On Thu, 11 Nov 2004, Bart Ingles wrote:From the Chronicle article I saw, it looked as though _none_ of the four races requiring a second round ended up with the eventual winner recieving a majority of votes. Did this turn out to be the case?
Yes, I made the same observation based on the pairwise tallies. On the other hand, Steven Hill of the Center for Voting and Democracy points out that "all winners were elected with many more votes than in previous races for Supervisor", presumably because of the typically low turnout at December run-off elections and the abnormally high turnout of this election:
It looks as though the district 5 winner ended up with 33.7% of the total ballots. The "effective turnout" for the final round of this election was about 67% of the overall turnout.
http://www.sfgov.org/site/uploadedfiles/election/RCV5.htm
For district 7, the winner ended up with 39.7% of total ballots, with a "surviving" turnout of around 70% of the original turnout.
http://www.sfgov.org/site/uploadedfiles/election/RCV7.htm
From the links above, it seems obvious that the vast majority of exhausted ballots in these races were due to the 3-choice limit, and not from people voluntarily undervoting. So the low winning totals in these races are not really analogous to a low December turnout-- obviously we'll never know how many of the voters with exhausted ballots would have preferred the runner-up enough to vote in a December runoff (or how many with non-exhausted ballots would have stayed home).
Not that I place any great value on having a majority winner-- actually none, unless there is an outright first-choice majority evident on the ballots-- but this does does discount the idea of "guaranteeing a majority winner" as a selling point.
Bart
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