[EM] FairVote comment on Burlington dumping IRV

[David L Wetzell]

52% is barely a defeat and a huge turnout in wards against IRV could also
reflect hard to prove fraud or a possibly an off-the-books well-funded GOTV
campaign.

IOW, there is no smoking gun or clear indictment against IRV due to the
politicking and slim margin.
So I'd hope you'd be a more careful in how you treat Burlington...

dlw

dlw


On Thu, Jul 4, 2013 at 8:56 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax <abd at lomaxdesign.com>wrote:

> At 01:00 AM 7/3/2013, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
>
>> http://www.fairvote.org/**lessons-from-burlington#.**UdOvX2LE0XY<http://www.fairvote.org/lessons-from-burlington#.UdOvX2LE0XY>(March 4, 2010)
>>
>>  Let me cut to the chase. Despite winning in five of the city's seven
>>> wards, the use of instant runoff voting (IRV) for mayor was repealed this
>>> week by a margin of less than 4% in Vermont's largest city of Burlington.
>>>
>>
> I was just looking at this post and was struck by the way in which the
> facts were presented. Because wards can have different numbers of voters,
> and because vote margins make a huge difference, winning in the most wards
> means very little. But Richie is trying to present a series of "Hey, we
> almost won" arguments. So I decide to look at the election. The results
> from some of the earlier IRV elections are no longer available, or, if they
> are, they are not easy to find. Turns out that some of the places where
> vote counts were maintained were web sites hosted by IRV supporters, and
> those have disappeared. Richie, in that blog post, referred to a web site
> that was used for that campaign. Gone.
>
> History disappears, often.
>
> http://www.burlingtonvt.gov/**WorkArea/LinkIT.aspx?itemID=**6116<http://www.burlingtonvt.gov/WorkArea/LinkIT.aspx?itemID=6116>
>
> Question 5. - Charter Change - Eliminate IRV
>
>         1       2       3       4       5       6       7       totals
> Yes     264     185     292     1203    545     477     1006    3972
> No      405     428     510     606     793     490     437     3669
>
> Richie is right. 5 out of 7 wards did support IRV. However, if we look
> more closely, it is more divided than that.
>
> Percentages:
>
> Yes     39.5%   30.2%   36.4%   66.5%   40.7%   49.3%   69.7%   52.0%
>
> Notice that Ward 6 *almost* approved the initiative to eliminate IRV.
>
> Wards 4 and 7 very strongly voted to eliminate it.
>
> We have two wards very much opposed to IRV, and four who wanted to keep
> it, and one on the fence, really.
>
> Notice the wards where the number of votes were greatest. The wards with
> the two highest vote totals also had the largest number of voters.
>
> Under conditions in Burlingon, conditions caused IRV to effectively damage
> the Republicans, or at least Republicans would see it that way.
>
>
> Richie wrote:
>
>   In the repeal, the two wards where Wright ran most strongly voted
>> against IRV by a margin of two-to-one after supporting it when first passed
>> in 2005.
>>
>
> I haven't checked this, but it's likely. Actual experience with IRV soured
> them. So?
>
>
>  The rest of the city voted 60% to keep IRV.
>>
>
> He's just manipulating statistics to create an impression. While the
> overall vote was not a landslide, it was still a clear margin, 52%.
>
> Notice that he states the 60% figure. Okay, I'll cherry-pick my own: The
> two largest wards in the city, by turnout in this election, Wards 4 and 7
> -- voted 67.0% to dump IRV.
>
> IRV produces erratic results. It's a shame that Burlington, instead of
> returning to top-two runoff with below 40% being the margin that triggers a
> runoff, was not educated in voting systems. This is precisely how
> FairVote's monomaniacal focus is harming voting system reform. The runoff
> system they went back to *could* produce the same results. There are simple
> systems that could avoid the problem, but FairVote has campaigned against
> them and has conspired to prevent their testing anywhere.
>
> (If "conspired" seems strong, then let FairVote actually show that they
> support real voting system reform, by opening up and truly suppporting
> election science, instead of arguing against it and creating mountains of
> misleading propaganda.)
>
>
>
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