Wow, I had to laugh out loud after finally figuring out these instructions that Chris Telesca of NC sent me in this PDF doc:
"Instant Runoff Voting, Single‐Seat Contests, ES&S Optical Scan Tabulation Procedures" http://electionmathematics.org/em-IRV/NC/IRVcountingProced.pdf Aren't IRV proponents (of the most fundamentally unfair voting method that has ever been used) CLEVER! IRV proponents have figured out how to count a NC-style IRV election (where all but the top two candidates are dropped in the first round) in the polling locations on Election Night in a way that makes IRV-NC-style precinct-summable! Wow. I'm really impressed for once by the skills of the IRV proponents in figuring out a way to make round #2 of IRV precinct-summable - which works in the NC version of IRV because all but two candidates are eliminated in round #1. However, there are some issues with the IRV proponents' method for making IRV precinct-summable in this NC-style IRV contest that also restricts voters to ranking at most three candidates and therefore has at most two counting rounds altogether for a one-winner contest due to eliminating all but the two candidates who receive the most first choice votes (a method that could often eliminate the most popular majority candidate as happened recently in Burlington, VT http://rangevoting.org/Burlington.html) Here is what I'd like to ask about conducting these IRV precinct-summable counts for round #2: 1. Are election officials and poll workers genius-level enough and focused enough to comprehend the instructions and to follow them without making errors? Link to the virtually incomprehensible instructions is here: http://electionmathematics.org/em-IRV/NC/IRVcountingProced.pdf 2. Just how sturdy are the paper ballots? This "precinct-summable" IRV counting method requires (to accomplish just one counting round - round #2 only) feeding each ballot one at a time by hand through the precinct opti-scanners up to four times with the optical scanner needing a differently programmed PCMCIA card in it for each count for EACH IRV ELECTION CONTEST and poll workers must pay close attention to whether or not each ballot is "rejected" or "accepted" and put each ballot in a correct pile depending on which stack it comes from and whether it is rejected or accepted by the M100. (Note this is to only count ONE IRV counting round since the first round is assumed to be counted and all but the top two 1st choice vote-getters are "eliminated" in the first step of M100 reprogramming that the poll workers have to do between each count - as far as I could tell. In fact, the PCMCIA cards may also have to programmed or burned in three separate ways at the poll locs as well - the instructions left out crucial details of exactly how to "burn" the PCMCIA cards. 3. What an amazingly long time is it going to take to count all the ballots in each precinct for each of the IRV contests for just this one IRV round? I.e. the ballots would have to be accurately sorted into four piles during the first feed (one ballot at a time) into the precinct scanners, and then sorted into five piles (sorted to four piles coming out of the optiscanner plus one pile not run through it) during the second feed (one ballot at a time) into the precinct scanners, and then sorted into six total piles (sorted to three piles coming out of the optical scanner plus two piles not run through it this time) during the third feed (one ballot at a time) into the precinct scanners, and then sorted into seven total piles (sorted to two piles coming out of the optiscanner plus five piles not run through it this time (one ballot at a time) into the precinct scanners. It will be nothing short of a praise the Lord miracle if this process is performed accurately in all polling locations. The press might as well go home and come back in the a.m. and the poll workers might as well plan to stay up all night to try to get this process right for EACH IRV contest. I hope that they plan on an all-new shift of poll workers coming in to every polling place to accomplish this task of counting all the IRV contests by running the IRV ballots through the M100s one at a time four times for EACH contest and reprogramming M100s numerous times to do it. 4. Are the election officials going to create the three PCMCIA cards accurately for EACH precinct or poll loc for each IRV contest, label them accurately and make sure that the right card is inserted at the exact right time in the process? Purchases must be made of at least 3 extra PCMCIA cards for EACH polling place and buying 3 backup PCMCIA cards for each polling place would be helpful as well in case any of them fail when poll workers are trying to configure and burn them all. I suppose another option in case the poll workers can't figure it out, would be for the central county office to burn all the extra PCMCIA cards after it is known which candidates did not receive the top-two 1st choice votes and poll-workers can simply wait until someone from the county office delivers all the correctly programmed and correctly labeled PCMCIA cards. 5. How are the poll workers going to correctly reprogram the M100 optical scanners between each of the four separate counts they'll have to do for EACH IRV contest for EACH precinct or polling location (from what I can tell)? 6. Wow. I would LOVE to see what happens if the late-counted absentee, early, or provisional ballots changes who the top-two 1st choice vote winners are, and the entire polling location counts have to be thrown out and all the ballots have to be recounted! Lovely thought for all those poll workers who are going to stay up all night counting but whose counts may be entirely scrapped later on whenever the number of first choice votes is very close for the candidate with the second most and third most first choice votes! This should be an amusing MESS of gargantuan proportions if any NC township or county is INSANE enough to attempt counting IRV ballots by using this method!! AMAZING. No election official with any semblance of a right mind would support doing these procedures in all poll locs on election night IMO. Combined with the recent evidence from the Burlington Nov 2008 election showing how IRV (including the NC variety) fails to elect majority winners or solve the spoiler problem and can easily be nonmonotonic, I hope that this proposed process will kill IRV proposals, at least in NC. Eventually sanity may prevail. Notice how closely ES&S worked with IRV proponents to create these instructions. If only the voting vendors would work that closely with election integrity advocates - but then the financial benefits to voting vendors if IRV is adopted are enormous and the costs to election integrity and fairness of adopting IRV are enormous too. It is interesting to see from this document how poorly designed the ES&S programming of its machines is for doing things like checking the accuracy of its machine counts after elections though. ES&S obviously was given the same design specifications as Diebold, Hart Intercivic, Sequoia, were given. Cheers, -- Kathy Dopp The material expressed herein is the informed product of the author's fact-finding and investigative efforts. Dopp is a Mathematician, Expert in election audit mathematics and procedures; in exit poll discrepancy analysis; and can be reached at P.O. Box 680192 Park City, UT 84068 phone 435-658-4657 http://utahcountvotes.org http://electionmathematics.org http://kathydopp.com/serendipity/ Post-Election Vote Count Audit A Short Legislative & Administrative Proposal http://electionmathematics.org//ucvAnalysis/US/paper-audits/Vote-Count-Audit-Bill-2009.pdf History of Confidence Election Auditing Development & Overview of Election Auditing Fundamentals http://electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/US/paper-audits/History-of-Election-Auditing-Development.pdf Voters Have Reason to Worry http://utahcountvotes.org/UT/UtahCountVotes-ThadHall-Response.pdf ---- Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
