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

[Jonathan Lundell]

On Jun 12, 2008, at 12:53 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:

> 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.

SF has always been notoriously slow to finish their counts and certify  
the results. More than one registrar has lost their job over it. Do  
you have reason to believe that it's actually taking significantly  
longer since IRV was implemented? The 1999 city election took three  
weeks to count.

> 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.

While that's true in theory (all California local elections are  
nominally nonpartisan), it's far from true in fact, at least in  
political cities like San Francisco. Case in point: when now-mayor  
Newsom was running against Matt Gonzalez, and looked like a real  
threat (Matt forced a runoff in those pre-IRV days), Bill Clinton and  
Al Gore both came to town to campaign against Gonzalez, a registered  
Green. So did Jesse Jackson, Dianne Feinstein, and Nancy Pelosi.

Nonpartisan? Hardly.

> 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>