[EM] new simple legal strategy to get IRV

[Sennet Williams]

 1- Constitutionally, the govt. cannot give some citizens better voting rights than others.  
***>   2-  Now several states allow overseas military to use IRV ballots for primaries.3- Since some GIs are choosing the IRV ballot, they obviously think that an IRV ballot has an advantage vs the old system.  No judge could rationally reject this fact.4- That means that ANY non-military voter can file suit for the right to request/use an IRV ballot in the primary and only have to vote once, just like overseas military personnel.5- When the judge rules that IRV ballots are superior, this will make national news.  The NYT will evaluate the benefits of IRV.  Political candidates will have an easy issue to promote IRV.  The judge's decision should also explain that the ability to rank all candidates is better than only three.
6- So all we need now is one voter in one of these states to file a suit and show up in court.
     I also want to share another tip that will work after IRV makes your local news.   By scheduling an IRV press conference just before an Oakland special election for city council,  (and inviting most of the candidates), we were able to basically force EVERY candidate to promise that they would support IRV, and after the election we had enough council votes to get a measure approving IRV for local elections on the next ballot.  

      btw,  We might consider keeping IRV distinguished from RCV.   I know that locally (in the bay area), four cities voted for "IRV."   Instead, SF and Alameda county  supervisors bought machines that can only count three rankings, and they call it Ranked Choice, and that is inferior to true IRV where only 3 rankings are allowed.  An anti-IRV  Berkeley council member did his own research study that proved that all rankings should be allowed, but the county made the final decision.  Now it should be obvious that he was right, because both the Oakland and SF mayoral elections were so close that the # of expired ballots vastly outnumbered the top three ranked candidates, so there is no way to know which candidate was actually preferred by the most voters.  (From my observation, the final winner would not have won either election if all rankings had been allowed.  

       That's why we need pressure for the state(s) or feds  to provide all counties statewide with standard equipment, so that counties don't each have to waste a lot of time (it took us 10 years) and money going through the process on their own.   If (we)  write up a ballot initiative to do this, I believe it will be possible to raise the $2,000 filing fee and lots of groups will want to help get signatures.  

(ps:  to get democrat support, it is best to clarify that the best use of IRV to better empower voters is to retains partisan primaries and only use IRV for general elections.  I have discussed this with MANY elected Democrats, and usually they do not support  IRV because they confuse it with PR or they don't want to lose partisan primaries, which CA has recently lost, so now money is more powerful than ever) 
-Sand/ sennetwilliams at yahoo.com


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