Greg Abbott wrote, "I don't think IRV fits in a DFL endorsing
convention right now. First, an endorsement requires 60 percent, not 50
percent. It's not clear to me how IRV would work in a super-majority
situation. Standard IRV says the lowest vote getter's votes are
reallocated according to preference until someone gets above 50 percent.
In a 60 percent situation, however, I could see that leading to having
only 2 candidates remaining, one with 58 percent, the other 42 percent,
for example. At that point, should candidate B's votes be reallocated to
see if candidate A can get over 60 percent? .... Lastly, I suspect that
the rules of the DFL would have to be amended in order to permit IRV (or
so I've been told). The only body with the authority to do that would be
the City Convention (assuming -- a big if -- that we wouldn't have to go
through the state DFL central committee). A ward convention cannot amend
the city DFL rules on its own. This raises the specter of a DFL
endorsement obtained through IRV being declared invalid, and having to
do the convention over entirely."
[BRM] Greg's very thoughtful post raises some issues that I have
been wondering about too.
I don't think the issue is that the City DFL Party's
constitution, bylaws, or other rules would need to be amended in order
to accommodate instant-runoff voting. Nothing in those documents
inherently prohibits instant-runoff voting or any other alternative
voting system. The issue, as far as I can tell, is that an endorsement
takes a supermajority of 60 percent. (That provision comes from the
State DFL Constitution, so neither a ward convention, nor the City
Central Committee, nor even a City Convention can change it.) And I'm
not aware of any system of instant-runoff voting that can satisfy that
requirement.
I too favor instant-runoff voting. I served for several years on
the FairVote Minnesota board (http://www.fairvotemn.org/), and I wrote
my law-school dissertation on preferential voting. I hope that the City
DFL Party, the City of Minneapolis, and the State of Minnesota will
adopt it *for elections that occur by simple majority*. The City Party
could, for example, elect its officers using instant-runoff voting.
But I don't know of any IRV-type system that works when the
threshold for election is greater than a simple majority. If, as in
Greg's example, you impose a drop rule against a candidate with 40
percent or more, then you have effectively circumvented the
60-percent-for-endorsement requirement, if only one candidate is left
standing and that candidate got less than 60 percent. I don't believe
that such a process satisfies the requirement that an endorsement takes
a supermajority of 60 percent.
I can imagine an IRV-type system that narrows the field to two
or more candidates. But I can't imagine an IRV-type system that will
reliably result in a single candidate with a supermajority of 60
percent. I'm more than willing to be proven wrong, if someone can
illustrate such a system, but absent such an illustration then I don't
see how a convention can adopt an instant-runoff-voting system and still
comply with the rule that an endorsement takes a supermajority of 60
percent.
BRM
Brian Melendez, Chair,
Minneapolis DFL Party
Lowry Hill (Ward 7)
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