[Election-Methods] Dopp: 5.“Confusing, complex and time-consuming to implement and to count”

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

>
>5. Dopp: “Confusing, complex and time-consuming to implement and to count
”
>
>IRV certainly is simpler for election officials 
>and voters than conducting a whole separate 
>runoff election to find a majority winner. It is 
>more complicated to administer than a single 
>vote-for-one election, but election officials 
>have adjusted well to their new 
>responsibilities. Note that the winning 
>threshold for an IRV election, as with any 
>election, must be specified in the law.

These are overall conclusions stated as fact by 
someone who is highly biased, and who has a 
history of very selective analysis and 
cherry-picking of facts. I'd not agree that IRV 
is "simpler" than a separate runoff. It may or 
may not be more work, depends. Apples and 
Oranges. A 23 candidate election with 19 rounds 
of counting, done manually (and San Francisco had 
to count its 2007 election manually), is insanely 
time-consuming. San Francisco faced difficult 
conditions, caused by nonpartisan races in 
diverse neighborhood districts, and a majority 
requirement with top-two runoff. Top-two runoff, 
like IRV, together with nonpartisan races where 
unaffiliated candidates can run without spoiling 
elections, in a very politically active city, can 
be expected to encourage many candidates to run.

San Franciscans clearly desired to keep the 
majority requirement, and the voter information 
pamphlet explaining 2002 Proposition A stated 
that it was being kept. But it wasn't. 
Proposition A actually struck the majority 
requirement from the election code. And, lo and 
behold, it turns out that the results from 
nonpartisan IRV elections closely track Plurality 
results. The first round leaders are uniformly 
winning these elections. Coincidence? Maybe. But 
the first round runners-up are remaining the same, too.

Think of it this way: a voter prefers a 
relatively low-popularity candidate. Except for 
that preference, how different is this voter from 
the rest of the electorate? Turns out, not much. 
I need to study this more carefully, but from the 
work I've done so far, the lower preferences of 
eliminated candidates seem to match the rest of 
the population in terms of relative preferences 
for remaining candidates. So I'd expect comeback 
elections, under IRV, to be pretty rare under 
conditions like those of San Francisco, 
requiring, generally, a quite close race in first 
preference. And, in fact, they aren't happening.

However, if it is a partisan election, the 
picture changes. Often, the supporters of a third 
party candidate would almost entirely prefer one 
of the two major party candidates over the other.

The'Single Transferable Vote method, 
single-winner, for nonpartisan races is, 
essentially, a fish bicycle. It almost always 
reproduces the results of Plurality. What benefit 
it provides can be provide at much lower cost by 
other reforms. Approval Voting is terminally 
simple, requires no changes to voting equipment, 
and is extremely easy to understand. In a 
majority-required environment, it would simply 
allow more majorities to be found, without any 
fuss or expense, so it would definitely save 
money over top-two runoff. The same is true for 
Bucklin Voting, which uses the same three-rank 
ballot as RCV in San Francisco, but simply finds 
more majorities, because it is "instant runoff 
approval." It's counted in rounds, but because 
there are no candidate eliminations, and all the 
votes are counted, it finds more majorities. This 
can be seen with the San Francisco IRV results 
for years prior to 2007. The 2007 results *still* 
haven't been released in the form used in prior years, if I'm correct.

continued with Dopp: 6. “Makes post election data 
and exit poll analysis much more difficult to perform
”