[EM] FairVote comment on Burlington dumping IRV

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

At 01:00 AM 7/3/2013, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
>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repealed this week by a margin of less than 4% in Vermont's largest 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

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.)