[Election-Methods] Dopp: 4. “Confuses voters”

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

>4. Dopp: [IRV] “Confuses voters
”
>
>All the evidence shows that voters are not 
>confused by IRV. The rate of spoiled ballots did 
>not increase in any of the U.S. cities when they 
>switched to IRV. For example, Burlington (VT) 
>used IRV for the first time in a hotly contested 
>race for mayor in 2006, and among those casting 
>votes in the IRV race fully 99.9% of ballots 
>were valid, with the very highest valid ballot 
>rate in the ward in town with the highest number 
>of low-income voters. San Francisco’s rate of 
>valid ballots in the most closely contested race 
>in its first citywide election with IRV was 
>99.6%. Furthermore, exit polls have been 
>conducted in every city having an IRV election 
>for the first time in the modern era. Each 
>survey shows that voters overwhelmingly prefer 
>IRV to their old method of elections.

Classic political argument, a combination of 
anecdotal contradiction and actual deception. 
"All the evidence." Well, then there really 
shouldn't be any problem looking at that 
evidence, should there? Burlinton is an anecdote, 
and a confined one, implying that the most 
confused voters would, of course, be in the "ward 
in town with the highest number of low-income 
voters." I'm not going to examine the Burlington 
data today, simply for lack of time, but, 
instead, will look at the allegedly non-existence 
evidence in the other direction.

It's hard to get spoilage data from prior San 
Francisco elections. It's not shown in the 
spreadsheet, though one can derive the difference 
between the "turnout" and the sum of votes for the candidates.

In 2000 Supervisorial elections, total informal ballots were
District 1: 3983/24211 (5 listed candidates). runoff: 21/14394
District 2: 11136/38206 (2 listed candidates). 
won by Gavin Newsome by 26433 to 637 write-in.
let's take a look at a difficult district, District 10
District 9: 4120/23884 (12 listed candidates). runoff: 365/11014

Now, what about 2004, the first year for RCV:

District 1: 2636/31333 (1st choice, 7 listed 
candidates). A total of 5393 ballots did not 
contain a valid vote for the final runoff round.
District 2: 6623/40931 (1st choice, 5 listed 
candidates). won by Alito-Pier with 21103/34308.
District 9: 2262/26995 (1st choice, 6 listed 
candidates). won by Ammiano with 12547/24733.

What to make of these statistics. First of all, 
there is no real spoilage data here, for mixed in 
with true spoiled ballots are undervotes. 
Apparently that information is available, because 
there is an analysis of it at 
http://rangevoting.org/SPRates.html. What is 
shown there is an analysis of overvotes. 
Overvotes spoil ballots. The analyst did not 
count overvotes in lower ranks, which would 
affect vote transfers. He found 0.082% overvotes 
in the plurality races on the ballot (basis 
223,837 votes), compared to 0.60% overvotes on 
the IRV races (basis 1,294,721), which is statistically significant.

Undervotes are not necessarily errors. Overvotes 
generally are. To determine the fact here would 
require a far deeper study that I can do in a few hours.

There is a study at 
http://www.gregdennis.com/voting/sf_irv.pdf that 
goes into much more detail. I don't think one 
could read this study and come away with the 
conclusion, given by FairVote, that "All the 
evidence shows that voters are not confused by 
IRV." According to the paper, 14% of Latinos and 
27% of Asian voters, in exit polls conducted by 
the Chines American Voter Education Committee, 
found IRV difficult to use. Apparently, poll 
workers made errors in instructing voters.

The author of the paper points out that the 
ballot images do not reflect the actual patterns 
of votes on the ballots. In particular, marking a 
candidate in more than one column was expected to 
occur commonly. However, if one looks at the 
ballot images, apparently, no such votes are 
recorded. None. Why? The machines were programmed 
that way, they record such additional marks as 
undervotes. I'd think someone concerned about 
election security would be less than thrilled 
that the machines are "interpreting" the votes in creating the ballot images.

The other error that one might expect from the 
rather forbidding ballot (see the ballot image in 
the paper), is that voters would overvote, 
marking their three choices in a single column 
rather than in three separate columns. The 0.85% 
overvote rate is "high for the OPtech Eagle III-P 
precinct-based optical scan machines. In the 2002 
Gubernatorial election in Florida, the state's 
Division of Elections found these same machines 
to allow for only a 0.5% rate of overvoting.

Mr. Dennis then notes: "Closer inspect of the 
data ... seems to reveal something curious: 
overvotes are only followed by undervotes, never 
valid votes or other overvotes. He is referring 
to his "Table SF," which reports the voting 
patterns found from the ballot images: there are 
three possible vote categories for each rank: a 
single valid vote (V), an overvote (O), or an 
undervote (U). Representing a vote for an office 
by VVU, for example, means that the voter made a 
valid first choice vote, a valid second choice 
vote, and no third choice vote. Or VVO eans that 
the voter made the same vote as VVU, except that 
in the third rank the vote was overvoted, i.e, 
cast for more than one candidate. The pattern OVV 
does not show up in the ballot images. It turns 
out that this, too, was deliberately programmed 
that way, because an overvote in first choice 
invalidates that and all subsequent choices. 
I.e., if OVV is legally the same as OUU, why 
bother putting it in the "ballot image."

(Because it is suppose to be an image of the 
ballot! -- that's why!) In fact, these ballot 
images are preprocessed, they are not the raw ballot data.)

Dennis also points out that the San Francisco 
Poll Worker Manual contained an error which 
apparently caused poll workers to tell voters 
that they must vote for three candidates, or their vote wouldn't count.

Do these problems mean that we should not use IRV 
or another preferential ballot system? Not 
necessarily. But we should not deny that it may cause some confusion!

continued with " Dopp: 5.“Confusing, complex and 
time-consuming to implement and to count
”"