On Jun 12, 2008, at 12:53 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
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.
SF has always been notoriously slow to finish their counts and certify the results. More than one registrar has lost their job over it. Do you have reason to believe that it's actually taking significantly longer since IRV was implemented? The 1999 city election took three weeks to count.
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.
While that's true in theory (all California local elections are nominally nonpartisan), it's far from true in fact, at least in political cities like San Francisco. Case in point: when now-mayor Newsom was running against Matt Gonzalez, and looked like a real threat (Matt forced a runoff in those pre-IRV days), Bill Clinton and Al Gore both came to town to campaign against Gonzalez, a registered Green. So did Jesse Jackson, Dianne Feinstein, and Nancy Pelosi.
Nonpartisan? Hardly.
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>
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