STAR voting

Adam @4 and Randal @5 and David @6:

I've held (and publicly shared) this position on RCV/IRV for many years. In the very eary days, I was sympathetic of the general reasoning for RCV, so support it (or what we used to call Instant Runoff Voting or IRV). And I still support the general principals. But, having covered this beat for as many years as I have, I stand by my initial awakening/change of heart, that IRV/RCV is a terrible idea right now. If we have this much trouble overseeing the accurate addition of 1 + 1 + 1 in our elections, adding the complicated algebra of RCV to it (which requirescomputer tabulation, btw) is insane.

RCV elections cannot be hand counted (in anything other than a race that takes place at one precinct), and it's virtually impossible for the public to oversee accurate results.

I have spoken to candidates and voters over the years who have been baffled by RCV elections, including candidates who have no idea why they lost an RCV election!

There is a reason why many jurisdictions have done away with it shortly after adopting it and trying to it out, only to have voters and candidates alike hate it.

I've held this position for years, and I would disagree with my characterization of it on yesterday's show as "smearing" it, as Randal charged. I'm offering my insight and concerns about it, and certainly welcome the thoughts of folks who see things differently than I do.

I spoke about RCV in a bit more detail not long ago in this show over the summer.

ALL OF THAT SAID, I remain sympathetic to the reasons that many support RCV, and to that end, I'd be willing to compromise with Approval Voting, which accomplishes most of the same things that RCV does, but in a way that voters and candidates can more easily understand and that can be easily hand-counted at each precinct without requiring computers or centralized tallies.

Approval Voting (AV), essentially, allows you to vote Yes/No for every candidate in the race. It also does away with the so-called "spoiler" effect in the bargain, and allows voters to support third-party candidates, etc., in a way that can be understood and overseen by the public.

(It can also be tabulated, for what it's worth, with all of our existing computer tabulation systems without needing to upgrade or reprogram, etc. Though that's just an added reason why moving to AV is much easier --- and safer --- than RCV.)

Hope that helps to clarify my position!

I don't mean to hit-and-run comment here, CK, just short on time for the moment.

But if you don't believe IRV counting is complicated, I might suggest you speak to some of the candidates who've run in IRV elections, such as Marilyn Marks in Aspen, CO where months after the election she was still unable to figure out how they had come to the math that they did. (I believe Aspen did away with IRV thereafter, if I recall, but I'd have to check.)

I've spoken to other candidates who similarly when unable to understand how their elections were tabulated and if they were correctly tabulated or not.

Other IRV elections were only found later to have been mistabulated.

As I've said many times, we have enough problem adding 1 plus 1 plus 1 in this country when it comes to elections. Adding the complicated algebra of IRV is simply insane. And, I should add, I used to be an IRV supporter until I learned more about both it and the disastrous way we already count (or try to) our regular plurality elections in this country!

BTW, while I believe IRV is insane, I feel less so about Approval Voting, if one is looking for an alternative to plurality elections which offer many of the purported benefits of IRV, without the insane voting and need for centralized (and computerized) counting.

I didn't say that IRV was proportional representation, rather, I specifically said that there are other locations using VARIATIONS known as "ranked choice" or "proportional representation." The confusion may be due to overzealous editing (by Brad!) of punctuation around "in variations" (the commas of which were not in my original document). 

{ED NOTE: Not entirely sure how those commas change the meaning of that sentence, but have removed them nonetheless as requested. Apologies for any confusion I inadvertently caused there! - BF}

As well, I did not say that computers necessarily HAVE to be used to tabulate IRV, but the fact is that they are and will be increasingly used for this purpose because of the complexity of the calculations. Another problem of IRV in this regard is that it also encourages central tabulation, which is adverse to spot-check (precinct) auditing. 

It is not a coincidence that some of those who were intent upon having votes tabulated in secret, and whose efforts in that regard were thwarted with the push-back away from DREs, are now very happy to support alternative balloting methods, such as IRV, that essentially ensure that hand-tabulation will not likely occur. It is also interesting to note that of various alternative methods, IRV is (according to some studies) not the best, but unfortunately it is the one gaining a foothold.

IRV is so complex to tally that it incentivizes computerized vote tallying where it hadn't been used before.

Example: Scotland gave up hand counting votes the IRV elections in May 2007. Of course the machines malfunctioned and left the results in doubt. The first IRV election was described as "Not so much an election as a National humiliation." (There were 100,000 spoiled ballots, mostly in the poorer areas)

IRV is not transparent.
Voters have to rely on people instead of an open process. From Voting Matters Blog:
The counting of IRV is complex — the elimination of some candidates at the end of the first round means that second choice votes are transferred to other candidates. If a third round is required the elimination and transfer process continues. The average voter has to place great trust in the reliability of the counting algorithm in a way far beyond what is necessary in plurality voting. So the counting is opaque and non-transparent — a kind of voting voodoo with election officials in the role of witch doctor producing the magical results. If one believes strongly that the average voter should be able to understand and observe the counting of votes in a democracy, then IRV fails to meet this standard.

I'm sorry, I left off the explanation as to WHY IRV, unlike any other election method, is so hard to tally transparently:

IRV is not additive. There is no such thing as a "subtotal" in IRV. In IRV every single vote may have to be sent individually to the central agency (1,000,000·N numbers, i.e. 1000 times more communication). [Actually there are clever ways to reduce this, but it is still bad.] If the central agency then computes the winner, and then some location sends a correction, that may require redoing almost the whole computation over again. There could easily be 100 such corrections and so you'd have to redo everything 100 times. Combine this scenario with a near-tie and legal and extra-legal battle like in Bush-Gore Florida 2000 over the validity of every vote, and this adds up to a complete nightmare for the election administrators.

The complexity of counting IRV ballots leads to great logistical problems and time-delays as in San Francisco . IRV counting cannot be started until after all absentee and provisional ballots are judged eligible and are ready to count because any mistake in the first counting round requires that the counting process must be begun all over again. (Imagine recounts of each IRV round in a Minnesota-like recount!)

We had a statewide IRV election for NC Court of Appeals in North Carolina in Nov 2010. The loser had 100,000 more votes than the winner.

Cessie Thigpen lost even though he still had the most votes by nearly 100,000:

Total votes cast (1, 2 and 3rd)
718,042 for Thigpen
618,431 for McCullough

MCCullough (the "winner")
1st choice 295,619
2nd choice 157,310
3rd choice 165,802

Thigpen (the "loser")
1st choice 395,220
2nd choice 162,795
3rd choice 160,027

It took seven weeks to get the results of the election.

An excel spreadsheet was used to tally the results - a process that the Chairman of the State Board of Elections warned was risky: Chairman Larry Leake is against.

"I'm a lot leary about it," Leake said. "The computer experts acknowledge there are potential problems with the system."

Having now personally experienced IRV voting once and the counting twice I am glad our state's Election Director said this was the last time we'd see IRV.

IRV was seen as an way to do an election and runoff at one time and do it on the cheap. It didn't work out that way, but the verified voting community knew it from the start here in NC. Back in 2004 after we had a Florida-style election meltdown, we decided to have a legislative task force hold hearings over a few months to make recommendations on how to fix our elections. IRV was suggested, but then dumped as part of the recommendations when it was realized that you can't really have election integrity and verified voting if you make the casting and counting of votes so complex that you can't do it in one easy task. Not being able to count the rankings at the place the ballots are cast in the same way you can count the 1st column votes started it off - but also realizing that there was (and still is) no federally tested and certified election system that can handle IRV. Meaning unless you want to do it ALL BY HAND, you have to use some sort of jury-rigged software patch that has not been fully tested, 

Don Frantz was our state's 1st and only elected public official who was elected using IRV. Even he knew it was bogus. He knows he was not elected by a 50% plus one majority - only by a slightly larger plurality vote. He also knew that in a real runoff election, the lowest vote getter would have most likely endorsed the other top-two candidate - who would have won a real runoff vote. Don's a great guy, and since getting elected in 2007 he's stood up for election integrity and opposed IRV even though it's the election method that put him in his current seat. 

Now let's look at the judicial IRV races. Of the four races (three county superior court and one statewide Court of Appeals), two went to the IRV - one county race that was in a 100% DRE touchscreen county, and the statewide race with about 40% of the vote cast on touchscreens. The NC GOP already went to court in 2010 saying that the touchscreens weren't calibrated properly. But the thing I worry the most about is the jury-rigged method of counting the 2nd and 3rd column votes that was used. 

State law says that only federally certified election systems may be used - either votes totally counted on the op-scan machines or touchscreens with reports that are sent into the ES&S Unity software system. Since neither the op-scan or DRE machines or the Unity system is certified to do IRV, that means that the only other certified method to county IRV was hand counting. 

So in all the counties with op-scan paper ballots were used, all those ballots had to be counted by hand. But the counting procedure varied by county, so we can't really be sure of the accuracy of the vote count in those counties. But in the DRE counties, they should have also counted all those races by the same sort-stack and tally method used in op-scan counties. But they could not because the election directors in those counties refused to cut up all those 300 foot long paper trails to sort-stack and tally with 2 foot-long thermal paper tapes! They said it would be too costly and that there was no method the SBOE had developed to do that for such a large number of ballots. So they asked to use an uncertified method developed by the State Board of Elections that ran an algorithm on a MS Excel spreadsheet program. Sure - many of us use Excel for daily work, but I asked a retired chemistry professor whether or not he would use Excel or some other certified statistical application to crunch his numbers. He said that in his work that had to be submitted for peer review, they'd laugh him out of the building for using MS Excel. And for work he needed to submit for grants or other purposes to the government, MS Excel was too buggy to be any good. So I don't think it's good enough for our vote counting, do you? 

And then on top of everything else, both of the two IRV elections that went to the 2nd and 3rd column votes to determine the winner had a very weird outcome. In all the other IRV races, the person who comes in first with just the 1st column votes goes onto win the race with the 2nd and 3rd column votes over 90% of the time. In traditional runoffs, the 2nd place finisher flips about 33% of the time. Both of NC's IRV judicial races flipped - 100%! I can't say it was solely because of the use of the undertested and uncertified workaround, or the fact that this was dumped on us with only two months to prepare (after doing nothing since the bill was passed back in 2006). In NC and many other places, IRV is an unfunded mandate because legislators and election officials were lied to when they were told that IRV always saved money. 

The casting of IRV ballots is confusing to voters in my precinct and elsewhere in the state. One old gent told me it was easier to pick the winners in a trifecta race than to vote the IRV ballot. Then the counting of the votes was also complex - too complex to be carried on the exact same way in every county in our state. Our voters didn't like it, the governor didn't like it, legislators in both parties didn't like it, and election officials didn't like it. So why should we all hold our noses to do IRV anymore? 

Of course the failure of IRV supporters like FairyTaleVote and others to show that IRV doesn't work as advertised or even to show people in Hawaii that some folks tried IRV and didn't like it is not a surprise to me at all.

In NC, voters who voted for ANYONE other than the top two were effectively shut out of the contest. The clear advantage of a traditional runoff election is that you only have two choices. And the other candidates who didn't make it can endorse one of the other two candidates for their supporters from the first race. So with a 13 candidate IRV race, there is a very good chance that many people cast all three votes for candidates OTHER than Thigpen and McCullough - so other than their first round vote being counted to determine the top two, none of their other two votes were counted at all. It strikes me as very sad that we are trying to increase turnout to increase citizen participation and we have folks resorting to trickery like IRV to tell people that it increases their participation when clearly it does the opposite. If you only count one of my 3 votes when none of them were for a winner - you've shut me out of the race entirely!

Before we even arrive at the question of increased mathematical complexity within the context of an existing, simple-math system that lacks transparency and verifiable accuracy, we need to ask ourselves why IRV?

Is there something wrong with a system, like the multiparty parliamentary systems employed by the UK and Canada, in which the candidate who receives the most votes is declared the winner even if that candidate receives only a simple plurality, as opposed to an absolute majority of the votes cast?

In those U.S. races where an absolute majority is required, there are run-off elections; though they are not "instant." Is there something inherently wrong with that?

I believe that many who advocate IRV in the U.S. do so because they feel trapped by the "lesser evil paradigm" of the two party system, something that Chris Hedges and Ralph Nader described in , "The Left Has Nowhere to Go" as the "cowardice of the Left."

IRV is proposed by those who would hold their nose and vote for Obama in 2012 because the alternative is to risk the election of a certifiably insane 'wing-nut.'

Rather than display the political courage required to vote for the candidate most suited for public office, IRV is advanced as a remedy for the IRV proponent's lack of political fortitude.

Flashback. . . .

remember this ?

Programmer under oath admits computers rig elections

http://www.youtube.com/w...;feature=player_embedded

A couple of notes: 

Oakland, Ca, had an IRV election for mayor recently for the first time. I have observed voting in Alameda Co. (which encompasses Oakland) before IRV. In California, one percent of the votes, paper ballots and DRE printouts, are counted by hand. It was hard to observe, because you had to stay in one spot on the side of the room while election workers counted the ballots at a distance. 

On the one hand, any complication of the system adds to the difficulty of counting and observing. On the other hand, in this election two grassroots-supported candidates would have split the vote in favor of a big money-supported candidate in a simple majority system. One of the grassroots candidates came in second on the first round of counting, but won the election. She could not have afforded a run-off election.

I wasn't aware of approval voting, before this. It does sound simpler to me, and fair.

RandyD @ 27 said:

I support IRV or "Single Transferable Vote" as it is also known. I fully support the goals of open, transparent election tabulation. But that is a means to an ends.

A means to what end? Democracy? Cool! Partisan triumph? You've come to the wrong place, if so.

I also support a voting system that allows the voter to select their preferred candidate rather than having to make the complicated game theory calculations necessary to navigate the "winner take all" system whenever there are more than two choices.

And yet you support IRV? Which triples down on the game theory involved to get your winner? Mmmkay. Methinks you may want to peruse the videos of SJVoterfor a while, and learn about the madness of IRV game theory.

If Nader (for example) is my choice, I want to be able to express that choice without having to do outside research on polling data (what other voters might do) to determine whether I have to vote for a lesser evil to avoid the greater evil.

Understood. And, as noted above, that's why I also once supported IRV. Until I came to understand how it works (or doesn't).

And also while I've mentioned Approval Voting as also linked above. Many of the upsides of IRV --- example, you could vote for BOTH Nader and your choice of other candidate --- much less mathematical madness.

I should note that all IRV supporters here would do well to peruse SJVoter's verysmart and informative videos on the FACTS of IRV, as I linked above in response to RandyD.

http://www.youtube.com/user/SJVoter

Randy D @27 writes:

If Nader...is my choice, I want to be able to express that choice without having to do outside research on polling data (what other voters might do)...

If Nader is your choice, then you should vote for Nader irrespective of what you "think" other voters will or will not do.

In a democracy, the intelligent voter makes a decision to support the best qualified candidate irrespective of what the pollsters say. The only reason the lesser evil paradigm even exists is because too many focus on polls, personality and not upon where an individual candidate stands on issues that truly matter.

In 2007 a blind poll was conducted that listed Democratic presidential candidate policy positions but not their names. Kucinich received a whopping 53%. Clinton and Obama were both in the low single digits.

The quality of our democracy, or should I say, the lack thereof, is a reflection of the willingness and wisdom of individual citizens to examine where each candidate stands on issues of substance and to then vote accordingly.

People who passively accept those whom the corporate media says are the "viable" candidates and then vote out of a desire to evade the lesser evil, or based on a choice between two corporate-sponsored candidates whom the polls suggest are the most likely to "win" are not citizens. They are consumers. 

The answer lies not in gimmicks like IRV but upon the existence of an informed citizenry which makes rationale and informed choices. 

As knowledge will forever govern ignorance, democracy imposes a burden upon each of us to acquire the knowledge necessary to elect a "representative" government with the informed consent of the citizenry.

Jack E Lohman @ 33 said:

IRV is too confusing??? Hey, then just mark ONE candidate, the old-fashioned way.

You may have missed the general thrust of the article and/or discussion here, Jack. While IRV can be very confusing for voters, the concern being discussed --- and, in my opinion, a much greater one --- is the confusion in counting and citizens being able to oversee that count to assure that it is accurate.

As I noted above, I have spoken to a number of candidates in IRV elections who have simply been unable to understand how the math was completed that resulted in them either winning or losing. And those are the candidates! Imagine how the public trying to oversee the accuracy of the count must feel!

Again, I'd strongly urge folks to check out the short videos by SJVoter on a number of different, real world, often nightmarish aspects, of IRV.

Leonard Schmiege @ 34 said:

The spread dishonestly by proponents part bothers me, as the idea is certainly worth debating.

You are correct. So, to expand on that charge, allow me to add that not all proponents of IRV are dishonestly spreading misinformation about it. There are many true believers. One of the main proponents of IRV in this country, however, having spent years and untold dollars misinforming the public about it, has been FairVote.org and their various representatives, such as Rob Ritchie, who have, at times, been very dishonest and very deceitful and very misleading in the course of their exhaustive (and, often exhausting) advocacy.

They are, largely, the main thrust behind the push for IRV in virtually every community where it rears its ugly head, and they have a long track record of misinforming both the public and the public official about it's serious shortcomings.