[EM] Legal brief vs. San Francisco limited IRV

[Kathy Dopp]

The thing I *LOVE* about these attorneys legal brief is how clear
they've made it to the Judge the way Fair Vote has twisted itself into
knots and is hanging itself with its own rope from telling one story
one day and the opposite story the next day, whatever story it thinks
will sell IRV that day regardless of negative consequences to the
fairness or constitutionality of the US election process or to the
long-term efforts to achieve alternative voting methods that would
improve upon plurality voting rather than being a step backwards.

Sure, I wish they'd also emphasized how unequally IRV treats voters'
votes, but by focusing only on IRV's disenfranchisement of voters by
prohibiting their participation in the final counting rounds (thus
rarely electing majority winners as we know), these attorneys have
made a brilliant case and steered clear of complexities that might
bring in legal precedence that might hurt their case.

And sure this case will only get rid of the 3-rank style of IRV
initially, but it should substantially slow down the adoption of IRV
or reveal utter disconcern of [un]Fair Vote for voting methods that
are auditable and accountable as a solution to the impossibly long
paper ballot IRV will require in US elections, and give people a
chance to learn more about how fundamentally unfair any IRV or STV
methods for counting rank choice votes are, and how they effectively
eviscerate election transparency and verifiability due to the
difficulties with administering and counting IRV elections compared to
virtually any other alternative voting method.

The folks still pushing IRV are doing an enormous disservice in many
ways to efforts to reform and improve elections in the US and around
the world.

Kathy

On Sun, Mar 7, 2010 at 12:39 AM, Kathy Dopp <kathy.dopp at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
>