7. Dopp: Difficult and time-consuming to manually count
Manual counts can take slightly longer than
vote-for-one elections, but aren't difficult,
unless many different races on a ballot need to
go to a runoff count. As cited earlier, Irish
election administrators can count more than a
million ballots by hand in hotly contested
presidential elections in one standard workday.
"Slightly"? Most hand-counted elections are done
in a few hours, I think, because they can be
counted precinct by precinct, and the totals
added up. That summation doesn't work with IRV
when it goes into runoff rounds, because the
results of one round then control how the next
round is counted. So all precincts must wait for
a central facility, collecting the results from
all precints or counting stations, to complete
the first round and report eliminations, before
they count the next round. If an error is made
that affects an elimination, all counts done
depending on the incorrect elimination must be
redone. An error anywhere can affect the next round counting in all precincts.
Now, about that Irish Presidential election.
FairVote misrepresented it. The last contested
presidential election was in 1997, and it took
two days to count it, not one. And it is
Contingent Vote, though they call it Alternative
Vote, I think, which is easier to count than most
IRV proposals for the U.S. (Another example of
the slipperiness in the name "Instant-runoff
voting.) This method only has two rounds, all
eliminations are done in a batch, leaving the top
two for the last round. I wrote the following in
another response to these arguments which had
been forwarded to a list that Kathy Dopp participates in:
Um, hotly contested? See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_presidential_election,_2004, which has:
The Irish presidential election of 2004 was set
for <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_22>22
October <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004>2004.
However, nominations closed at noon on
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_1>1 October
and the incumbent
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/President_of_Ireland>president,
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_McAleese>Mary
McAleese, who had nominated herself in accordance
with the provisions of the
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_Ireland>Constitution,
was the only person nominated. Accordingly she
was re-elected for a second seven-year term of
office without the need to hold a poll. This is
the third time a president has been returned
unopposed, following
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sean_T._O%27Kelly>President
O'Kelly in
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1952>1952 and
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Hillery>President
Hillery in
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983>1983.
President McAleese's re-inauguration took place
on <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/November_11>11 November.
Okay, what about the previous Irish Presidential election?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_presidential_election%2C_1997
McAleese won that one with a reported 45.24% of
the first preference vote, with her closest rival
having 29.30% of that vote. From my experience
examining IRV elections, there is about zero
chance that the rival could come back and win,
with McAleese having less than 5% to go. If we
assume that the closest rival stays the
runner-up, what generally happens is that the
vote transfers later go roughly according to the
early preference ratios, so, without knowing the
final results after transfers, other things being
equal, I'd predict that McAleese would get
(45.24%)*(100% - 45.24% - 29.30%) of the vote in
the last round (neglecting exhausted ballots
entirely), and would thus win an additional
11.52% of the vote from transfers, giving her a
total of 56.76% of the vote. It will be
interesting to see the actual results when I have
a chance. What was "hotly contested about this is
that there were five candidates altogether, which
is the most that have ever been seen. But it certainly was not close.
According to one source, McAleese ended up, in
the second round, with 58.7% on second count.
Pretty close to prediction. With an election that
is truly "hotly contested," there would have been
three rounds, not two, so the counting would have
taken almost half again as long. If no mistakes
were made. [This was incorrect, because at that
point I had not discovered that the method was
Contingent Vote.] (Fewer rounds occur when more
than one candidate gets such a low vote count
that coming back to survive is impossible, this
is called "batch elimination.") In San Francisco,
there were *19* rounds of counting in one
election! (There were 22 candidates. Both top-two
runoff and IRV seem to encourage larger numbers
of candidates to run, since they can do so
without spoiling the election. Is that a good
thing? Probably. But it's also expensive, and
explains why San Francisco had so many runoff elections before IRV.)
However, other things aren't necessarily equal,
and this is a partisan election, so, in 1990,
there was indeed a "comeback" election, the first
preference leader lost to the runner-up. As we
might expect, there appears to have been
vote-splitting between the two runner-up parties,
resolved by the STV method. Without knowing more
about Irish politics -- I know practically
nothing -- I think chances are good that this was a proper result.
Now, how long did it take to count these
elections? Well, 2004 was pretty easy! No
ballots. 1997 was two rounds. See
http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/9710/31/ireland.elex/index.html.
"Voters cast ballots Thursday, and when the first
round of counting was finished Friday, McAleese
had 45.2 percent of the vote, easily besting
second-place finisher Mary Banotti, who had 29.3
percent. Three other candidates trailed far behind.
Under the Irish election system, voters selected
both a first and a second choice in the
presidential race. After the first count, the
three trailing candidates were eliminated and a
second round of counting took place, with their
votes redistributed to voters' second
preferences. A candidate had to win a majority to claim the presidency."
Continued with
Dopp: 8. Difficult and inefficient to manually audit
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