[Election-Methods] draft press release #2 re. my revised IRV flaws paper

[Kathy Dopp]

Voting Methods Friends,

I don't get into the nitty gritty details of voting methods like most
of you on this list do, but I am just trying to nip some big problems
in the bud before serious problems are added via IRV elections to the
huge amount of problems existing already in US voting systems which
we've not been able to solve yet.

I have taken the extensive email rebuttals to Fair Vote by Adb ul and
extracted from them to create an appendix in version 2 of my paper
that responds to Fair Vote's "Debunking".

Please do Not Forward this email yet because this is only a draft
release to see what you think, which I will send out tomorrow or
Tuesday for real. I apologize for not having more time and energy to
make a more flawless paper to do the subject of election methods more
justice, but this is all the time I have for this subject for now, and
I have already spent five times the amount that I'd planned.

So what do you think about this draft press release and the revised
version of my report on the flaws & benefits of IRV?
---

RELEASE:  Report Criticizing Alternative Voting Method Draws Fire,
Flames Internet Debate - Second Version Released With New Title
"Worrisome Realities Mar Alternate Voting Method - 17 Flaws and 3
Benefits of Instant Runoff Voting"

By The National Election Data Archive
Park City, UT June 16, 2008

Last Monday, June 9. 2008, the National Election Data Archive released
a report "15 Flaws and 3 Benefits of Instant Runoff Voting or Ranked
Choice Voting". The report flamed debate on the "blogosphere" and in
Internet email discussion groups.  In an Internet war of words, the
organization Fair Vote posted a web page entitled "De-Bunking Kathy
Dopp's 15 Flaws of Instant Runoff Voting" See
http://www.fairvote.org/dopp

On the other hand, computer scientists, voting system experts, and
election methods experts provided more information and insight and
suggested three additional flaws of instant runoff voting:

1.	IRV cannot be implemented without modification to the ballots or to
the optical scan machines or their software;

2.	IRV is unstable and can be delicately sensitive to noise in voters'
rankings; and

3.	IRV does not always find a majority winner, whereas real runoff
elections would.

Instant runoff voting (IRV) is a method for counting ranked choice
ballots where each "vote" is a rank ordering of the candidates.  IRV
counting proceed in "rounds" where the candidate with the fewest votes
in each round is eliminated and that candidate's votes are reassigned
to the remaining candidates using voters' lower-ranked choices.
Instant runoff voting is promoted as solving the "spoiler" problem of
a non-winning candidate who changes an election outcome by splitting
the vote.

Kathy Dopp, the report's author, concludes that "Instant runoff voting
is a threat to the fairness, accuracy, timeliness, and economy of U.S.
elections". Dopp became concerned about the problems with instant
runoff voting and about five weeks ago after learning that several
State Leagues of Women Voters had endorsed instant runoff voting
methods, and that the League of Women Voters, U.S. was considering its
use, and decided to write a brief research report on it. Dopp believes
that "We already have too many problems with U.S. voting systems that
need to be solved, without introducing more problems."

The report has drawn a lot of heat, including a threat to oust Dopp
from the political party she is currently registered in.  Dopp's
finding that, "IRV fails to eliminate the spoiler problem …." was
countered by Fair Vote's web page which stated that "In fact, IRV
solves the spoiler problem in virtually all likely U.S. partisan
elections… whenever a third party or independent candidate is unlikely
to be one of the top vote-getters." Fair Vote also countered Dopp's
statement that IRV requires state-level vote tallying, by responding
that "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." Fair Vote added that "If the Electoral College
were abolished and IRV were then adopted for future national popular
vote elections for president, there would need to be national
coordination of the tally in order to know which candidates got the
fewest votes nationwide and needed to be eliminated".

Countering Dopp's statement that "IRV Violates some election fairness
principles" Fair Vote said that "Every single voting method ever
devised must violate some "fairness principles".

Due to all these Internet responses, the revised report differentiates
between the ballot style and the counting method and focuses more on
IRV, discusses alternative voting methods in a new appendix
contributed to by computer voting system experts, describes an
"IRV-like" solution that would solve some of IRV's counting problems,
provides a more precise definition of "spoiler", and responds to Fair
Vote's attempt to rebut the first version of the report in a new
appendix.

The National Election Data Archive report makes the same conclusion as
before, that "Instant runoff voting (IRV) is not worthy of
consideration and its use should be avoided" because "there are
simpler, fairer, less costly, more auditable alternative voting
methods."

The National Election Data Archive recommends restoring the
fundamental integrity of elections before implementing any alternative
voting methods, and reminds readers that not one U.S. State today
utilizes sufficient measures to ensure fundamental election integrity
such as:

*	public access to all election records and data necessary to evaluate
the integrity of the electoral process,

*	observable post-election independent manual audits of machine vote counts,

*	post-election ballot reconciliation of all printed, counted, unused,
and spoiled ballots with voter process records, and

*	public oversight of ballot security.

Version two of the report "17 Flaws and 3 Benefits of Instant Runoff
Voting" is eleven (11) pages long plus acknowledgments, appendices and
endnotes and has two new appendices "Voting Methods Worth
Considering", and "Rebuttals to Fair Vote's 'De-Bunking Kathy Dopp's
15 Flaws of Instant Runoff Voting'".

The full report is found on-line at
http://electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/US/RCV-IRV/InstantRunoffVotingFlaws.pdf

This press release will be posted online at
http://electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/US/RCV-IRV/FlawsIRV-PressRelease-V2.pdf

Press Contact: Kathy Dopp 435-658-4657 kathy at electionarchive.org

The National Election Data Archive is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organized
for educational and scientific purposes of promoting fair and accurate
elections by researching, developing  and promoting methods and
procedures to detect voter disenfranchisement and vote count
inaccuracy.  Such methods include independent manual vote count
audits, exit poll discrepancy analysis, and the public release and
scientific analysis of election data along with public release of
election records necessary to verify the integrity of elections.