[EM] LTEs about IRV in Burlington Free Press

[Jan Kok]

...including a comment from yours truly

http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/article/20090404/OPINION/904040304/1006


Letters to the Editor
----------------------------

IRV less effective with 3 strong candidates

IRV seems to work well with two definite front-runners, less well with
three. This time, three mayoral candidates had strong popular support
for their years of dedicated public service. It looks to me as if Andy
Montroll, in fact, might have won if he hadn't been dropped so early
in the shuffle.

In any case, no one's plurality was to be proud of, not Kurt Wright's
initial 33 percent nor Bob Kiss' final, labored 48 percent. As you
stated editorially, we are all shamed when fewer than half of those
registered bother to vote.

The abstainees probably had opinions, but I think the problem is,
people don't go out to stand in line these days except for sporting
events. We need aggressive voter outreach. Online voting, for
instance, which could be based on driver's license numbers verified
automatically against electronic department address records. (A
tougher problem is how to reach the Internet-less voters. Any ideas
out there?)

FRED G. HILL
Burlington


All votes counted in IRV system

I wanted to respond to the Free Press' editorial, "IRV does job, but
not necessarily better" (March 10) to point out a factual error and
address other points.

The statement starting "Not all the second-place votes were counted"
is incorrect. All voters who listed Kiss or Wright first or second had
their votes counted as such in every round of the IRV. Implications
that IRV caused votes not to be counted is irresponsible, no matter
your opinion of IRV.

The editorial also cites the March 8 article "Third-choice votes
sealed Kiss victory," reiterating the meaningless statistic that in
the final round, the winner had only 44 percent of the ballots as
compared to the first round. Traditional runoff elections do not
require a majority of the votes of the general election's total, and
only by unethically forcing voters to rank all candidates can IRV be
held to such a standard.

The "44 percent" figure is used to reinforce the point, "to say that
the results truly show whom the majority of voters want as their mayor
is, at best, a stretch." However, the numbers from the same March 8
analysis show that the vast majority (83.5 percent) of voters did rank
more than one candidate; they understood the process. The third round
had 94 percent of the first-round voters participating, a small drop
in turnout compared to a traditional runoff.

There may be some interesting discussions about IRV, but
misrepresenting the details of IRV and the intentions of voters
doesn't advance them.

JOSHUA SLED
South Burlington


IRV math makes sense

I'm a student at Bellows Free Academy in St. Albans and I'm enrolled
in the discrete math class. As a class we have studied over half a
dozen different voting methods, and I believe that the IRV is a
superior system.

Kurt Wright said in The Burlington Free Press on March 4 that if the
city of Burlington used the plurality method he would've won ("Wright
might challenge vote"). He's right, but he only had the plurality for
some of the ballots between him and Bob Kiss, not all. If one takes
into account all of the 8,980 ballots, the results show that the
majority (51.5 percent) of the voters placed Mr. Kiss higher on the
ballots than Mr. Wright (48.5 percent).

Dr. Kenneth Arrow won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1972 for
concluding that all voting systems have some flaws. Studies have led
researchers to believe that the tally (or approval) system of voting
violates Arrow's guidelines the least. In this system, instead of
ranking candidates, the voter would place an "X" next to the candidate
they wished to give their approval; they could vote for all of them,
none of them, or any number in between. The voter must decide which
candidates are acceptable to become mayor, and leave blank the
candidates who are unacceptable.

The logic that the winner is ranked higher on the majority of all of
the ballots than the loser, I believe appeals to all fair-minded
voters. Congratulations to you, Mr. Kiss.

WILLIAM MERCIER JR.
St. Albans


In Your Voice
--------------------

JanKok wrote:
Maybe Montroll should have won.

In the 2009 Burlington Mayoral election, voters preferred Montroll
over Kiss, 4067 to 3477. In fact, Montroll was preferred over ALL
other candidates. But because the IRV vote-counting method ignored the
second choices of the Wright voters (who preferred Montroll over Kiss
about 3:1), Kiss won.

Burlington should change the voting method for future elections to
improve the chances of picking the most-preferred candidate as winner.

Plurality Voting (the method used in most elections) is NOT a good
method. Voters preferred Montroll over Wright, but Wright would have
won with Plurality voting. And remember Florida 2000, where Plurality
Voting gave us GW Bush, although a majority preferred Gore.

Better methods include Approval Voting (mentioned above), Score
Voting, Condorcet Voting, and Bucklin Voting. All of those methods
would likely have chosen Montroll. See Wikipedia. org for details.

- Jan Kok, cofounder of ScoreVoting. net
4/4/2009 11:31:12 PM


goseabees wrote:
A more simple and democratic solution for IRV's would be to have a
primary first which you would have
republicans in one group, democrats in another group and progressives,
green party,liberaltarians,etc
in there own group. The winner of each group would then go to a
general election and the one with the
MOST votes would be the winner without a need for 50 % being a rule.
We have to many different parties
to get a 50 % purality anymore.
4/4/2009 10:29:40 AM