Instant runoff could cost North Carolina $20 million first year

A switch to instant runoff voting could cost North Carolina taxpayers an estimated $20.3 million in the first year. Voter education could cost $2.9 million per year.

Last Tuesday North Carolina set a record low for voter turnout in the Labor Commissioner runoff. Activists are saying that the state should adopt instant runoff voting as a way to save money. The fact is, a switch to instant runoff voting could cost North Carolina taxpayers an estimated $20.3 million in the first year.


Other states such as Maryland have studied the costs of implementing instant runoff for their fiscal analysis for legislation. If the fiscal analysis prepared for Maryland lawmakers hold true, voter education alone would cost North Carolina taxpayers approximately $2.9 Million. This is based on the estimate of spending only .50 cents per registered voter per year on voter education.

These estimates do not even include the costs of purchasing new software (not yet developed) to tabulate instant runoff, or new machines, if needed.

There are other simpler less expensive ways to eliminate costly runoff elections. We can stop having statewide runoffs - 42 states don't have them, do as 45 other states do and appoint the Labor Commissioner , or adjust the thresholds for these elections. Third parties can be helped by making ballot access easier, and considering other voting methods that don't require complex tabulation. These reforms are compatible with North Carolina's Public Confidence in Elections Law, whereas Instant Runoff is not. (See Raleigh N&O: Instant runoff voting poses problems )

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Fiscal analysis by Maryland's state legislature: figures do not include the cost of buying new voting machines and or special IRV software.

Note: Maryland had 3,135,773 registered voters on Jan 22, 2008 and 3,056,657 registered voters on Oct 17, 2006 while North Carolina had 5,816,510 registered voters on June 30, 2008

Maryland Bills for IRV in 2009 and 2007 that have fiscal analysis included: the Maryland legislature estimates that costs could be as high as an additional $3.50 per registered voter in their 2006 IRV bill, and a little less in the 2008 bill which did not include the cost of software.

Fiscal Summary of two IRV bills in Maryland (none have passed)

Senate Bill 292 (Senator Pinsky, et al.)

Elections - Instant Runoff Method of Voting

This bill establishes an instant runoff method of voting intended to ensure majority rule in an election. The bill takes effect January 1, 2007.

Fiscal Summary


State Effect: General fund expenditures would increase by roughly $11.1 million in FY2008 and $1.5 million in FY 2009, reflecting documentation revision, information technology, voter education, and election judge training development costs leading up to the 2008 presidential primary and general elections. General fund expenditures also would increase by $1.5 million in FY 2011 due to voter education costs prior to the 2010 gubernatorial elections. These estimates do not include costs that cannot be reliably estimated for additional staff to assist in the ballot counting process and additional voting machines possibly needed if allowing voters to rank candidates will cause significantly longer voting lines.

Local Effect: Local election boards would experience increased expenditures due to
voter education and election judge training costs.

House Bill 1502 (Delegate Hixson)
This bill establishes an instant runoff method of voting intended to ensure majority rule in an election. The bill takes effect January 1, 2009.

Fiscal Summary

State Effect: General fund expenditures would increase significantly prior to the 2010 and 2012 elections to implement an instant runoff method of voting. Implementing the new method of voting is anticipated to require revisions to various aspects of the election management process and a considerable voter outreach campaign to educate voters on the new method of voting. The extent of the increase in expenditures cannot be reliably estimated at this time.

Local Effect: Local election boards are expected to also experience increased expenditures for voter outreach and for election judge training costs.

State Fiscal Effect: General fund expenditures would increase significantly leading up to the 2010 elections to implement an instant runoff method of voting, with expenditure increases expected to begin in fiscal 2009. General fund expenditures are also expected to increase prior to the 2012 elections for continued voter outreach and possibly further revisions to documentation and SBE’s election management system. The increases in costs, however, cannot be reliably estimated at this time.

SBE indicates it is difficult to determine the full extent of the changes that would need to be made to accommodate the new method of voting, though such a change would require revisions to regulations and documentation used in the election process (including judges manuals and canvassing instructions), SBE’s election management system, and election procedures. A considerable voter outreach campaign would also be required, likely including advertising through television, radio, and print media, direct mailing, and staff outreach to various organizations.

Local Fiscal Effect: Local boards are also expected to experience increased expenditures primarily due to voter education (in addition to SBE’s voter education costs) and election judge training. Local boards likely would need additional staff or would
need to hire a public relations firm to assist with voter education. In addition, SBE recommends, as a part of voter education, that a mandatory primary election specimen ballot mailer be sent to each voter to allow them to determine how they will rank
candidates prior to voting.

SBE advises that election judge training has become more complex due to added security requirements and Help America Vote Act mandates. Adding subject matter on the instant runoff method to election judge training may increase time needed for training and therefore compensation costs for the judges.

...more on costs of Instant runoff voting here

Instant Runoff and Gutting North Carolina's Verified Voting Law - 8 Bad Things IRV Does to NC Public Confidence in Elections

On Wed July 2, 1 PM the House Election Law Committee will hear an amendment in S 1263 to extend the Instant runoff experiment. Please say no to adding an IRV pilot to S 1263 or any other bill. The only way we can have another instant runoff experiment is to gut our Verified Voting law and to allow the use of uncertified software and cut corners on audits and election night reporting. There is no software or firmware developed to tabulate IRV, none tested or federally approved for our voting machines. Since IRV is being sold as a "cost saver" - no money will be spent to educate our nearly 6 million voters about this drastic change in our elections and many will be disenfranchised.

ACT NOW BEFORE WEDNESDAY JULY 2: email the House Election Law Committee. Below is a sample message you can send, with email addresses:


Melanieg@ncleg.net; joek@ncleg.net; paull@ncleg.net; mailto:Deborahr@ncleg.net;Angelab@ncleg.net;Waltc@ncleg.net
Angelab@ncleg.net;Waltc@ncleg.net;
Billcu@ncleg.net;Susanf@ncleg.net; Priceyh@ncleg.net,
Georgeho@ncleg.net; Carolynju@ncleg.net; davidl@ncleg.net;Grierm@ncleg.net;Mickeym@ncleg.net;
Pauls@ncleg.net;Edgars@ncleg.net, verlai@ncleg.net; elliek@ncleg.net;

House Election Law Committee Members
Chairman Rep. Goodwin, Vice Chairman, Rep. Kiser, Vice Chairman Rep. Luebke, Vice Chairman Rep. Ross, Rep. Bryant, Rep. Church, Rep. Current, Rep. Fisher, Rep. Harrison, Rep. Holmes, Rep.Justice, Rep. Lewis, Rep. Martin, Rep. Michaux, Rep. Stam, Rep. Starnes

Subject: S 1263-say no to IRV pilot

Please say no to adding an IRV pilot to S 1263 or any other bill. No more Instant Runoff Experiments.

IRV is a well intentioned idea that produces unintended consequences, and fails to deliver as promised. It does not save money, is confusing and violates the KISS principle of elections (Keep it Simple).

This is not a partisan issue, but about maintaining the integrity of our elections. Our equipment currently can not handle IRV, and it would lead to a push for more electronic voting machines, and we have seen the problem with those. IRV costs will include changes to our voting machines or software, increased ballot printing, and voter education. Many voters won't be reached by the education and most will not know enough about all of the candidates to choose 2 or 3 for each contest. This is inherently unfair to the average voter and also will harm the down ticket contests. Another IRV experiment cannot be done without gutting key provisions of the Public Confidence in Elections Law - standards that protect our state from unscrupulous voting vendors and defective voting software.

There are other simpler less expensive ways to eliminate costly runoff elections. We can stop having statewide runoffs - most states don't have them, or appoint the Labor Commissioner as do 45 other states, or adjust the thresholds for these elections. Third parties can be helped by making ballot access easier, and considering other voting methods that don't require complex tabulation.

8 ways another IRV experiment would hurt NC's verified voting law:

1. Would require the use of uncertified software or uncertified voting systems. This could result in permanent allowance for uncertified software because of "emergencies" like IRV that set a precedence to using uncertified systems/software.

2. Decrease/void vendor responsibility & accountability - how can the vendor be responsible for a system that uses untested/uncertified software?

3. Will exempt 2nd and 3rd choices on ballots from being counted at the polling place as currently required for regular ballots by NC law, putting those choices at risk of tampering after being hauled away from the polling places and put into storage. There are no election night reports/poll tapes for these results. Raw vote data was never reported by the Wake or Henderson County BoEs for the 2007 experiment.

4. Auditing will either become extremely difficult, or officials will exempt IRV elections from auditing, or meager measures will make audits meaningless. Kathy Dopp explains how IRV complicates auditing in her report about 17 Flaws in IRV

5. Recounts will be far more laborious - each round of counting must be correct before you can "recount" the next.

6. Put provisional voters at risk - Wake Co did not count provisional ballots until after the IRV rounds had been counted. Somehow they "added" the provisionals back in?( Oct 12, 2007 Recount widens Frantz lead in Cary )This does not make sense because each individual ballot must be considered to see which 2nd and 3rd choices will be counted.

7. Encourage the use of touchscreens, as the NC SBoE has already created a "workaround" with uncertified software for our touch screens that likely violates our law.

8. Discourage precinct based optical scan, as evidenced this May in Pierce County WA's failure to certify precinct optical scanners but allowance for uncertified DRE/touchscreens and central count (county office) optical scanners. See Voters Unite report on this.

Wake County miscounted just 3,000 ballots in the Cary IRV experiment, (Oct 30, 2007 Critics Take Runoff Concerns To Elections Board NBC 17) and still has trouble counting votes the plain old vanilla way. On May 6 how Wake County double counted 15,000 ballots and Mecklenburg double counted 2,000, (May 8, 2008 Mecklenburg, Wake find vote flaws News 14 Carolina, NC ) and Onslow "omitted" 4,000 ballots. (May 9, 2008 Thousands of votes missed in Tuesday tallies Jacksonville Daily News, NC ). And our voters still haven't gotten the hang of straight ticket voting after 20 years - Every four years, tens of thousands of voters who mark the "straight-party-ticket voting" option forget to also vote separately for president. ("2004 vote count smoother, still some problems" Scripps Howard News Service Dec. 22, 2004 )

Clearly we're not ready for more complex elections and the tremendous instability that IRV introduces to our elections system?

There is a precedent where IRV adoption in the US has forced the "emergency" approval of uncertified, untested IRV software in the United States:

1. San Francisco used uncertified software and after 3 years was notified that the algorithm was flawed. A study by Greg Dennis reveals unintended consequences that IRV caused in San Francisco's IRV elections and the affect of overvoted contests on next contests on ballot.

2. The Secretary of State of Washington granted "emergency" permission in May 2008 for Pierce County to use uncertified software on Seqouia machines, even though flaws were found in the WinEDS (central tabulating system). Touchscreens were certified on an emergency basis, but not the precinct optical scanners. All optical scan ballots will be hauled off to the county office to be tabulated.

3. Burlington Vermont uses some sort of uncertified software to tabulate the results from their Diebold machines.

Raleigh N&O: Instant runoff voting poses problems

Please say no to adding an Instant Runoff Voting pilot to S 1263 or any other bill. No more Instant Runoff Experiments.

On Wed July 2, 1:00 PM the House Election Law Committee will hear an amendment in Sb 1263 to extend the Instant runoff experiment.

The only way we can have another instant runoff experiment is to gut our Verified Voting law - to allow our state to use uncertified software and cut corners on audits and election night reporting. There is no software or firmware developed to tabulate IRV, none tested or federally approved for our voting machines. Since IRV is being sold as a "cost saver" - no money will be spent to educate our nearly 6 million voters about this drastic change in our elections and many will be disenfranchised.There are other simpler less expensive ways to eliminate costly runoff elections.

ACT NOW BEFORE WED. JULY 2ND: email the House Election Law Committee, their email addressess and a sample message are below:

Melanieg@ncleg.net; joek@ncleg.net;paull@ncleg.net;Deborahr@ncleg.net; Angelab@ncleg.net;
mailto:Deborahr@ncleg.net;Angelab@ncleg.net;waltc@ncleg.net;Billcu@ncleg.net;Susanf@ncleg.netwaltc@ncleg.net;Billcu@ncleg.net;Susanf@ncleg.net; Priceyh@ncleg.net;Georgeho@ncleg.net;Carolynju@ncleg.net;Davidl@ncleg.net;
Grierm@ncleg.net; Mickeym@ncleg.net; Pauls@ncleg.net; Edgars@ncleg.net, verlai@ncleg.net; elliek@ncleg.net;

Subject: S 1263- say NO to IRV pilot

Please say no to adding an Instant runoff voting pilot to S 1263 or any other bill. No more Instant Runoff Experiments.IRV is a well intentioned idea that produces unintended consequences, and fails to deliver as promised. It does not save money, is confusing and violates the KISS principle of elections (Keep it Simple).

This is not a partisan issue, but about maintaining the integrity of our elections. Our equipment currently can not handle IRV, and it would lead to a push for more electronic voting machines, and we have seen the problem with those. IRV costs will include changes to our voting machines or software, increased ballot printing, and voter education. Many voters won't be reached by the education and most will not know enough about all of the candidates to choose 2 or 3 for each contest. This is inherently unfair to the average voter and also will harm the down ticket contests. Another IRV experiment cannot be done without gutting key provisions of the Public Confidence in Elections Law - standards that protect our state from unscrupulous voting vendors and defective voting software.

There are other simpler less expensive ways to eliminate costly runoff elections. We can stop having statewide runoffs - most states don't have them, or appoint the Labor Commissioner as do 45 other states, or adjust the thresholds for these elections. Third parties can be helped by making ballot access easier, and considering other voting methods that don't require complex tabulation.

Raleigh N&O: Instant runoff voting poses problems

Raleigh News and Observer, Jun 24, 2008

Joyce McCloyWINSTON-SALEM - Today's runoff election for state labor commissioner will be a costly, low-turnout contest. One proposed remedy is "instant runoff voting" at the primary election, ending the need for separate runoffs. But that would be a drastic change in our way of voting and could prove worse than the problem it tries to solve.

Instant runoff voting means that in races with more than two candidates, voters mark a first, second and third choice for each office. It can be described as retallying without revoting, until a majority of votes are reshuffled into one pile.

In our state's May 6 primary, with its record turnout, ranking the choices on a long ballot with many races would have been extremely confusing to voters. It would likely have led to greater "fall-off" on down-ballot races, harming those candidates.

There are better alternatives -- using winner-take-all voting, using different thresholds or percentages needed to win or having a mail-in ballot for low-intensity runoffs. Conducting a runoff is made easier by provisions for early voting and mail-in balloting. The real problem is a lack of voter interest.

Here's the bottom line:

* North Carolina's voting machines cannot count IRV ballots. According to the State Board of Elections, "There are no provisions on ... equipment to tabulate IRV."

* IRV ballots are difficult to count. Officials had to manually tally the IRV results for an instant runoff election held in Cary as a pilot project last year. One small error cascaded into a miscount that had to be corrected at another date. One Knightdale resident, commenting on the Cary test at a follow-up meeting, said that "If the best board of elections in North Carolina had this much trouble counting 3,000 votes, this is too dangerous to try statewide."

* IRV creates new costs. The system requires specialized voting machines and software, increased ballot-printing expenditures and voter education, something North Carolina does poorly. Wake County spent $9,000 on voter education for the Cary experiment, with advocacy organizations donating the rest.

* In Cary, the winner in the District B Town Council contest took office with less than 40 percent of the first-choice votes cast, and less than 50 percent of the votes of people who showed up on Election Day.

* Some voters in the Cary IRV experiment ranked the same candidate more than once. Some did not rank choices. Don Frantz, winner of the District B contest, said he heard from many confused voters on the campaign trail. Vickie Maxwell, another candidate, said that having to explain a novel voting process was a distraction from discussing the issues with voters. Another candidate instructed supporters to vote for him as their first, second and third choices, a confusing message that effectively caused voters to pick nobody else as a second choice.

* IRV places a cognitive burden on voters. Who should you rank second or third, or should you rank at all? Voters should not need calculators to figure out how to vote. According to Eugene Weeks, chairman of the Wake County Voter Education Coalition, "The ballot that is being used now is already confusing to some voters, yet you want to antagonize and confuse the voters more by asking them to not only vote for one candidate, but indicate a second and third choice before leaving the voting booth. Where is the voter's rights in this process?"

* No instant-runoff capable equipment meets North Carolina's tough election standards -- so will we gut those standards and risk harm caused by uncertified software or unscrupulous voting vendors?* North Carolina still has trouble counting votes the plain old vanilla way. On May 6, 15,000 ballots in Wake County and 2,500 in Mecklenburg County were double counted, and 4,000 were omitted in Onslow County.Instant runoff creates new opportunities for problems.

If the objective of an election process is to discern the will of the voters, then our lawmakers should work to make our voting process the simplest, most transparent and most enfranchising method for all voters.(Joyce McCloy is with the N.C. Coalition for Verified Voting.)http://www.newsobserver.com/opinion/columns/story/1118100.html

CRITICAL ALERT: Verified Voting threatened, act NOW

This is a CRITICAL action alert. Please share this message with anyone who cares about verified voting and wants to keep our Public Confidence in Elections Law intact. We have voters from every background (liberal, conservative, disabled groups, minority groups) who agree they don't want their votes experimented with, they don't want more confusing ballots, and they don't want the paper ballot law compromised.

Take action now or be sorry later!

Background: The House Election Law Committee will be hearing an amendment to extend the Instant Runoff Voting experiment. The amendment will be in SB 1263. The claim is that we need IRV so we won't have to spend money on expensive low turnout runoffs.

But IRV is expensive! They don't tell lawmakers that. You can't save money with IRV if you plan to educate our nearly 6 million voters, can you?

There is no certified software anywhere in the US to count IRV - IRV will lead to stripping standards from our verified voting law in order to "automate" the counting of IRV with untested, uncertified, illegal software. IRV is too complicated to count by hand! Cary NC miscounted just
3,000 ballots.

The House Election Law Committee will be discussing Luebke's amendment on Wednesday, July 2 at 1:00 PM. Please send an email to the House Election Law Committee and also cc your own lawmakers - its their job to protect their constituents. My email to lawmakers is lower down, you can use it or craft your own. THANK YOU!

Melanieg@ncleg.net; mailto:joek@ncleg.net;%20paull@ncleg.net;%20Deborahr@ncleg.net;%20Angelab@ncleg.net;Waltc@ncleg.net;Billcu@ncleg.net;Susanf@ncleg.net;
Priceyh@ncleg.net;Georgeho@ncleg.net;Carolynju@ncleg.net;Davidl@ncleg.net;
Grierm@ncleg.net;Mickeym@ncleg.net;Pauls@ncleg.net;Edgars@ncleg.net
verlai@ncleg.net; elliek@ncleg.net;

House Election Law Committee Members: Chairman Rep. Goodwin, Vice Chairman Rep. Kiser, Vice Chairman Rep. Luebke, Vice Chairman Rep. Ross, Rep. Bryant, Rep. Church, Rep. Current, Rep. Fisher, Rep. Harrison, Rep. Holmes, Rep. Justice, Rep. Lewis, Rep. Martin, Rep. Michaux, Rep. Stam, Rep. Starnes

Subject: S 1263-say no to IRV pilot

Please say no to adding an IRV pilot to S 1263 or any other bill.No more Instant Runoff Experiments. Our votes are too precious. We are told that Rep Luebke will ask to amend SB 1263 to extend the Pilot Program for Instant Runoffs.The title of the bill is "Election Law Amendments" and is here:
http://www.ncleg.net/gascripts/BillLookUp/BillLookUp.pl?Session=2007++&BillID=sb+1263

If you recall, the previous pilot allowed for 10 cities in 2007 and 10 counties in 2008 to participate. Two cities, Cary and Hendersonville participated, and no counties volunteered. The pilot expired. The people have spoken!

Cary was a disaster: besides the miscounting of the ballots, the provisional votes were mishandled - they were not counted until after the "instant runoff" was run. I don't know how you can "add back in" the provisional ballots after counting all three rounds of votes, do you? In a inner office memo, the State Board of Elections admitted that IRV was too dangerous to try during the May 2008 primary.

In addition to the obvious problems with Instant Runoff (IRV) including that our machines can't handle it, many of our standards for voting systems and vendors would be have to be lowered to allow this experimental voting system. Recounts and auditing elections are exponentially more complex with IRV as well.

Since IRV is being touted as a cost saving measure, it is clear that the State isn't going to appropriate the millions of dollars necessary to educate our nearly 6 million voters.

If the state is anxious to end statewide runoffs, then they could easily abolish them and join about 42 other states who do not have statewide runoffs. Or let the governor appoint the labor commissioner, as happens in 45 other states. Third parties can be helped by making ballot access easier, and considering other voting methods that don't require complex tabulation.

The fact is that IRV is a well intentioned idea that produces unintended consequences, and fails to deliver as promised. It does not save money, is confusing and violates the KISS principle of elections (Keep it Simple). Let some other state work out the many problems with IRV implementation and voter education.

Why does North Carolina have primary runoffs? Most states don't http://www.instantrunoffvoting.us/runoffelections.html
Kentucky repealed its provision to hold gubernatorial primary runoff elections in April 2008.
http://migration.kentucky.gov/Newsroom/sos/article162.htm
IRV disenfranchises everyone. Remember the long time voter in Hendersonville: Oct 19, 2007 Voter finds new system frustrating By Harrison Metzger Times-News. Hendersonville: Bill Modlin wasn't happy with his first experience with the new "instant runoff" voting when he cast his ballot for Hendersonville City Council on Thursday. ..."It doesn't make any sense to me, and I can guarantee you because of the way they have it set up there are people in this town that are going to lose their vote," he said. ..."I call it instant confusion," he said. (Cached) Blue Ridge Now Oct 19.
http://www.ncvoter.net/downloads/IRV_Oct_19_Voter_finds_new_system_frustrating.pdf North Carolina, Instant Runoff Voting and the Flying Car http://irvbad4nc.blogspot.com/2008/06/north-carolina-and-instant-runoff.html Instant Runoff was a disaster in Cary North Carolina http://irvbad4nc.blogspot.com/2008/06/instant-runoff-was-disaster-in-cary.html On May 6,

15,000 ballots in Wake County and 2,500 in Mecklenburg County were double counted,[1] and 4,000 were omitted in Onslow County.[2] [1]May 8, 2008 Mecklenburg, Wake find vote flaws News 14 Carolina, NC
http://news14.com/content/top_stories/595595/mecklenburg--wake-find-vote-flaws/Default.aspx [2]

May 9, 2008 Thousands of votes missed in Tuesday tallies Jacksonville Daily News, NC http://www.jdnews.com/news/votes_56535___article.html/board_onslow.html

Regards; Joyce McCloy NC Coalition for Verified Voting
336-794-1240 joyce@ncvoter.net http://www.ncvoter.net/

Instant Runoff was a disaster in Cary North Carolina

Instant runoff voting was not so great in Cary North Carolina

Even "one of the best Boards of Elections in the state of North Carolina" had trouble counting IRV ballots in the Cary NC in Oct 2007 and provisional ballots weren't counted until after :

1. It was difficult to count just 3,000 ballots correctly. Officials had to manually tally the IRV results for the Cary, NC “instant runoff”. There was confusion during the counting and ballots were miscounted and not properly allocated to the candidates. Friday, the day after the "runoff" or count of the 2nd round, the election director performed an audit, according to the media. Errors were discovered and the audit extended into a full blown recount:

Oct 12, 2007 Recount widens Frantz lead in Cary Matthew Eisley, Raleigh News & Observer A double-checking of votes today in Cary's razor-thin District B Town Council election showed that Don Frantz appears to be the unofficial winner after all.... But Elections Director Cherie Poucher said today that an audit of the votes found math mistakes: several votes for Frantz had been missed, and a group of 24 one-stop ballots had been counted twice for Maxwell. The new tally is 1,392 for Frantz and 1,339 for Maxwell, giving Frantz a 53-vote lead.
http://www.newsobserver.com/news/story/735111.html


One small error cascaded into a miscount that had to be corrected at another date. Oct 30, 2007 Critics Take Runoff Concerns To Elections Board ..."What IRV does is violate one of the basic principals of election integrity, which is simplicity," said Perry Woods, a political consultant in Cary. He says a small glitch threw everything into turmoil. Basically, someone counted the same group of votes twice; the error was caught, and corrected after an audit. Wood says his problem is with how they conducted that audit. "In this case, they ended up recounting all the ballots again and calling it an audit," said Woods. "I felt like if they were doing that, the public should have been involved, so no doubt is there."
http://www.nbc17.com/midatlantic/ncn/search.apx.-content-articles-NCN-2007-10-30-0028.html

A Knightdale resident said. “If the best board of elections in North Carolina had this much trouble counting 3,000 votes, this is too dangerous to try statewide.” (January 22, 2008 Opinion mixed on Cary's instant-runoff trial http://www.carynews.com/news/story/8057.html )

In "Instant Runoff Voting – 17 Flaws and 3 Benefits" a description of the Cary count:

According to Chris Telesca who observed the IRV counting in Wake County, NC, to hand-process a little over 3000 paper ballots (after the first choice votes were counted on the op-scan machines) when there were only 3 candidates plus a few write-ins for the Cary district B, single member town council seat, and the counting went only two rounds it took 6 sorting stacks for each of 12 ballot groupings or precincts (8 precincts plus absentee by mail in Cary, board of elections one-stop site, the Cary one-stop site, provisional ballots- Cary, and possibly some transfer votes from another county which were eligible to vote in the Cary IRV contest) or 12 times 6 stacks = 72 stacks. Wake County officials decided to put each stack in a separate plastic bag to keep track. This would not be possible if there were more than one IRV contest because each contest requires independent sorting and stacking to count. The procedure was very complicated, but it was there in print. Even so, the Wake Board of Elections (BOE) didn’t follow it. There was no overhead projector so that observers could follow the process. Non Board members were sorting the ballots into stacks which was hard to follow. Nonetheless, observers and the Board came up with different totals at the end of the day. The next day, the different totals were determined to be caused by a calculator error that was discovered in an “audit” – that also discovered a few missing votes.

The “audit” – which had to have included going back into the previously sorted/stacked and counted ballots – was not done in public. It took 3.5 hours minimum to do the first expedited processing of the 3000 ballots, not including the non-public “audit”. If you proceeded at the same pace for a county commissioner election in 2008, it could take three teams of counters 350 hours to sort/stack and count 300,000 ballots for just one race. That is just ten hours short of nine weeks –more time than it would take to hold a runoff election 4 to 6 weeks later. http://electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/US/RCV-IRV/InstantRunoffVotingFlaws.pdf

IRV is complicated to count, because each individual ballot has to be considered when deciding which ones advance to the "next round".

Why IS instant runoff so hard to count? Because 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 State Board of Elections issued 3 pages of instructions on how to count IRV elections. Instructions on counting optical scan IRV ballots are on pages 1- 3, and sample ballots are on page 5 (provided by the Rocky Mount Telegram)http://www.ncvoter.net/downloads/IRV_Optical_Scan_Ballot.pdf

2. The Wake BoE did NOT count the voters' provisional ballots before going to the 2nd round. I inquired and was told that these were later added into the totals. (considering how IRV can only be counted by considering each individual ballot, how were these added back in?)Tuesday, October 16, 2007 at the public canvassing of the election, the provisional ballots were approved and added back into the election(s).

Oct 17, 2007 Frantz wins Cary runoff Cary's new 'instant runoff' procedure settles a close Town Council election ...Because dozens of provisional ballots had yet to be verified, the narrow margin meant that Maxwell might still win. http://www.newsobserver.com/news/wake/cary/story/739547.html

3. Overvotes were not reported by the voting machines, because our voting machines cannot see/read the 2nd and 3rd choices, so an important protection was lost. Especially considering that one of the Cary candidates was telling voters to rank him 1, 2 and 3 - many voters' 2nd and 3rd choices would not count in a "runoff'.

4. IRV creates new costs for every election. IRV requires specialized voting machines and software, increased ballot printing expenditures and voter education, something North Carolina does poorly.

North Carolina’s voting machines cannot count IRV ballots. According to the State Board of Elections, “There are no provisions on ES&S equipment to tabulate IRV.” ( January 7, 2008 email from Keith Long, NC State Board of Elections Voting Systems Project Manager. http://www.ncvoter.net/downloads/Keith_Long_Machines_Not_IRV_Compatible.pdf)

Wake County spent $9,000 on voter education for the Cary experiment, with advocacy organizations donating the rest. This figure is on the low end and amounts to about 8.5 cents per registered voter , with Cary having 76,258 voters. This is the cheapest I have ever heard of being proposed for IRV voter ed. We know that IRV proponents heavily augmented the voter education efforts.

Contrast that to San Francisco, one of the few IRV jurisdictions in the US, which spends approx $1.87 per registered voter on voter education. San Francisco had 421,094 registered voters in 2004, spent $776,000 on IRV related voter education , or $1.87 per registered voter, with $210,000 specifically allotted to the community organizations for their efforts. 700 public outreach events in one year were held.

How much would it cost to educate the entire state's voters about IRV?

If done for the cost of a first class stamp (.42 cents), with 5,810,420 registered voters, that would be $2.44 million at least. This will have to be repeated each time, and many may ignore the mailer. If done for the low ball unrealistic amount of 8.5 cents per registered voter, that amounts to approximately $500.000 or half a million dollars. Just for the most meager voter education for a very foreign way of voting.

Then there's the cost of printing ballots. Ranking candidates takes up a lot more of the ballot, what normally would have fit on half a page may end up taking 3 ballot pages.

Instant runoff voting would make a difficult process even more complicated and less transparent - we need to focus on counting ballots the plain old vanilla way:

On May 6 primary night, 15,000 ballots in Wake County and 2500 in Mecklenburg were double counted ( May 8, 2008 Mecklenburg, Wake find vote flaws News 14 Carolina, NC http://news14.com/content/top_stories/595595/mecklenburg--wake%20find-vote-flaws/Default.aspx )

and 4,000 were omitted in Onslow County.” ( May 9, 2008 Thousands of votes missed in Tuesday tallies Jacksonville Daily News, NC
http://www.jdnews.com/news/votes_56535___article.html/board_onslow.html )

North Carolina, Instant Runoff Voting and the Flying Car

Are we ready for the "flying car" yet? Some people think we are.

In an AP news article today, IRV advocates are plugging instant runoff voting as if it were a feasible alternative to holding traditional runoffs.

This is like suggesting that we could all get "flying cars" to help us avoid rush hour traffic. It would be nice, but it isn't realistic.

During North Carolina's May primary, voters faced a very long ballot with some contests they knew little or nothing about. The office of Labor Commissioner is one of those contests. Many people don't know anything about what the Labor Commissioner does. Do you? 45 states don't even vote for this office. Many voters came out mainly to vote for the presidential candidates.

Yet proponents think that IRV would make elections easier. Why should North Carolina be a beta test for this type of experiment? No other state has ever used IRV for statewide contests, there is no IRV software available for our machines, our elections officials had trouble counting votes in the Cary North Carolina IRV experiment, and North Carolina still has trouble counting votes the plain old vanilla way.

June 22, 2008 NC
runoff low-key affair compared to primary
By GARY D. ROBERTSON Associated
Press Writer

...Some people want the state to switch to instant runoff voting, which allows a winner to be named without holding a separate runoff because voters rank all the candidates by their preference during the primary. The concept has been used in Cary and Hendersonville as a way to boost voter involvement and save money."It would have made sense to just identify your choice and backup choice," said Bob Hall, research director with the campaign reform group Democracy North Carolina. "More people would have done that than (will) show up at the polls."

Bob Hall of Democracy for NC says that "instant runoff voting" is the solution to the issue of low turnout runoffs, even statewide runoffs.

We can't even handle IRV contests for city council. Our voting machines can't count IRV ballots so officials had to manually tally the IRV results for the Cary, NC “instant runoff”. There was confusion during the counting of just 3,000 votes. The ballots were not properly allocated to the candidates. Friday, the day after the "runoff" or count of the 2nd round, the election director performed an audit which blossomed into a recount, and then corrected the results. The Wake BoE did NOT count the voters' provisional ballots before going to the 2nd round. Tuesday, October 16, 2007 at the public canvassing of the election, the provisional ballots were approved (after the "instant runoff' had already been conducted) and added back into the election(s). The counting of IRV in Hendersonville was never tested, as a "majority" winner was found in the "first" round. officials is difficult to count by hand, and that there is no IRV software for NC's voting machines.

Chuck Herrin, a certified white hat hacker and IT certification specialist warned our lawmakers about the ability of today's technology to handle IRV or even just plain elections. He compared IRV to the "flying car":

Fri, 31 Dec 2004

Dear Representatives and Committee Members, I look forward to speaking to you on January 7th on the security and audit issues of electronic voting systems. I would like to thank each and everyone of you for taking the time to hear what your constituents and fellow North Carolinians have to say.

I am planning to speak briefly on Industry Standards for Information Security, Auditing, and demonstrate how to change vote totals on a running instance of Diebold's GEMS software, which is the software used to tabulate vote data from DREs as well as optically-scanned and absentee ballots. This is the software that was recently highlighted in Gaston County when the problems with vote numbers surfaced, leading to the resignation of Sandra Page after 15 years of service.

In preparation for the next meeting, I have included a link to a recent discussion of electronic voting by some of my Infosec colleagues from May of 2004 that you may find interesting. Topics include instant-runoff voting, paper trails, and communication with state officials and the public.

http://www.cs.may.ie/~mmcgaley/Download/e-voting-6-04_british.pdf

I have also included a link to the main site for the Common Criteria, which is the international standard used for building appropriately secure systems. http://csrc.nist.gov/cc/

One other issue I wanted to touch base with you on is Instant Runoff Voting. I think that IRV is a fabulous goal, long term. It stands to greatly reduce runoff costs and other problems once we have systems that can reliably handle it. The problem right now is that our electronic voting systems cannot reliably count straight races, and even the DRE manufacturers have said that they are not ready for IRV. Complicating things, IRV introduces a more confusing system in terms of audit ability and security, since the ballots are more complex and normal indicators such as exit polls will not be able to easily reflect IRV results. Tracing back the will of the voter in the event of problems or fraud would be more difficult with IRV until a reliable procedure and design is in place, and any abuses are much less likely to be detected since the whole point of the IRV system is avoiding recounts. That's not to say that it can't be done, just that it is extremely important to get it right the first time, with proper design and certification.

Instant Runoff Voting is a great goal for us to work toward, but if we need to get a system in place for 2006 and 2008, IRV is not logistically viable. For IRV to work, we need systems that are trustworthy and reliable, and that takes more time and money than we have available before the next election. An analogy I use for IRV is the flying car - definitely possible, and a great idea, but right now we won't get there by strapping a missile to a Yugo. Would it fly? Sure - but I don't think it's what we want to rely on for safe and reliable transportation.

I would be happy to work with you towards IRV as a long-term goal, as I think it has merit as a long-term solution when properly designed and tested. I look forward to seeing all of you on the 7th, and if there is any information that you would like for me to address, please let me know!Regards,Chuck Herrin, CISSP, CISA, MCSE, CEHAll outgoing correspondence is digitally signed. Lack of a valid signature indicates possible forgery. My public key is available at http://www.chuckherrin.com/ChuckHerrin.asc

Instant Runoff Voting Not Constitutional says St. Paul MN City Attorney - not obligated to place the proposed IRV charter amendment on ballot

June 18, 2008. St. Paul Minnesota.

A proposed amendment to require St. Paul to conduct local elections using instant runoff voting is not constitutional, according to John Choi, City Attorney for Saint Paul. The City Council may put the amendment on the ballot but it is not recommended.

At issue is a petition that is deemed to have sufficient signatures on it. Joseph Mansky, the Ramsey County Elections Manager expressed five issue of concern with the petition's substance.

City Attorney Choi answers in a letter today to City Council President Cathy Lantry, some excerpts below:

Questions presented:

1. Does the City Council have the legal authority to not submit a charter proposal to the voters?
2. Is whether the recently filed petition for a charter amendment that proposes Instant Runoff Voting (IRV) constitutional and without any legal defects?
3. As the City's chief legal officer, please share with us any legal advice about best managing the City's liabilities and other legal considerations that you may deem important for the City Council to consider in determining whether to put the proposed IRV petition on the 2008 Ballot.


BRIEF ANSWER

This office has anticipated these questions and over the past eighteen (18 months has thoroughly researched, reviewed and considered all of the legal issues associated with IRV. During that time, I enlisted the resources of two assistant city attorneys and the deputy city attorney of the civil division for independent analyses of IRV's legality. Although it is impossible to predict with absolute certainty the judicial response to IRV, all three attorneys independently concluded that IRV is more likely than not to be determined unconstitutional and suffering from other legal defects by a reviewing
court.

...I am keenly aware that voters in the City of Minneapolis recently approved IRV and the parallel that plays regarding the extraordinary effort put into gathering the petition signatures to place IRV on the ballot in Saint Paul. I am also aware of the intense local public interest in IRV in Saint Paul. It is, however, not this office's role to consider the policy wisdom or popularity of IRV but only to answer the legal question you have presented.

Accordingly, it is the professional opinion of the City Attorney's Office that for the reasons stated herein, IRV is more likely than not to be determined by a reviewing court to be in violation of the Minnesota Constitution. In addition, a reviewing court would likely rule that the City is precluded by Minn. Stat 205.02 from enacting IRV as its voting system. If the City Council so chooses, the City is not obligated to place the proposed IRV charter amendment on the ballot. ... Case law, however has long recognized a city's right to refuse to place a manifestly unconstitutional charter amendment on the ballot.

Legal considerations the Council may deem important to consider in determining whether to put the proposed IRV petition on the 2008 Ballot:

The Council is faced with two permissible options: to place the IRV petition on the ballot; or to refuse to place it on the ballot. While most petitions are placed on the ballot as a matter of course, the Minnesota Supreme Court has repeatedly recognized a city's legitimate need to avoid"a futile election and a total waste of taxpayer's money." Davies, 316 N.W.2d at 504.

This concern is particularly compelling for two reasons: First, as described in Mr. Mansky's letter, IRV's cost is particularly high; and second, the City of Minneapolis is currently in litigation over the validity of an IRV provision adopted by its voters. That case, likely to be appealed regardless of the outcome at the district court level, should resolve the question of IRV's legality and constitutionality. The Council could reasonably conclude to wait for a decision in that case before placing the IRV petition on the ballot....

CONCLUSION

Based on the foregoing, we answer your questions as follows: The City is not obligated to place the proposed IRV charter amendment on the ballot. The City is expressly precluded from enacting IRV as its voting system by Minn. Stat 205.02 and it is not impliedly authorized by the Minnesota Constitution. The Council, to avoid "a futile election and a total waste of taxpayer's money", could wait to act until it knows the outcome of the pending litigation regarding IRV.

A group of citizens called the Minnesota Voters Alliance is currently challenging the constitutionality of IRV. They are prepared to take the issue to the US Supreme Court.

IRV has been promoted heavily by Fair Vote in North Carolina, but a recent pilot program had meager participation, ballots were difficult to count, and the pilot program expired. More information about the IRV experiment in North Carolina at the website of the NC Coalition for Verified Voting, NC Voter.

Kathy Dopp and Experts Deconstruct Instant Runoff Voting, rebutting the rebuttal

Fair Vote's "debunk" of Kathy Dopps' report on IRV is now itself - "debunked"

Fair Vote's talking points have been repeated over and over as if they were fact, instead of unsubstantiated opinion. Many people accept these talking points without question because the methods and mechanics are dauntingly complex, and because the idea of IRV sounds so appealing. People in North Carolina and Minnesota should be espcially alarmed since Fair Vote is pushing IRV so desperately in those states.

Kathy Dopp has laid out the facts and addressed the faults and myths about IRV in a second report on the flaws of instant runoff voting. You can read the press release here. Kathy enlisted the assistance of top national computer voting experts and also election method experts. Her report is the first one I've seen that addresses whether IRV works, and how it (negatively) impacts election integrity.

The hardest hitting section of the report is where Kathy Dopp deconstructs Fair Vote's rebuttal, "point-by-point". In effect she dismantled the pro IRV talking points. Additionally, in her rebuttal of a rebuttal, Kathy shows us how Fair Vote parses their words and responses. (In my opinion).

Appendix F: Rebuttals to Fair Vote's "De-Bunking Kathy Dopp's 15 Flaws of Instant Runoff Voting"

This appendix relies heavily on the expertise, writing, and research of Adb ul-Rahman Lomax and his rebuttals to Fair Vote on the election-methods@lists.electorama.com with some help by other email list members, including Warren Smith. This appendix rebuts the Fair Vote organization's attempted rebuttal of the first version of this paper.

(See http://www.fairvote.org/?page=2285 or http://www.fairvote.org/dopp for the full text of Fair Vote's rebuttals.) Note: The numbering of IRV flaws is slightly different in this revised version above than in the original version due to the addition of two new flaws in this addition.

1. "Does not solve the "spoiler" problem except in special cases…."

Fair Vote's rebuttal:"Dopp has her "special cases" reversed. In fact, IRV solves the spoiler problem in virtually all likely U.S. partisan elections. Whenever a third party or independent candidate is unlikely to be one of the top vote-getters …, IRV eliminates the spoiler problem"

Fair Vote does not contradict the point that "IRV does not solve the spoiler problem" except in the particular case where no third candidate is among voters' top choices. In other words, using IRV counting methods means that the presence of a non-winning "spoiler" candidate can still split the votes and cause a different candidate to win than would otherwise win an election contest.

The particular spoiler problems that IRV does not solve are not rare whenever there are three or more major candidates. IRV is mostly being proposed at this time in the U.S. as a replacement for non-partisan elections. For instance, that is what IRV is being used for in San Francisco. Three or more major candidates occur much more commonly in nonpartisan election contests than in partisan ones in a two-party system, so that the spoiler problem is particularly likely in the same local U.S. elections where IRV is usually tested.

Notice that Fair Vote's response uses many hedging or misleading words like "virtually all", 'likely", "unique", "final", and "partisan". Because simpler, more problem-free voting methods are available which do solve the spoiler problem in all cases, the fact that IRV solves the spoiler problem only in cases where only two major-party candidates are viable, is not a valid reason to support IRV.

2. Dopp: "Requires centralized vote counting procedures at the state-level…"

Fair Vote's rebuttal:

IRV creates no need to centralize the counting or the ballots themselves, although that is one possible counting procedure … all that is required to implement IRV is central coordination of the tally. If ballot images are recorded on optical scan equipment, the data from those images can be collected centrally for an IRV ballot. If a hand-count is conducted, vote totals need to be reported to a central tallying office in order to determine what step to take next in the count. In Ireland, for example, there are 43 counting centers in the presidential race. Election administrators count
ballots and report their totals to a national office that in turn instructs the administrators at each counting center on what to do next. The entire process takes less than a day even though more than a million ballots are cast.

Fair Vote renames "central vote counting" to "central coordination of the tally", but does not contradict our point that IRV requires centralized vote-counting procedures at the state-level for all races with districts that cross county lines. What Fair Vote describes is a system where actual ballot counting takes place in regional centers, but the tallies must be transmitted to the central facility and added together and announced before the next round can be counted at the regional centers. All ballots in the entire election contest must be counted for each round and its totals computed and announced, before the next round can be counted. This web page by warren Smith explains the need for centralized IRV vote counting: http://rangevoting.org/IrvNonAdd.html

Consider absentee ballots which frequently take some jurisdictions up to two weeks after Election Day to verify voter eligibility and count. If all the absentee voters' ballots must be counted first before proceeding to round two, then the statewide or nationwide (in the case of an IRV presidential election) would be held up for two weeks before being able to finish round one
counts.

Fair Vote's response hi-lights its push for new hi-tech optical scan voting equipment needed in order to implement IRV by saying "If ballot images are recorded on optical scan equipment, the data from those images can be collected centrally for an IRV ballot". The truth is that very few of today's optical scanners create ballot images.

There is a study at http://www.gregdennis.com/voting/sf_irv.pdf
that describes that the San Francisco machines are programmed to "interpret" the votes in creating "ballot images" and that the alleged "ballot images" are pre-processed and do not reflect the actual patterns of votes on the paper ballots. See appendix E of this paper for a description by computer scientists of the fact that most of today's optical scanning equipment is not designed to be able to process any ranked choice ballots or to count using IRV methods. Any voting system involving transferring all individual ballot images introduces new costs and security vulnerabilities; and introduces ballot privacy issues.

The method of counting votes in Ireland is that the two lowest-ranking candidates can be eliminated in the first round as long as the sum of their votes is less than the vote total of the next highest candidate. The full counting rules for Ireland are found here:
http://www.irishstatutebook.ie/1937/en/act/pub/0032/gen_6.html#gen_6

This makes sense because even if all voters were transferred to one of the other eliminated group of candidates, that candidate would still be eventually eliminated without enough votes to surpass the remaining group of candidates. While such a procedure helps shorten IRV counting, Ireland only has 1 million voters nation-wide and 43 total counting centers as opposed to the U.S. having millions of voters just in some cities and over 3300 separate election administration jurisdictions (dozens to hundreds in each state) with dozens to thousands of polling locations in each jurisdiction. The Irish Presidential election is held only once every 7 years and in 2004 it took one day to count but two days to make a decision because no candidate got a majority in the first and only round.

3. Dopp: "Encourages the use of complex voting systems and… [FairVote promotes] electronic balloting…"

Fair Vote's rebuttal:

Most government IRV elections are in fact conducted with hand-count paper ballots, including national elections in Australia, Ireland and Papua New Guinea….

FairVote advocates that all such machines store a redundant electronic record of each ballot, as well as a paper ballot to allow for better fraud detection, and to simplify ranked ballot tabulations.

Fair Vote reinforces our point that "Fair Vote promotes electronic balloting" when its attempt at rebuttal asks for an "electronic record of each ballot… to simplify ranked ballot tabulations. Consider trying to manually audit an IRV election. It is not enough to look at the totals for each rank. One has to look at each round, and the ranks on ballots transferred in that round. Suppose A is eliminated. On some ballots A might be in the first position, on some in second position, and so forth. On each of these ballots where A is eliminated, there is the candidate in the second position. The exact sequence of eliminations that took place in the original election must be followed. Compare this with just counting the marks on the ballot and adding them up. How can Fair Vote IRV activists deny the complexity of IRV counting with a straight face?

IRV is far more complex to count than any other alternative voting system being considered. Elections in Australia, Ireland, and Papua New Guinea are held under very different circumstances than U.S. elections. Please refer to response #2 above for a discussion of Ireland's IRV election. Australia …

4. Dopp: "Confuses voters…"

Fair Vote's rebuttal:

All the evidence shows that voters are not confused by IRV. The rate of spoiled ballots did not increase in any of the U.S. cities when they switched to IRV.

All the evidence? Well then, let us look at the evidence. Fair Vote implies that the most confused voters would, of course, be in the "ward in town with the highest number of low-income voters". However Burlington is a college town and college students are known to be low-income. When I called the Burlington election office, I was told by the person answering the phone that IRV "confused voters". Fair Vote's claims about San Francisco are unfounded because there is no real ballot spoilage data from which to make their statistics. There is an analysis of over-vote rates available at http://rangevoting.org/SPRates.html or that found a 0.082% overvote rate in plurality races compared to a 0.60% overvote rate in the IRV races, a difference that is statistically significant. More information here:

http://rangevoting.org/Irvtalk.html#nospoilageincrease . There is also a study that goes into more detail at http://www.gregdennis.com/voting/sf_irv.pdf that is inconsistent with Fair Vote's conclusion that "All the evidence shows that voters are not confused by IRV." According to the paper, 14% of Latinos and 27% of Asian voters, in exit polls conducted by the Chinese-American Voter Education Committee found IRV difficult to use. Also, some patterns of overvotes did not show up in the ballot images used to determine the statistics because the software pre-processed and interpreted the voters' ballots, rather than simply reporting them.

The author(s) of Fair Vote's rebuttal attempt should read all the news articles on voter confusion that are provided in the endnotes of this paper. It is hard to imagine how anyone could deny that IRV causes some voter confusion.

5. Dopp: "Confusing, complex and time-consuming to implement and to count…"

Fair Vote's rebuttal:

IRV certainly is simpler for election officials and voters than conducting a whole separate runoff election to find a majority winner. ... Note that the winning threshold for an IRV election, as with any election, must be specified in the law.

Computer scientists who are voting system experts generally disagree with Fair Vote's unsupported assertion that IRV is "simpler" than an election plus a separate runoff election. If the required winning threshold for an IRV election is a majority of voters, then an IRV election could end by requiring a separate top-two runoff election afterwards. It took two years to implement IRV in San Francisco, and some jurisdictions have passed IRV but are still waiting to implement it whenever new voting equipment that can handle IRV elections can be purchased.

6. Dopp: "Makes post election data and exit poll analysis much more difficult to perform…"

Fair Vote's rebuttal:

To date, IRV election can make it easier to do post-election and exit poll analysis. Because optical scan counts with IRV require capturing of ballot images, San Francisco (CA) and Burlington (VT) were able to release the data files showing every single ballot's set of rankings – thereby allowing any voter to do a recount and full analysis on their own.

Exit polls can be done just as well under IRV rules as vote-for-one rules. California requires a manual audit in its elections, which has been done without difficulty in San Francisco's IRV elections. Manual audits should be required for all elections, regardless of whether IRV is used or not.

Fair Vote continues to make the wholly unsupported assertion that election and exit polls analysis can "be done just as well under IRV". However, the fact is that no researcher or mathematician has yet been able to generalize exit poll analyses methods that could detect patterns consistent with vote miscount or with exit poll response bias in two candidate races, to any ranked choice voting methods. Imagine exit pollsters trying to accurately obtain all the ranked ballot choices of all voters for all election contests at the precinct-level and then trying to compare their sums statistically with the number of subtotals of votes equal to the number of candidates raised to the power equal to the number of candidates minus one for each precinct!

Imagine the sample size exit pollsters would need to reduce the error due to random chance for such statistical comparisons! I have repeatedly challenged IRV proponents to generalize the methods explained in this exit poll analysis paper to IRV and none have been able to do so yet:

http://electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/US/exit-polls/Exit-Poll-Analysis.pdf

As pointed out above, the optical scan machines in San Francisco (and probably in Burlington) do not provide images of the ballots. The ballot data they provide are preprocessed and modified into abstracted vote data which is what San Francisco calls "images" that do not show all the rankings on the ballot. Data is processed out that is considered irrelevant for election administration purposes but very relevant for determining voter error rates and for analyzing election data. There are also legal, financial, administrative, and ballot privacy impediments to publicly releasing the images of all ballots.

Fair Vote's response suggests, also without supporting evidence, that if ballot images showing all voters' ranked choice votes were available, then an election data analysis would be easy to perform (and raw ballot images are not available in either location mentioned by Fair Vote because only interpreted and possibly incorrect ballot data is available), as explained in this study: http://www.gregdennis.com/voting/sf_irv.pdf

Fair Vote claims that San Francisco manually audited its IRV machine count accuracy "without
difficulty".

How could San Francisco manually audit 1% of its IRV election precincts according to California statutes in a publicly verifiable way? I ask Fair Vote to demonstrate that San Francisco did a publicly verifiable valid manual audit of its precinct machine counts which actually checked the accuracy of its IRV election results by providing the URL where San Francisco, prior to beginning its audit, publicly released all of the thousands of vote counts, more than N factorial
(exact formula in full paper) vote counts per precinct, along with each vote count's unique candidate ranking order, or alternatively, where San Francisco publicly posted all of its individual ballots' IRV rankings with humanly readable identifiers that are needed to manually audit an IRV election by randomly selecting ballots.

More discussion on post-election audits of IRV elections is below in the audit section.

7. Dopp: "Difficult and time-consuming to manually count…"

Fair Vote's rebuttal:

Manual counts can take slightly longer than vote-for-one elections, but aren't difficult, unless many different races on a ballot need to go to a runoff count. As cited earlier, Irish election administrators can count more than a million ballots by hand in hotly contested presidential elections in one standard workday.

See the response to Fair Vote's "Irish" story above which counts only one election contest using only 43 counting centers for only 1 million total ballots for only one IRV round because the election was not close, and actually took two days to decide. What does Fair Vote mean by "need to go to a runoff count"? Is Fair Vote is honestly admitting that if many different races on a ballot are counted using IRV, manually counting is difficult? Fair Vote fails to mention San Francisco where election workers put in 16 hour days and the counting took about a month to count their IRV election.

A number of vote counts equal to N raised to the power (N-1), where N is the number of candidates in the race, could possibly be used to tally IRV rounds in each precinct or voting machine. Errors in counting IRV ripple through the rounds. Machine programming errors are easier to make and more difficult to detect. An error in counting the first round can require the entire election to be recounted in all the precincts and in all the rounds. Absentee and provisional ballots that sometimes take weeks after Election Day to process could change the entire IRV election results, necessitating waiting until all absentee and provisional ballots have been counted to begin IRV counts. For all contests whose districts reside in more than one jurisdiction, unless all ballots are centrally tallied by the state, every local jurisdiction must wait until all jurisdictions have reported the prior round's tallies to the central office to tally and the central office reports back who won the prior round, before knowing how to tally the next round.

8. Dopp: "Difficult and inefficient to manually audit…"

Fair Vote's rebuttal:

IRV can be manually audited just as well as vote-for-one elections, although it does take more effort (since voters must be allowed to express more information on their ballot). A manual audit can either be done using a random sample of ballots from all jurisdictions, or a random sample of ballots from a random sample of voting machines, or by a complete re-tally from a random sample of voting machines. A complete re-tally of all ballots (a recount) is, of course, possible but unnecessary unless a court recount is ordered.

Notice this paper said audits are "difficult and inefficient" and Fair Vote says "can be manually audited". This is true. However, ordinarily with an audit, one can pick a sample precinct and count it. Period. But with IRV, the number of possible vote counts that could be used to tally any IRV election in each precinct or other auditable vote count is equal to more than N factorial (see full report for exact formula) if N is the number of candidates. With just three candidates, there are 15 possible ballot orderings or subtotals in each precinct. One cannot know if the overall IRV results are correct by randomly selecting and counting all the ballots from 1% of precincts, unless all those more than N factorial (exact formula in full report) counts for each and every precinct, including the unique candidate ranking associated with each of the å counts within every precinct or other auditable vote count, are publicly released prior to the audit, in order that auditors could:

1. check the accuracy of all the tallies for all those counts in all precincts for each IRV round, and then that
2. randomly select from all those counts (equal to the number of total precincts times more than N factorial (see full paper for exact formula) which had been previously publicly reported.

Alternatively, Fair Vote is proposing a ballot-selection method to audit an IRV election that (to be publicly verifiable) would necessitate first publicly releasing the ranked vote choices on each and every individual ballot, along with printing a humanly readable identifier on each ballot that could be used to randomly select identifiable ballots. To avoid ballot privacy issues the humanly readable identifiers for each ballot would have to be printed on the ballots after voters cast them.

With IRV's more than N! unique ballot preference orders for each precinct, if there were a lot of candidates, then individual voters' ballots could become easier to identify. Then ballots would have to be randomly selected from the entire election contest, including all precincts, so this might not meet California's requirement to manually audit 1% of precincts. See http://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/voting_systems/pearson_rcv_letter_091407_07_0586.pdf

The only other possible way to validly audit an IRV election that takes more than one round to count would be to manually recount 100% of the ballots involved in the election contest. Perhaps since it took San Francisco about a month to count its IRV election, it simply manually counted all the ballots and called it an audit.

9. Dopp: "Could necessitate counting all presidential votes in Washington, D.C.…"

Fair Vote's rebuttal:

If the Electoral College were abolished and IRV were then adopted for future national popular vote elections for president, there would need to be national coordination of the tally in order to know which candidates got the fewest votes nationwide and needed to be eliminated –… Note that voters certainly would be pleased to have a majority winner in elections for our highest office.

Fair Vote has renamed "counting votes in Washington D.C." to "national coordination of the tally" and our two statements are in agreement. All 3300+ jurisdictions which count votes in a U.S. presidential election would first have to completely count the first choices on all ballots, including absentee and provisional ballots before transmitting first round numbers to Washington DC where these votes would be tallied and the winner of the first round announced, prior to any of the 3300+ jurisdictions being able to count round #2, and so forth. Of course each of these 3300+ jurisdictions have dozens to thousands of precincts in each of them. Alternatively, all the ballots could be sent to Washington DC for counting.

Fair Vote's misleading assertion that "voters certainly would be pleased to have a majority winner in elections for our highest office" is probably true. However, IRV does not find majority winners with any reliability. A majority winner occurs when a majority of those who voted in an election cast a vote for the winner. In Australia's IRV system, they find majority winners because Australia requires that all voters fully rank all the candidates, or the ballot is not counted. That a ballot containing a vote for an eligible candidate is eliminated is a violation of a basic principle of democracy and would never be adopted in the U.S. As the Australians know, once you have ranking optional, you can get majority failure. The only method being used that guarantees a majority winner is real top-two runoff voting.

If the same definition that Fair Vote uses for "majority" is used for "unanimous", why not, for the cost of a very complicated counting process, have "unanimous" elections by using IRV and continuing the elimination for one more round, until all the votes are for one candidate?

10. Dopp: "IRV entrenches the two-major-political party system …"

Fair Vote's rebuttal:

IRV neither "entrenches" nor "overthrows" the two-party system. It simply ensures no candidate wins over majority opposition. If a minor party has the support to earn a majority of vote, it can win in an IRV election. If not, it will not win.

IRV makes the continuation of a two-party system highly likely, and IRV has no record of assisting in the overturning of a two-party system, and IRV has several obvious ways in which it helps maintain a two-party system by eliminating minor political parties in the first round, with less risk to the major party candidates, so that major parties can safely ignore minor parties. Observant voters also notice immediately that ranking a minor party candidate first, could cause the early elimination of their major-party favorite, causing their least favorite candidate to win, and so voters quickly learn to rank a major party candidate first. Some information on how IRV entrenches the two-party system in Australia is in this article:
http://www.abc.net.au/elections/federal/2004/items/200407/s1162263.htm

On the other hand, with an actual top-two runoff, a third party has only to muscle its way to second place to make it into the runoff, giving it a better chance of winning, as opposed to IRV which provides less chance for a minor party to convince voters that it is viable. Fair Votes' response does not say that the Green party won any seats, only that it ran candidates. Could it be that the Green party supports IRV against its own interests? With IRV they are defanged. Political scientist Maurice Duverger observed (See http://rangevoting.org/DuvTrans.htmlnote%20#3) that the top-2-runoff (2 round) election method is a single winner system which does not lead to 2-party domination, as is shown by historical experience.

Fair Vote's statement that IRV "ensures no candidate wins over majority opposition" is misleading because a candidate with more opposition than any other candidate could win an IRV election. In a simple 12 voter example in appendix A above, 11 voters prefer the Democrat over other candidates; 10 voters prefer the Green over other candidates; 9 voters prefer the Libertarian over other candidates; and only 6 voters prefer the Republican over others candidates; 6 voters rank the Republican dead last; 3 voters rank the Libertarian dead last; 2 voters rank the Green party dead last; and 1 voter ranks the Democrat dead last. Yet the Republican and Green party candidate tie for first place!

In Australia, it appears there were 9 Green "pair-wise majority winners" but IRV forced every single one of them to lose. Yet Richie considers it a "success" that the Green party "contested" and "won 8% of the vote" but did not win a single seat? The Greens are strong in Australia because of other elections in their senate which are not held using IRV.

11. Dopp: "Could deliver unreasonable outcomes…."

Fair Vote's rebuttal:

Unreasonable outcomes are less likely with IRV than with any other single-seat voting method in use today. Every single voting method ever proposed can deliver "unreasonable outcomes" in some scenarios, but real-world experience has shown IRV to be one of the best methods. The overwhelming number of election method experts agree that IRV is fairer and more democratic than plurality voting even if some might prefer other theoretical voting methods.

Fair Vote says "IRV is fairer and more democratic than plurality voting…" Sure, fairer than plurality voting, better than diving into a swimming pool with no water in it. Better than dictatorship. But is IRV fairer and more democratic than other methods in use today, such as "top-two runoff"? Absolutely not. Is IRV fairer and more democratic than other available voting methods including approval, Borda count, Condorcet, or range methods? Absolutely not.Fair Vote's rebuttal:

The American Political Science Association (the national association of political science professors) has incorporated IRV into their own constitution for electing their own national president. Robert's Rules of Order recommends IRV over plurality voting.

Look at the APSA constitution and, sure enough, you will find a provision that if there are three or more candidates for the office of President-Elect, the "standard method of the alternative vote" is to be used, and the method is described. The method is loosely IRV. However, how does the APSA actually elect its Presidents? The President, with the advice and consent of the elected Council, appoints a Nominating Committee which names a single nominee. If there is no other nominee, this candidate is elected at the Annual Meeting. However, it is possible to nominate other candidates by petition. The last time there was a petition candidate was about 40 years ago. In order for the APSA to use IRV, there would have to be a second petition candidate. The chances of that can be estimated at once in every 1600 years.

Wait, what about the elected APSA Council? They are elected by plurality-at-large. Voters vote for as many seats as are open and the candidates with the most votes win. So the APSA is actually not using IRV. They are using plurality. Period.

Next, Robert's Rules of Order do not actually recommend IRV. It says that "preferential voting" gives fairer results than plurality voting if it is considered impractical to used repeated balloting, which is what Roberts Rules actually recommend. Robert's Rules states that "there are many forms of preferential voting" and describes the Single Transfer Vote (STV) "IRV-like" method "by way of illustration". Robert's Rules require repeat balloting when no candidate gains a majority of all ballots cast. Then Robert's Rules discusses some of the problems of this specific method: it "deprives" voters of the opportunity to base later choices on the results of earlier rounds (which is provided with top-two runoff) and can fail to find a "compromise winner".

12. Dopp: "Not all ballots are treated equally…"

Fair Vote's rebuttal:

This charge reveals a lack of understanding of how IRV works. All ballots are treated equally. Every one has one and only one vote in each round of counting. Just as in a traditional runoff, your ballot counts first for your favorite candidate and continues to count for that candidate as long as he or she has a chance to win.

In an IRV "instant runoff" voters who sincerely rank their preferred candidates cannot participate in the instant runoff unless one of their top two candidates is still in the last runoff. So in the U.S., IRV does not treat all voters equally because voters only get to participate in the real election IRV runoff if the top two leading candidates are among their top three preferences. In addition, some voters' ballots have all their choices counted, other voters' ballots have only their top preference counted. In other words, IRV conceals votes because some votes are never
counted in determining the winner. Clearly Fair Vote has a different perspective on the meaning of when voters' ballots are "treated equally". On the other hand, the top two runoff method that IRV often replaces treats all voters' ballots equally by anyone's definition of "equal".

13. Dopp: "Costly. …"

Fair Vote's rebuttal:

The two main expenses associated with the transition to IRV are voting equipment upgrades and voter education. Both of these are one-time costs that will be quickly balanced out by the savings coming from eliminating a runoff election in each election cycle.

The increased voting equipment maintenance, programming, testing, and upgrade costs of IRV are on-going, not "one-time". If IRV saves so much money, then why did jurisdictions like Oakland adopted IRV "pending implementation"? And why did the Maryland legislature estimate that costs could be as high as an additional $3.50 per registered voter in their 2006 IRV bill, and a little less in the 2008 bill which did not include the cost of software, as cited earlier in this paper? While IRV supporters in North Carolina are claiming that the pilot was a success, why did no NC counties decided to participate in the 2008 county-elections IRV pilot?

IRV is being promoted by Fair Vote to replace plurality voting, not just to replace top-two runoff elections. Not every election requiring a majority candidate necessitates a runoff election. And because IRV does not always find a majority candidate, another runoff could be necessary after the IRV election anyway.

In nonpartisan elections, IRV tends to simply ratify the results of the first round because the vote transfers tend to happen in the same ratio as the already existing votes. In other words, if candidate C is eliminated, the C votes will be split in about the same ratio as A and B have already. There are simpler methods to count ranked choice ballots which find majority candidates more often than IRV, such as the Bucklin method. Top-two runoff elections more often cause the original second-place candidate to win the final runoff. Often top-two runoff elections are held during the next general election and are therefore relatively cheap. Fair Vote neglects to mention the increased costs of manually counting and manually auditing IRV rounds over any other voting method being recommended by voting system experts or inuse today.

14. Dopp: "Increases the potential for undetectable vote fraud and erroneous vote counts…"

Fair Vote's rebuttal:

Actually, just the opposite is true, so long as paper ballots (such as optical scan) are used. The reason that any attempts at fraud are easier to detect with IRV is that there is a redundant electronic record (called a ballot image) of each ballot that can be matched one-to-one with the corresponding paper ballot. Cities such as San Francisco (CA) and Burlington (VT) release these ballot files so that any voter can do their own count. Without such redundant ballot records (which are not typical with vote-for-one elections) there is no way to know for certain if the paper ballots have been altered prior to a recount.

Fair Vote's claim that "there is a redundant electronic record (called a ballot image) of each ballot" is:

1. False, as discussed amply above the alleged "ballot images" are interpreted ballot data,

2. prohibitively costly,

3. would open up new security issues and new avenues for electronic ballot box stuffing, vote tampering and fraud,

4. would require a humanly readable identifier printed on each paper ballot after the voter casts them to "match up" with electronic records,

5. would necessitate extra post-election auditing steps and expense, and

6. certainly does not make fraud "easier to detect" in the absence of post-election manual audits, that are absent in most states, and which IRV makes much more difficult to conduct.

In addition, the complexity of IRV counts makes any patterns caused by vote miscount much more difficult to detect by data analysis methods.

15. Dopp: "Violates some election fairness principles…."

Fair Vote's rebuttal:

This charge reveals either a general lack of understanding, or intentional mis representation. Every single voting method ever devised must violate some "fairness principles" as some of these criteria are mutually exclusive. …. When the field narrows to the two finalists in the final instant runoff count, the candidate with more support (ranked more favorably on more ballots) will always win. Some theoretical voting methods may satisfy some "fairness' criteria, such as monotonicity, but then violate other more important criteria such as the majority criterion, or the later-no-harm criterion.

After making unsubstantiated claims, the rest of Fair Vote's paragraph substantiates the original statement that IRV "violates some election fairness principles". In fact, this second version shows how IRV violates an additional fairness condition, the majority candidate condition that was not shown in the first version.

Sure, it is possible that "all voting methods violate some election fairness principles," but many alternative voting systems, including top-two runoff, range and approval and Condorcet voting methods satisfy many fairness principles that IRV does not satisfy. For instance, some voting systems always find majority winners, pick the pair-wise favorite among all voters, or eliminate the spoiler problem completely, whereas IRV does not do any of these except in particular cases. These same voting systems, besides being fairer in many respects than IRV and plurality voting, are easier to count and to administer and to audit than IRV.

For a more detailed rebuttal of Fair Vote's claims, see the full email responses by Abd ul-Rahman Lomax to the election-methods discussion list which will be posted here http://uscountvotes.org/ucvAnalysis/US/RCV-IRV

http://electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/US/RCV-IRV/InstantRunoffVotingFlaws.pdf

NEDA Press Release: Instant Runoff Voting - Not What It Seems

While North Carolina is in the middle of a statewide runoff election for State Labor Commissioner, some groups are pushing 'instant runoff voting", a radical voting method as the solution. Their unstated goal is that they hope that with "instant runoff voting", (IRV) people will be less afraid to vote for candidates they expect to lose. Their purported goal is to "save" the state money and make voting "easier". The problem - IRV is too dangerous to use with complicated elections like our May primary, there is no IRV capable software for our machines, and with IRV, every election costs more.

RELEASE: Instant Runoff Voting - Not What It Seems

By The National Election Data Archive
Park City, UT June 16, 2008


Summary:

After its report criticizing the increasingly popular instant runoff voting method aroused cyberspace debates and flame wars last week, the National Election Data Archive released a second version"Realities Mar Instant Runoff Voting - 17 Flaws and 3 Benefits".

The National Election Data Archive, on June 9th, 2008 released a report "15 Flaws and 3 Benefits of Instant Runoff Voting or Ranked Choice Voting" that provoked criticism and comment on the Internet,including a web page called "De-Bunking Kathy Dopp's 15 Flaws of Instant Runoff Voting" by the organization Fair Vote. On the other hand, computer scientists, voting system experts, and election methods experts responded to the report by providing additional insight and information on alternative voting methods, including the flaws of instant runoff voting.

Instant runoff voting (IRV) is a method for counting "ranked choice"ballots where each voter ranks the candidates – first choice, second choice, etc. The IRV counting process proceeds in "rounds" where the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated in each round and that candidate's votes are reassigned to the remaining candidates using voters' choices. IRV sounds enticing to voters who can express their preferences, but according to the new report, IRV does not solve the problems it is promoted as solving and causes significant new problems.

The National Election Data Archive recommends restoring verifiable integrity to elections first before implementing alternative voting methods, and reminds readers that not one U.S. State today utilizes all the basic measures required to ensure fundamental election integrity such as public access to election records, observable post-election manual audits, ballot reconciliation, and public oversight of ballot security.

The revised new report differentiates between the ballot style and the counting method, discusses alternative voting methods, describes an"IRV-like" solution that would solve some of IRV's counting problems,and responds to Fair Vote's attempt to rebut the first version of the report. According to Kathy Dopp, the report's author, "Instant runoff voting is a threat to the fairness, accuracy, timeliness, and economy of U.S.elections. The U.S. needs to solve its existing voting system problems and then carefully consider the options before adopting new voting methods."The full report "Realities Mar Instant Runoff Voting - 17 Flaws and 3Benefits" is found on-line at
http://electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/US/RCV-IRV/InstantRunoffVotingFlaws.pdf

This press release will be posted online athttp://electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/US/RCV-IRV/FlawsIRV-PressRelease-V2.pdf

Press Contact: Kathy Dopp 435-658-4657 kathy@electionarchive.org

The National Election Data Archive is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organized for educational and scientific purposes of promoting fair and accurate elections by researching, developing and promoting methods and procedures to detect voter disenfranchisement and vote count inaccuracy. Such methods include independent manual vote count audits, exit poll discrepancy analysis, and the public release and scientific analysis of election data along with public release of election records necessary to verify the integrity of elections. NEDA relies on the donation of time by volunteers who donate their time and expertise because of their dedication to vote integrity and public service. The project depends on donations from from citizens who are concerned about fair and free elections in the U.S. in order to continue its work. All donations are tax deductible.

To make a donation or become involved in the project, please visithttp://electionarchive.org/--Kathy Dopp, Executive Director, National Election Data Archive P.O. Box 680192Park City, UT 84068 http://electionarchive.org/"

Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day," wrote Thomas Jefferson in 1816