Warren, Regarding the number of valid ballots in the Burlington IRV mayoral election:
(I doubt anyone else is interested in this, but I will post it to the list just in case.) Now I understand the source of your confusion about the number and rate of "valid" ballots. The word "valid" has more than one possible usage. the Choice Plus Pro software web output posted on the Burlington web site uses a non-standard definition...it includes all of the four (although actually discovered in the recount to be only one) first round exhausted ballots (that the scanner detected two ovals marked in the first choice column) as "valid," because they were genuinely cast by voters and could be incorporated into the algorithm. We however refer to these as "invalid" ballots, meaning ballots which were cast with an intent to participate in the contest, but were apparently miss-marked so as to make the voter intent uncertain. However also note that four different ballot cards were BLANK...the voters completely skipped this particular race and didn't vote at all. Choice Plus Pro unfortunately uses the term "invalid" where as it should use the standard election administration and legal term "blank" to describe these four blank ballots. If you look at the actual ballot data, you will see 8,980 ballots with rankings marked, and four blank ballots with no votes at all. If one adds in the four blank ballot papers, the total is 8,984. Since voters often skip some races, and no jurisdiction in the U.S. that I am aware of includes blank ballots in the base for calculating spoilage rates, our analysis focuses on the 8,980 ballots that were cast for this particular contest. Of these, the recount showed that at most one was an invalid over-vote...thus the rate of 99.99% valid. Finally, you can find the results of the recount on the city's web site www.burlingtonvotes.org. They are labeled as uncertified, because the city attorney says state law has specific requirements for completion, and a certification form to be signed by the Board of Civil Authority at the end of the recount. Since Kurt Wright, the petitioner, called a stop to the recount at the half-way point, the partial results could not legally be called official or certified. But the fact remains that the three ballots the vote scanner identified as invalid over-votes in Ward 1, were in fact found, and determined to have only stray marks in the write-in oval, and in fact to be valid votes, that were added to the candidate totals during the recount. I hope this clarifies the situation. Terry Bouricius ----- Original Message ----- From: "Warren Smith" <[email protected]> To: "election-methods" <[email protected]> Sent: Sunday, March 29, 2009 5:02 PM Subject: [EM] Burlington 2009 IRV election pathologies - updated web page Bouricius and Richie ("FairVote") objected to the fact that many of the lies in their multiyear propaganda/lying campaign to mislead millions about IRV had been refuted by us by analysing IRV's pathologies in the Burlington 2009 mayoral election. (A lot of the FairVote lies are conveniently outlined in GREEN in our http://rangevoting.org/Burlington.html and http://rangevoting.org/BurlResponses.html pages; more are documented at, e.g, http://rangevoting.org/Irvtalk.html .) Although most of their new objections were as-pathetic and misleadling as their usuals, they did contribute one correct one. As a result, we have added the following "update" section to this page: http://rangevoting.org/BurlResponses.html#update -- Warren D. Smith http://RangeVoting.org <-- add your endorsement (by clicking "endorse" as 1st step) and math.temple.edu/~wds/homepage/works.html ---- Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info ---- Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
