[Election-Methods] Dopp: 13:“Costly. ”

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

>Dopp: 13:“Costly. 
”
>
>The two main expenses associated with the 
>transition to IRV are voting equipment upgrades 
>and voter education. Both of these are one-time 
>costs that will be quickly balanced out by the 
>savings coming from eliminating a runoff 
>election in each election cycle. In San 
>Francisco, for example, the city and county 
>saved approximately $3 million by not holding a 
>separate runoff election in 2005, easily 
>covering the mostly one-time costs spent in 2003-2004 to implement the system.

There are some strong assumptions being made 
here. There are increased counting costs that are 
ongoing. Consider this: there are a number of 
jurisdictions, like Oakland, which have "adopted" 
IRV "pending implementation." I.e., if they can 
get the money to do the conversion and education. 
If it saves so much money, one would think it 
would be a good investment, that the City of Oakland would rush to do it.

There are a number of issues that get mashed together here.

First, twice FairVote mentioned Robert's Rules of 
Order as stating that Preferential Voting was 
more fair than Plurality. However, what they 
describe is the method of STV with a true 
majority requirement, the election will have to 
be repeated under some circumstances, i.e., 
where, after transfers, no candidate gains a 
majority of ballots cast, due to exhausted 
ballots. Robert's Rules doesn't just prefer 
repeated balloting if there is no majority found, 
it *requires* it. It takes a bylaw to change 
that. This is about majority rule, and some think 
that important. I know I do. And cities which 
have adopted Top-Two Runoff apparently think so 
too, and were willing to cover the extra cost for the benefits of that.

IRV does not find those majority winners. It's a 
trick, smoke and mirrors, making it look like 
there was a majority, if you only look at the 
last round, pretending that this was an actual 
runoff, where people show up and vote among those 
two options. But RCV, with a three-rank ballot, 
doesn't even allow some sincere voters that 
privilege. Further, in nonpartisan elections, and 
the vast majority of these RCV elections are 
actually nonpartisan, RCV tends very strongly to 
simple ratify the results of the first round, 
because the vote transfers tend to happen in the 
same ratio as the already existing votes. This is 
the point about partisan elections: voters and 
candidates aren't neatly organized by political 
preference, and, it turns out that, if C is 
eliminated, the C votes will be split up in about 
the same ratio as A:B already have.

In a real runoff, however, something different 
happens. I can theorize as to why that happens, 
but the fact is that it does. There are 
"comebacks." I found one-third comeback elections 
in my small study, FairVote, in a larger one, found 29%.

Let me say what this means to me. In something on 
the order of one-third of IRV elections that are 
taking place, there is an instant runoff. I think 
we can pretty much assume that the same 
proportion of runoffs would occur with TTR. And 
in a little less than one out of three runoffs 
there is a comeback. There are no comebacks 
happening in these nonpartisan IRV elections, and 
so I conclude that about one time out of ten, IRV 
is choosing the wrong winner, i.e., choosing a 
winner other than what democratic process, as 
recommended by Robert's Rules of Order, would 
choose. Robert's Rules of Order specifically 
notes this drawback of the STV method. It 
*greatly* prefers that there be repeated balloting.

IRV choosing the wrong winner isn't "rare." It's 
about one election out of ten. Those comebacks 
are important to democracy. And we've been 
deceived about them. Top-two runoff gives real 
room for third parties, if used for partisan 
elections. Consider what happens if a minor party 
candidate manages to move up to second place in 
the first round. Suddenly all bets are off. There 
will be a real campaign where the major party 
candidate involved will have to take the third 
party seriously. The supporters of the third 
party will be highly motivated to turn out to 
vote. It becomes a real race. This isn't just 
theory, it happens, in France for example.

We already have an advanced election system in 
place, it's called top-two runoff. We should use 
it more, not less. It can be improved. Using IRV 
for the first round would be an improvement, but 
pretty expensive. It looks like it would avoid 
less than one out of three runoffs. That's why I 
suggest Approval or Bucklin for the first round. 
Bucklin is probably the most efficient of the 
four methods (Plurality, IRV, Approval, and 
Bucklin) at finding majorities. The problem with 
IRV is that it conceals votes, some votes are 
never counted in determining the winner. Some 
second rank votes are important, some aren't. 
FairVote touts Later-no-Harm as a big feature of 
IRV, but, in fact, it is the cause of its 
failure, the cause of Robert's Rules criticism of the method.

In my mind, cost is an issue, but is secondary to 
democratic values. Majority rule is a basic 
democratic value. IRV has been sold as a way to 
satisfy "majority rule," but, if those who said 
that knew what they were talking about, they were 
lying. Most of those saying that are simply 
deceived, they haven't looked at the details, and 
you know what is said about the devil and the 
details. IRV frustrates majority rule almost as 
badly, i.e., as often, as Plurality can.

>In North Carolina, counties spent $3.5 million 
>for the Superintendent of Public Instruction 
>runoff in 2004, an election with a statewide 
>turnout of only 3%. In 2007, IRV elections in 
>Cary (NC) avoided the need for a runoff in one 
>of the city council districts that would have cost taxpayers $28,000.

Runoffs in Cary are held with the November 
general election. They are therefore relatively 
cheap. Did Cary save money? I haven't seen any 
analysis that shows that? They did have a lot of 
problems counting their experimental IRV election.

>An effective voter education program can also be 
>done for relatively little money by learning 
>from what types of education worked well in 
>other jurisdictions and what types did not – 
>with the biggest factors being a good ballot 
>design, clear voter instructions and effective 
>pollworker training, in that order. In a report 
>to the Vermont General Assembly, the Vermont 
>Secretary of State estimated that, based on how 
>well IRV was implemented in Vermont’s largest 
>city of Burlington in 2006, voter education for 
>statewide IRV in Vermont would cost less than 
>$0.25 per registered voter. In a city of more 
>than 100,000 people, Cary spent less than 
>$10,000 on voter education – with highly favorable reactions from voters.

The analysis is coming from someone paid to 
promote IRV. Indications I get from North 
Carolina is that Cary is not at all eager to repeat the experiment.

But the bottom line is that we could save a *lot* 
of money by not holding any elections at all. 
Couldn't we? Or how about selecting a random jury 
of twelve to make decisions? After all, we allow 
juries of twelve to make life and death decisions routinely.

>14. Dopp: “Increases the potential for 
>undetectable vote fraud and erroneous vote counts
"
>
>Actually, just the opposite is true, so long as 
>paper ballots (such as optical scan) are used. 
>The reason that any attempts at fraud are easier 
>to detect with IRV is that there is a redundant 
>electronic record (called a ballot image) of 
>each ballot that can be matched one-to-one with 
>the corresponding paper ballot. Cities such as 
>San Francisco (CA) and Burlington (VT) release 
>these ballot files so that any voter can do 
>their own count. Without such redundant ballot 
>records (which are not typical with vote-for-one 
>elections) there is no way to know for certain 
>if the paper ballots have been altered prior to a recount.

Dopp is the voting security expert, against Rob 
Richie, the huckster paid for years to promote 
IRV, regardless of whether it's an improvement or 
not, paying no attention to voting systems 
researchers and academics. "Any voter can do their own count"? Try it.

But this is an entirely different issue. Those 
ballot "images" aren't images. They are the 
result of ballot analysis by the equipment, not 
just the results of scans. They have been 
altered, that is, they do not show what marks 
were made on the paper unless those marks met 
certain rules. For example, if there is an 
overvote in first choice, but normal votes for 
second and third choice, all those subsequent 
votes are read by the equipment, I'm sure, but 
the equipment is then programmed to put undervotes into the "images."

Isn't that just slightly disturbing?

Continued with:
Dopp: 15. “Violates some election fairness principles
."