[Election-Methods] Dopp: 2. “Requires centralized vote counting procedures at the state-level"

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

>2. Dopp: “Requires centralized vote counting procedures at the state-level
"
>
>IRV creates no need to centralize the counting 
>or the ballots themselves, although that is one 
>possible counting procedure -- and indeed a 
>central count is often sensible for smaller 
>jurisdictions. But 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. In Ireland, for example, there are 43 
>counting centers in the presidential race. 
>Election administrators count ballots and report 
>their totals to a national office that in turn 
>instructs the administrators at each counting 
>center on what to do next. The entire process 
>takes less than a day even though more than a million ballots are cast.

Dopp overstated it, I think, but she is still 
technically correct. Counting must be centralized 
in some way. What FairVote describes is a system 
where actual ballot counting takes place in 
regional centers, but the counting is coordinated 
and controlled centrally. The results of each 
round of counting can be found locally, once the 
result of the previous round is known, and then 
transmitted to the central facility. All ballots 
must be counted for each round, in some cases, 
before the next round can be counted. (Consider 
absentee ballots. IRV creates many opportunities 
for ties, and so it becomes far more likely that 
a few votes can turn a round result, and then 
*the next rounds must be recounted.*. With a 
summable method, a few votes will ordinarily not 
turn a result. Such an effect becomes far more likely with IRV.

Now, as to Ireland's elections. There are not a 
lot of examples to look at. The Irish President 
is largely a ceremonial office. The last 
President was elected in 1997, and the elections 
take place every 7 years. What happened in 2004? 
She ran unopposed. That ought to give you a clue. 
Now, with some searching, I found some 
information on the counting of the ballots. It 
took one day to count one round. Not the whole 
election. Because no candidate got a majority in 
the first round, the result, though predictable, 
wasn't clear until the next day. So call that two 
days, not one. Now, a lot of mischief has been 
done by using the same name for what is a whole 
family of methods. What is good about one can 
then be attributed, even if falsely, to all of 
them. And what is bad about one can then be 
blamed on the peculiarities of that one. 
Inventing the term "instant runoff voting," not 
used with any frequency to speak of before 1996, 
was brilliant as a political move.

The method used in Ireland is the Contingent 
Vote. There cannot be more than two rounds of 
counting, because all but the top two are 
eliminated in one step, if there is no majority in the first round.

But it isn't so fast, necessarily. In San 
Francisco, one election required 19 rounds of 
eliminations, as I recall. They took a month, I 
think, to issue the results. A far simpler 
method, using the same three-rank ballot as IRV, 
but far more flexibly, would be Bucklin voting. 
And much, much simpler to count. While FairVote 
claims that Later-no-harm failure for Bucklin 
will cause wide strategic voting (bullet voting), 
I think that actually quite unlikely. These are 
nonpartisan elections. There is nothing wrong 
with voting only for your favorite, if you think 
that's best. But I think many, many voters won't. 
And if you do get a majority of votes, you 
actually had a majority of voters voting for the 
candidate, which is not true with the false "last 
round majority" reported by IRV>

To be continued, with: Dopp: 3. “Encourages the 
use of complex voting systems and
 [FairVote promotes] electronic-balloting
”