Voting Methods Friends, I don't get into the nitty gritty details of voting methods like most of you on this list do, but I am just trying to nip some big problems in the bud before serious problems are added via IRV elections to the huge amount of problems existing already in US voting systems which we've not been able to solve yet.
I have taken the extensive email rebuttals to Fair Vote by Adb ul and extracted from them to create an appendix in version 2 of my paper that responds to Fair Vote's "Debunking". Please do Not Forward this email yet because this is only a draft release to see what you think, which I will send out tomorrow or Tuesday for real. I apologize for not having more time and energy to make a more flawless paper to do the subject of election methods more justice, but this is all the time I have for this subject for now, and I have already spent five times the amount that I'd planned. So what do you think about this draft press release and the revised version of my report on the flaws & benefits of IRV? --- RELEASE: Report Criticizing Alternative Voting Method Draws Fire, Flames Internet Debate - Second Version Released With New Title "Worrisome Realities Mar Alternate Voting Method - 17 Flaws and 3 Benefits of Instant Runoff Voting" By The National Election Data Archive Park City, UT June 16, 2008 Last Monday, June 9. 2008, the National Election Data Archive released a report "15 Flaws and 3 Benefits of Instant Runoff Voting or Ranked Choice Voting". The report flamed debate on the "blogosphere" and in Internet email discussion groups. In an Internet war of words, the organization Fair Vote posted a web page entitled "De-Bunking Kathy Dopp's 15 Flaws of Instant Runoff Voting" See http://www.fairvote.org/dopp On the other hand, computer scientists, voting system experts, and election methods experts provided more information and insight and suggested three additional flaws of instant runoff voting: 1. IRV cannot be implemented without modification to the ballots or to the optical scan machines or their software; 2. IRV is unstable and can be delicately sensitive to noise in voters' rankings; and 3. IRV does not always find a majority winner, whereas real runoff elections would. Instant runoff voting (IRV) is a method for counting ranked choice ballots where each "vote" is a rank ordering of the candidates. IRV counting proceed in "rounds" where the candidate with the fewest votes in each round is eliminated and that candidate's votes are reassigned to the remaining candidates using voters' lower-ranked choices. Instant runoff voting is promoted as solving the "spoiler" problem of a non-winning candidate who changes an election outcome by splitting the vote. Kathy Dopp, the report's author, concludes that "Instant runoff voting is a threat to the fairness, accuracy, timeliness, and economy of U.S. elections". Dopp became concerned about the problems with instant runoff voting and about five weeks ago after learning that several State Leagues of Women Voters had endorsed instant runoff voting methods, and that the League of Women Voters, U.S. was considering its use, and decided to write a brief research report on it. Dopp believes that "We already have too many problems with U.S. voting systems that need to be solved, without introducing more problems." The report has drawn a lot of heat, including a threat to oust Dopp from the political party she is currently registered in. Dopp's finding that, "IRV fails to eliminate the spoiler problem …." was countered by Fair Vote's web page which stated that "In fact, IRV solves the spoiler problem in virtually all likely U.S. partisan elections… whenever a third party or independent candidate is unlikely to be one of the top vote-getters." Fair Vote also countered Dopp's statement that IRV requires state-level vote tallying, by responding that "all that is required to implement IRV is central coordination of the tally. If ballot images are recorded on optical scan equipment, the data from those images can be collected centrally for an IRV ballot. If a hand-count is conducted, vote totals need to be reported to a central tallying office in order to determine what step to take next in the count." Fair Vote added that "If the Electoral College were abolished and IRV were then adopted for future national popular vote elections for president, there would need to be national coordination of the tally in order to know which candidates got the fewest votes nationwide and needed to be eliminated". Countering Dopp's statement that "IRV Violates some election fairness principles" Fair Vote said that "Every single voting method ever devised must violate some "fairness principles". Due to all these Internet responses, the revised report differentiates between the ballot style and the counting method and focuses more on IRV, discusses alternative voting methods in a new appendix contributed to by computer voting system experts, describes an "IRV-like" solution that would solve some of IRV's counting problems, provides a more precise definition of "spoiler", and responds to Fair Vote's attempt to rebut the first version of the report in a new appendix. The National Election Data Archive report makes the same conclusion as before, that "Instant runoff voting (IRV) is not worthy of consideration and its use should be avoided" because "there are simpler, fairer, less costly, more auditable alternative voting methods." The National Election Data Archive recommends restoring the fundamental integrity of elections before implementing any alternative voting methods, and reminds readers that not one U.S. State today utilizes sufficient measures to ensure fundamental election integrity such as: * public access to all election records and data necessary to evaluate the integrity of the electoral process, * observable post-election independent manual audits of machine vote counts, * post-election ballot reconciliation of all printed, counted, unused, and spoiled ballots with voter process records, and * public oversight of ballot security. Version two of the report "17 Flaws and 3 Benefits of Instant Runoff Voting" is eleven (11) pages long plus acknowledgments, appendices and endnotes and has two new appendices "Voting Methods Worth Considering", and "Rebuttals to Fair Vote's 'De-Bunking Kathy Dopp's 15 Flaws of Instant Runoff Voting'". The full report is found on-line at http://electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/US/RCV-IRV/InstantRunoffVotingFlaws.pdf This press release will be posted online at http://electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/US/RCV-IRV/FlawsIRV-PressRelease-V2.pdf Press Contact: Kathy Dopp 435-658-4657 [EMAIL PROTECTED] The National Election Data Archive is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organized for educational and scientific purposes of promoting fair and accurate elections by researching, developing and promoting methods and procedures to detect voter disenfranchisement and vote count inaccuracy. Such methods include independent manual vote count audits, exit poll discrepancy analysis, and the public release and scientific analysis of election data along with public release of election records necessary to verify the integrity of elections. ---- Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
