A voting rights amendment has just been passed, which requires that everyone's vote be counted.
If a vote is a voted preference, then IRV ignores many votes. If your vote in IRV is your traveling IRV vote, then it seems meaningless to only require counting your vote, because a count rule could put your vote wherever it wants to, and count it there :-) Maybe your vote in IRV means your entire ballot, which must be counted by the same rules as any other ballot. In that case, the amendment says nothing about any count rule. But can't there be count rules that unfairly don't count votes in some way? If so, those count rules make nonsense of the amendment's protection purpose. Since the balloting is one that expresses many pairwise preferences, it seems reasonable to argue that a pairwise preference is the vote that the voting rights initiative should protect. There's also the federal Constitution provision requiring equal protection under the law, and it could be argued that uncounted pairwise preference votes on a pairwise ballot amount to unequal protection in that election. Maybe SF's opposition groups could get an attorney to pursue these questions. Maybe IRV opposition groups in Vermont could hire attorneys to pursue the "equal protection" approach. I believe that uncounted preferences genuinely violate at least the spirit of those provisions. Mike Ossipoff _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp.
