IRV: Dead or alive?

The Secretary of State of Washington has procedures in place for provisional certification of software that has not been federally certified. This procedure was used in 2004 for software for all of the jurisdictions in the state. There were no IRV elections in the state of Washington in 2004. The procedures used in the state of Washington were on place before IRV became the law in Pierce County. The federal certification process appears to be broken since no software has been certified in years. The Secretary of State in 2004 was required to change our method of electing people at the last minute due to changes in the law. No county had federally certified software due to the last minute nature of the change and the broken federal certification process. During the state review of the Sequoia software, a flaw was discovered in one of the machines. Sequioa has been able to put together a fix. However, Pierce County will NOT be using those machines in counting ballots in 2008. The Pierce County Auditor is being very conservative in the implementation of Ranked Choice Voting. Those of us in Pierce County are looking forward to a historic election. Ranked Choice Voting and other factors has led to some very competitive elections. In one race in particular, I would not want to have to list just one choice as we have several strong candidates. Ranked Choice Voting is improving democracy in Pierce County.

Wishing for something isn't the same thing as actually having it. It's the same for certification - applying for certification isn't the same thing as actually having it. And there simply is no federally certified software or election systems (software and hardware) that will tabulate IRV. It's just that simple. There is no guarantee that those machines will work as advertised. There are already problems with those machines counting a limited number of votes in the testing process, so anyone who is relying on equipment and software to count votes that isn't yet certified and tested in real-world situations is putting their elections at risk. That is the big problem with IRV in American-style long ballot elections. It's all been done in small boutique-style elections with uncertified software borrowed from someone else on the cheap or tweaked to make IRV appear easier than it really is. FairVote's own Rob RIchie testified in April that a lot of optical scan systems don’t capture ballot images that they would need to do in order to tabulate IRV in the machines - instead of doing 100% hand tabulation. So your community runs the risk of requiring IRV and possibly not having the elections systems to tabulate IRV - which means hand tabulation. And if your community holds off on doing IRV until the system is ready - FairVote will threaten to sue your ass. They did that in San Francisco, so there is no reason to assume they wouldn't do it in your community. http://gopetition.com/petitions/oppose-instant-runoff-voting.html

If you really wanna know how the FairVote people felt about the "good election people of San Francisco", you owe it to yourself to check out this link - it's one complaint after another from FairVote about how San Francisco election administrators were getting ready for IRV - check it out here: http://instantrunoff.blogspot.com/2008/07/all-for-instant-runoff-how-fair-vote.html You can read for yourself that FairVote admonished the "good elections people" for not going to them for expertise on IRV. You can read how the FairVote people sued the "good elections people" for not implementing IRV fast enough. The FairVote people repeatedly admonish ED Arntz for not going with central op-scan tabulators or touchscreens - something they now claim they never wanted for IRV anywhere. You can read how FairVote claims that the Arntz process (counting the first column in the precinct and then subsequent columns in a central location) was a poor decision - but that is exactly what they are recommending for IRV elections in NC and probably elsewhere. This piece - taken directly from the FairVote website - shows once and for all that FairVote knows that IRV works best on op-scan with central tabulation or DRE touchscreens - that is what they recommended after all. But that is not what they are telling voters in North Carolina, and I bet that is not what they are telling voters up where you live. So if your elections officials want to stay on FairVote's good side, you had better implement IRV really fast, even if it's illegal or unconstitutional. That is the only way for you to become and remain "good people" in FairVote's opinion.

Hill's statement is incorrect. He says "Secondly, the algorithm was not flawed at all but has worked well in all four years — and over some 19 races — in which IRV has been used." But the Secretary of State of Califoronia said the IRV software algorithm was flawed in a memo dated June 20, 2007: "An anomaly in the RCV algorithm concerning the elimination of the lowest ranking candidates who are tied." http://www.sfgov.org/site/elections_index.asp?id=62751 (With IRV as complex as it is, it would be hard to detect other flaws or anomalies, especially since IRV election results are not always intuitive. Voters Unite reports on flaws found in Pierce Co's new IRV software in (http://www.votersunite.org/info/uptherabbithole.asp) and (http://www.votersunite.org/info/TheisenTestimony5-23-08.pdf) Astonishingly, Stephen Hill later attacked California SOS Debra Bowen for the security measures she required in order to protect voters from problems with the voting machines. Here is the article in which Hill is attacking Debra Bowen: "S.F. supervisors blamed for blocking new voting system" John Wildermuth, Chronicle Staff Writer Friday, September 21, 2007 … The tough restrictions put on the use of the company's voting system in San Francisco are borderline ridiculous given how few people are likely to run into the problems with the ink, said Steven Hill, director of the political reform program of the New America Foundation. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/09/21/MN8ASA8T4.DTL SOS Bowen sought to protect voters from another flaw found in the machines. SF had used to tally IRV is that the optical scanners could only read certain types of ink, so if a polling place had the wrong ink pens, votes might go unread by the machines. The security measures slowed the counting of the votes. Sadly because of IRV/RCV, San Francisco's priority in selecting voting machines is that first the machine must have IRV software, because IRV is so hard to count manually. Other considerations such as meeting state or federal standards for voting systems, accuracy, and cost - all play second fiddle. San Fran's new voting machines made by Sequoia - are not federally certified either. For all of the complications of IRV RCV - voters aren't marking additional choices, election costs are still high, turnout is down, and politics is nasty as usual. The one time IRV actually elected someone in San Francisco, the winner turned out to not even live in the district he was running for. Perhaps no one noticed - since the field of candidates was so large. So Ed Jew won, by asking people to rank him 2nd, and then he served a brief time before being arrested for bribery and extortion by the FBI, and then went to prison.

The NC League of Women Voters never heard a great deal from Joyce McCloy. Can you prove the accuracy of that statement? They probably heard from your fellow-traveler Bob Hall or other folks from DemocracyNC, or maybe even someone from FairVote (or your local affiliate FairVoteNC). I know for a fact that the NC State Board of Elections was running around NC promoting IRV like some carnival huckster selling patent medicine at the county fair - claiming it's the remedy for whatever ails you. And what's wrong with being an opponent of IRV? There are two sides to every issue. Why do you feel you have to badmouth people who don't agree with you? And I do remember that the LWV at one time endorsed sticking with paperless touchscreen voting machines even after we had experienced election meltdowns in Florida and even here in NC in 2004. I guess it all depends on who they do and do not have access to. And so if they only listen to one side of the issue - as apparently they did in NC - it's only natural they would vote to endorse IRV. That's what happens when a group like FairVote sucks all the oxygen out of the room.

IRV is NOT the only way to ensure fair and impartial elections. Here in Cary, IRV was used to declare a winner with less than a majority of the vote - despite the fact that IRV advocates claimed that IRV ensures a winner gets a 50% plus one vote majority win. Our Cary IRV race involved 3022 first column votes. 50% of that number is 1511, and 50% plus one vote is 1512. No one crossed that threshold after all the first column votes were counted. By the time the second and third column votes were tabulated, no one had 1512. But they declared a winner anyway. But there was a discrepancy between the final vote count the Wake BOE and observers (me included) had come up with. The next day, the BOE claimed to have done an audit - but it wasn't done in public. They claim the discrepancy in the previous day's vote count was due to a calculator error. Then they claimed that they missed a few votes in the previous day's tabulation, but not enough to make a difference. But the thing that bothers me the most is that the "audit" took place out of the public eye. The observers caught the numbers problem - but we weren't notified of or allowed to observe the retabulation of the ballots. For all we know, one person could have locked themselves in their office and counted the ballots in secret. That is hardly fair or impartial. Do you want to trust that for our elections? In my experience, as someone who has actually attended my county BOE meetings and seen how our county handled the Cary IRV election, I can say that IRV leads to lower standards for election accountability.