5. Dopp: Confusing, complex and time-consuming to implement and to count
IRV certainly is simpler for election officials
and voters than conducting a whole separate
runoff election to find a majority winner. It is
more complicated to administer than a single
vote-for-one election, but election officials
have adjusted well to their new
responsibilities. Note that the winning
threshold for an IRV election, as with any
election, must be specified in the law.
These are overall conclusions stated as fact by
someone who is highly biased, and who has a
history of very selective analysis and
cherry-picking of facts. I'd not agree that IRV
is "simpler" than a separate runoff. It may or
may not be more work, depends. Apples and
Oranges. A 23 candidate election with 19 rounds
of counting, done manually (and San Francisco had
to count its 2007 election manually), is insanely
time-consuming. San Francisco faced difficult
conditions, caused by nonpartisan races in
diverse neighborhood districts, and a majority
requirement with top-two runoff. Top-two runoff,
like IRV, together with nonpartisan races where
unaffiliated candidates can run without spoiling
elections, in a very politically active city, can
be expected to encourage many candidates to run.
San Franciscans clearly desired to keep the
majority requirement, and the voter information
pamphlet explaining 2002 Proposition A stated
that it was being kept. But it wasn't.
Proposition A actually struck the majority
requirement from the election code. And, lo and
behold, it turns out that the results from
nonpartisan IRV elections closely track Plurality
results. The first round leaders are uniformly
winning these elections. Coincidence? Maybe. But
the first round runners-up are remaining the same, too.
Think of it this way: a voter prefers a
relatively low-popularity candidate. Except for
that preference, how different is this voter from
the rest of the electorate? Turns out, not much.
I need to study this more carefully, but from the
work I've done so far, the lower preferences of
eliminated candidates seem to match the rest of
the population in terms of relative preferences
for remaining candidates. So I'd expect comeback
elections, under IRV, to be pretty rare under
conditions like those of San Francisco,
requiring, generally, a quite close race in first
preference. And, in fact, they aren't happening.
However, if it is a partisan election, the
picture changes. Often, the supporters of a third
party candidate would almost entirely prefer one
of the two major party candidates over the other.
The'Single Transferable Vote method,
single-winner, for nonpartisan races is,
essentially, a fish bicycle. It almost always
reproduces the results of Plurality. What benefit
it provides can be provide at much lower cost by
other reforms. Approval Voting is terminally
simple, requires no changes to voting equipment,
and is extremely easy to understand. In a
majority-required environment, it would simply
allow more majorities to be found, without any
fuss or expense, so it would definitely save
money over top-two runoff. The same is true for
Bucklin Voting, which uses the same three-rank
ballot as RCV in San Francisco, but simply finds
more majorities, because it is "instant runoff
approval." It's counted in rounds, but because
there are no candidate eliminations, and all the
votes are counted, it finds more majorities. This
can be seen with the San Francisco IRV results
for years prior to 2007. The 2007 results *still*
haven't been released in the form used in prior years, if I'm correct.
continued with Dopp: 6. Makes post election data
and exit poll analysis much more difficult to perform
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