarily. In San
Francisco, one election required 19 rounds of
eliminations, as I recall. They took a month, I
think, to issue the results. A far simpler
method, using the same three-rank ballot as IRV,
but far more flexibly, would be Bucklin voting.
And much, much simpler to count. While FairVote
claims that Later-no-harm failure for Bucklin
will cause wide strategic voting (bullet voting),
I think that actually quite unlikely. These are
nonpartisan elections. There is nothing wrong
with voting only for your favorite, if you think
that's best. But I think many, many voters won't.
And if you do get a majority of votes, you
actually had a majority of voters voting for the
candidate, which is not true with the false "last
round majority" reported by IRV>
To be continued, with: Dopp: 3. Encourages the
use of complex voting systems and
[FairVote promotes] electronic-balloting
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