[EM] Legal brief vs. San Francisco limited IRV

Kathy Dopp kathy.dopp at gmail.com
Sat Mar 6 21:39:05 PST 2010


I've posted the latest plaintiffs' legal brief here. Plaintiffs
attorneys are brilliant and this brief is actually fun to read the way
plaintiffs' attorneys expose all the disinformation told the court by
the defendants' attorneys and use Fair Vote's own words and the words
of the Minnesota Supreme Court Judges against the restricted San
Francisco rank only three version of IRV.

http://kathydopp.com/wordpress/?cat=8

IRV may now hopefully be delayed in Berkeley and Oakland long enough
for some sanity to regain a footing there, and San Francisco may be
returning to hand counting its really really long paper ballots (there
are 20 candidates registered to run in just one contest.)  This may
cost SF a lot of money and be a boon to a voting machine vendor that
can figure out how to count 20+ candidates using IRV on a paper
optical scan ballot.

I still fail to comprehend how UnFair Vote can keep raising money to
fund all the local efforts to implement the only alternative voting
method that fails more of Arrow's Fairness criteria than plurality
voting does (fails nonmonotonicity as well as irrelevant alternatives
- the spoiler effect of a non-winning candidate) and eviscerates the
ability of the average citizen to verify the accuracy of election
results by being essentially not precinct summable except by reporting
all voters' choices for each precinct or 20! tallies for each precinct
for each candidate. Perhaps Unfair Vote will pour all its funds into
this legal case in San Francisco now to try to defeat this case?

Anyway, this was the most fun I've had reading a legal brief. I've got
it posted from my blog link above.

-- 

Kathy Dopp
http://electionmathematics.org
Town of Colonie, NY 12304
"One of the best ways to keep any conversation civil is to support the
discussion with true facts."

Realities Mar Instant Runoff Voting
http://electionmathematics.org/ucvAnalysis/US/RCV-IRV/InstantRunoffVotingFlaws.pdf

Voters Have Reason to Worry
http://utahcountvotes.org/UT/UtahCountVotes-ThadHall-Response.pdf

Checking election outcome accuracy
http://electionmathematics.org/em-audits/US/PEAuditSamplingMethods.pdf



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