[EM] Fwd: Re: Fwd: [uscv-voting_activists] Coinkie-dink? Aspen mayor-1273, Seat 1-1273 & Seat 2- 1273 ???]

[Kathy Dopp]

Some possible rebuttals to Terry's last post.


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Chris Telesca <cjtelesca at earthlink.net>
Date: Tue, May 12, 2009 at 6:14 AM
Subject: Re: Bouricius [Fwd: Re: [EM] Fwd: [uscv-voting_activists]
Coinkie-dink? Aspen 	mayor-1273,Seat 1-1273 & Seat 2- 1273 ???]
To:
Cc: Joyce McCloy <jmc27106 at earthlink.net>, Kathy Dopp <kathy.dopp at gmail.com>




Joyce McCloy wrote:
>
>
> -------- Original Message --------
> Subject:     Re: [EM] Fwd: [uscv-voting_activists] Coinkie-dink? Aspen mayor-1273,Seat 1-1273 & Seat 2- 1273 ???
> Date:     Mon, 11 May 2009 17:36:04 -0600
> From:     Kathy Dopp <kathy.dopp at gmail.com>
> Reply-To:     kathy.dopp at gmail.com
> To:     Terry Bouricius <terryb at burlingtontelecom.net>
>
>
>
> On Mon, May 11, 2009 at 5:21 PM, Terry Bouricius
> <terryb at burlingtontelecom.net> wrote:
>>
>> Kathy,
>>
>> As I understand it (and I am not directly involved, so may have this
>> imperfectly)
>> 1. In Aspen there were zero invalid ballots...The "spoiled" ballot
>> estimation was made by an election official referring to several voters
>> who made mistakes, but then automatically had their ballots bounced back
>> by the voting machine for correction. In the end, I believe there were no
>> invalid IRV ballots.

Well we'd really have to look at the raw voting data before making
that assumption.
>>
>> 2. I believe the city is going to, or has, posted all of the ballot
>> rankings on the Internet (as do San Francisco and Burlington) so that now
>> that the random sample audit has confirmed that the scanners recorded the
>> ballots correctly, anybody who wishes (including you) can double check the
>> IRV tally on any spreadsheet program.

No they have not done that.  ALl they have done is posted the results
of the rounds.

>>
>> 3. The city did use a non-conventional majoritarian vote-tally rule for
>> the two seat council election (first and second choices counted
>> simultaneously), but the mayoral election was standard.

You bet your ass it was non-conventional.  My head hurt trying to read
and comprehend it.

What it looks like they did was state up front that they would only
have the top 4 candidates in the IRV round. So any votes for the other
candidates might have automatically been considered "exhausted"
resulting in the high exhausted ballot pile numbers.

But where it gets real interesting is that the threshold for victory
in all three races was exactly the same - and that is the exact number
of votes that all three candidates got.  The two council elections
were even more interesting - by what should have been the last round
with only two candidates standing, none of them had enough votes to
cross the threshold.  So instead of merely declaring the candidate
with the most votes the winner, they turned around and checked the
ballots for the lowest vote getter of the last two standing to see if
there were any second or third choice votes for the top vote getter -
then see if there were enough votes there to make the leader a winner.
 In those two cases, there were just enough votes to put the candidate
RIGHT ON the minimum number of votes to win the election.
It looks like they have a process so complicated and hard to
understand that 3 elections settled with exactly the same number of
votes also had three votes pulled out of someone's ass to make it look
like IRV is as easy as "1-2-3"!

Chris Telesca

>>
>> Terry Bouricius