Hendersonville: Instant runoff voting No friend to voters

Is the instant runoff voting a bit Orwellian? Hendersonville voters were never asked if they wanted Instant Runoff Voting. IRV was used in Hendersonville's 2007 & 2009 municipal election. Now more voters speak up.

No friend to voters
Sunday, November 15, 2009

To The Editor: "All men are created equal but some men are more equal than others." (George Orwell, "Animal Farm," 1945).

That was fiction but now our election officials have made it a reality with IRV. No not me, Irv. IRV, Instant-Runoff Voting, is double speak for tampering with the rule of "one man, one vote." When election boards can take my vote and divide it between several candidates or decide that it belongs to a candidate for whom I did not vote, our Republic is in deep trouble. IRV may be easy and cheap, but it is wrong and it is election tampering.

Irving Kasner

Etowah

In 2007 and in 2009, there was no public hearing to ask for voter input or comment before the city council adopted. Thanks to new legislation, if Hendersonville's City Council wants to partipate in instant runoff voting again,they have to hold a public hearing first. Hendersonville voters should let their City Council and County Board of Elections ( and staff ) their feelings about IRV.


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Hendersonville: Instant Runoff Voting Process is not reliable

Not everyone likes instant runoff voting after all. An environmental activist in Hendersonville, North Carolina says that instant runoff voting is complicated, short changes the voter and its results do not always reflect the will of the voter.

IRV process not reliable
November 14, 2009 at 10:42 a.m.

To The Editor: I respect the work of the League of Women Voters. Their guest column favoring Instant Runoff Voting, however, begs several corrections.

The Heisman Trophy is not determined by IRV voting. They use a point system. Their system is simpler than IRV and doesn't include IRV elimination. (Heisman.com)

IRV is not a "fair, effective method for electing a single winner." Ask Burlington, Vt. After analyzing the voting data for six weeks University of Vermont researchers concluded that the winner lost.

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=img9y2AYTQA)

"The IRV process is not complicated." It was in Cary. Cary ditched it after the first try.

IRV doesn't "do everything a runoff system does." A runoff produces a majority vote candidate. If IRV goes to the third and fourth round, you get a candidate with a manufactured majority vote.

Corporations use IRV for single seat elections — secretary, treasurer — not multiple seat elections as in Hendersonville.

Yes, we do need primaries. They winnow the field allowing voters opportunity to more closely scrutinize candidates that will make important decisions.

Do the results reflect the will of the people? That is the goal of every election. With IRV, sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't and that is the problem.

Eva L. Ritchey

Hendersonville

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IRV: Santa Claus, Jesus Christ and Barack Obama did NOT endorse Instant Runoff Voting

Santa Clause and Jesus Christ didn't endorse Instant Runoff Voting and neither did Barack Obama. The St Paul Better Ballots group claimed lofty pro IRV endorsements on campaign mailers. Endorsement claims range from St Paul League of Women Voters, to the State DFL Party all the way up to President Obama. The St Paul League of Women Voters asked Better Ballots to correct their literature, but were ignored. Finally, though, the pro IRV group has run into a barrier called the Minnesota State Election Law. Its about time. We've stomached these so-called "endorsements" for long enough.

Anti-IRV group calls claims of Obama, DFL endorsement ‘evil’
By Paul Demko 11/2/09

At issue is a mailing that the Saint Paul Better Ballot Campaign, which is running the pro-IRV campaign, has sent out to potential voters. It claims a wide array of supporters for the ballot measure, from President Obama to the Star Tribune to the Minnesota DFL party.

But Chuck Repke, co-chair of the No Bad Ballots Committee, charges that the claims are patently false. Under state election law, a campaign cannot claim the support of an individual unless that person has provided written permission. Clearly President Obama, Repke notes, hasn’t taken time out from his schedule to provide written support for the local ballot initiative.

“I was surprised that Santa Claus and Jesus Christ weren’t on the list,” Repke says. “You can’t be more deceptive than to claim the endorsement of the President of the United States when you don’t have it. I’m just flabbergasted.”

Repke is particularly peeved that the pro-IRV group is claiming DFL support. He notes that at the St. Paul DFL convention in March, a resolution to support the ballot measure was explicitly voted down by party activists. And in a town dominated by Democrats, the party’s purported backing could carry weight with voters.

“They cannot claim DFL endorsement,” Repke says. “These people know that. They were at the convention. I saw them there. They were standing next to me.”

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Survey on Instant Runoff Voting in Hendersonville: did you understand it?

There's an Instant runoff voting in Hendersonville North Carolina, last day to vote is Tuesday November 3rd. The NC Coalition for Verified Voting is doing an informal voter survey on Instant Runoff Voting in Hendersonville. We hope to raise awareness about Instant Runoff Voting in Hendersonville North Carolina. We believe that the informal survey below is a good step in that direction. Could you please share this survey with voters as you see fit? It is also posted on the home page of our website, http://www.ncvoter.net/. Thanks, Joyce McCloy, Director, NC Coalition for Verified Voting.

IF YOU VOTED IN HENDERSONVILLE NORTH CAROLINA'S NOVEMBER 2009 IRV MUNICIPAL ELECTION WE WOULD LIKE TO HEAR YOUR EXPERIENCE.

1. Did you vote on election day, during early voting or absentee by mail?
   
2. Did you know that you would be asked to rank choices on the ballot?
   
3. Did you understand how to vote?
   
4. Were the instructions clear?
   
5. Did you like this new ranked choice voting method?
   
6. What was source of your voter education about Instant Runoff Voting?
   
7. Describe any problems you had in voting.
   
8. Did you rank choices?
   
9. If you ranked choices, how many did you rank?
   
10. Do you understand how instant runoff votes are counted?
    
11. Did you know that if your choices are not for the top two candidates, you will not be voting in the "runoff"?
    
12. Did you know that your additional choices may go uncounted if there is a winner in the first round of voting?
    
13. Do you want all votes, including the additional ranked choices - to be counted and publicly reported, so you can see how much support each candidate received?
    
14. Do you prefer traditional one-to-one runoff elections or IRV?
    May we use your name? (Your name will be kept anonymous if you prefer)

Please email your response to joyce@ncvoter.net and thank you for helping us.

About us: The North Carolina Coalition for Verified Voting is a grassroots non-partisan organization fighting for clean and verified elections. We study and research the issue of voting to ensure the dignity and integrity of the intention of each voting citizen. The NC Voter Verified Coalition has consistently fought for increasing access, participation and ensuring the voter franchise. Contact Joyce McCloy, Director, N.C. Coalition for Verifiable Voting - phone 336-794-1240

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Hendersonville Instant runoff voting: IRV is verified confusion

If you vote in Hendersonville's instant runoff voting election, will your vote be counted? Will your vote, all of them, count? The answer, your first choice vote will get counted, but the rest might not. You also can hurt your preferred candidate just by voting for him or her. Here's food for thought on the matter by Eva Ritchey:

IRV is verified confusion
Sunday, November 1, 2009

86/14 is not always a good number. If 86 percent of high school students choose oranges and 14 percent choose apples for dessert, that's a good number. However, if 86 percent of the bridges in the state are sound and 14 percent are inferior, that's not a good number.

Which leads us to the question, why have election officials concluded that a pilot program, Instant Runoff Voting (IRV), is a good decision when 14 percent (or more) of the voters in Hendersonville's 2007 election found it confusing? Aren't clarity and confidence two requirements of an election system that should never be compromised?

In a traditionally conducted election primary, it's easy to determine the top two candidates just by counting the votes. Contrast that simplicity with IRV, which might be described as the political equivalent of musical chairs.

Using IRV, voters are asked to rank candidates in order of preference. IRV is really a tally-and-elimination scheme, re-tallying without re-voting, and repeating until a majority of votes are reshuffled into one pile.

If no one wins the "first" round of voting, then all candidates are eliminated except for the top two.

Counting and distribution is where the problem begins. History has determined that votes not counted on election night are sometimes prone to disappearance. For that reason, a state statute says, "Vote counting at the precinct shall occur immediately after the polls close and shall be continuous until completed." This was not the case in the Hendersonville 2007 election.

Any time a voter makes a selection that can affect the outcome of an election, it is a vote, not a preference. Third- and fourth-round votes cast in Hendersonville's 2007 election were not openly reported to the public because they were never counted. It's a bad practice for government to keep any expression by voters secret. Distributing remaining IRV votes is confusing, relies on more complex technology, makes audits and recounts more prohibitive, and can even change the outcome of an election away from the voter's original intent.

In the Cary experiment, the winner of an "instant runoff" 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. (ncvoter.org)

In Hendersonville, no meeting was held to get voter input or educate the voters before IRV was implemented, and over 33 percent of voters arrived without knowing it was an IRV election. The average voter has to place great trust in the reliability of the IRV counting method. Perry Woods, a Raleigh-based political consultant, says,
"Ranked choice voting violates a key principle in electoral confidence, and that is simplicity. If the desire is to eliminate runoff elections, than a plurality election will produce the same result as an IRV race in virtually every instance without the added confusion or risk."

IRV procedures as proposed will compromise the integrity of elections. Since state voting machines lack instant runoff voting capability, the State Board of Elections put together an uncertified "work-around," using a spreadsheet program, circumventing the legal method of manually sorting and counting "paper trails." Experts say this method is error prone and risky.

The cost savings IRV advocates tout are minimal and don't compensate for the erosion of transparency. Political Scientist Tony Gierzynski said it quite clearly: "Let's get right into it: instant runoff voting is not good. It's not good because it suffers from three fundamental problems: it discriminates against classes of voters by adding complexity to the ballot: it has a very real potential to produce perverse outcomes or voting paradoxes that are not majoritarian; and it fails to address the real problem that arises when multiple parties compete in a two-party system..." (3/12/09, vermontdailybriefing.com).

Can we really justify a voting system that is confusing, difficult to calculate, prone to error and fails to count every vote? Third, fourth and more place votes aren't "backup" votes as some IRV proponents define them, they're your votes and if your vote isn't counted, it doesn't count.
http://www.blueridgenow.com/article/20091101/ARTICLES/911011032

BlueRidgeNow has an op/ed by the Hendersonville League of Women Voters saying that they endorse IRV. And the LWV repeats the same old twisted talking points set forth by FairVote. They put out that false claim that IRV guarantees a majority of the votes. No, it is an engineered majority of the remaining votes, after many are eliminated.

Where was the LWV when Henderson County made the bad decision to purchase new touchscreens in 2006, when the rest of the United States is ditching them because of reliability factors? LWV has done many good thing but also has made mistakes. It is a shame to see the local LWV supporting something without researching it, something that that is detrimental to the voters and to election transparency.

IRV is bad, and that is why places that have recently tried it are rejecting it:

Places that Have Ditched Instant Runoff Voting or are Moving to Ditch It
-Getting rid of IRV will be on the ballot in both Aspen Colorado and Pierce County Washington.
-Cary North Carolina tried instant runoff voting in 2007 and said no more.
-British Columbia had it on the ballot this year and the majority of voters said NO!
-Georgetown University ditched IRV earlier this year.

Other jurisdictions that "adopted" IRV are not yet able to implement it because their voting machines cannot accommodate it.

see http://www.instantrunoffvoting.us/ to learn more

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Hendersonville Instant runoff voting in Nov - Will your vote be counted? Surprising answer

Will Hendersonville voters' instant runoff votes in the November election count or even be counted? Does Hendersonville's IRV counting method rob some voters of their say in the runoff? How will Hendersonville North Carolina tally the upcoming instant runoff voting election for Mayor and City Council? Will voters understand how votes are sorted, allocated and reallocated? Will voters help or hurt their favorite candidate by ranking choices? The answers are discouraging if you care about every vote counting, about election integrity, transparency and about fairness to voters.

I sent an email to Henderson County's Board of Elections to find out: what votes will be counted and reported, which IRV votes will be counted, and how will the IRV votes be counted and reported? Henderson BoE Director Beverly Cunningham promptly provided these answers below in 2 emails on October 16, see lower down the page.

The answer -not all Instant runoff votes get counted. It is a fact that some or all 2nd and 3rd choice votes cast will be kept secret and hidden from the public and never counted. Just because second and third round votes are not needed or utilized in determining an outcome does not mean that they were not cast by a voter. It is a bad practice for government to keep any expression by voters secret.

If there is a winner in the first round of voting, then officials will not count or even report the voters 2nd and 3rd choice votes. If there is not a winner in the first round, then only votes for the top two candidates will be considered from the 2nd round. 2nd choice votes for any other candidates will not be counted or reported.

Not only will candidates and voters be in the dark as to how much support each candidate got, but voters will not be able to look at the results and see if they hurt or helped their preferred candidates by ranking. It is a fact that Hendersonville voters can hurt their preferred candidates just by ranking them, according to Dr. Steven Brams of New York University. But if Henderson's Board of Elections does not count and report all 2nd and 3rd choice votes, we have no way to know if this happens.

Nothing about how Hendersonville's election is typical of IRV - IRV is for single seat election contests, Hendersonville is using it for multi-seat elections and thwarting the use of bullet voting also called "single shot" voting.

Downsides with Hendersonville's Instant runoff voting procedures:

1. Voters are handicapped by IRV because they do not know who the top 2 candidates are that they should vote for, so there vote might not count in the "instant runoff". In a traditional runoff, voters would all have an equal opportunity to vote for the runoff candidates.

2. Candidates, supporters and IRV advocates will not know how IRV benefited or hindered their 2nd and 3rd choice votes since Henderson's BoE doesn't plan to count or report these votes. Democracy and transparency are weakened when all votes are not counted.

Most IRV jurisdictions count and report all of the voters choices. Only Hendersonville, NC will not do so. Below is an example of how San Francisco reports all of the vote data:

Henderson BoE Director Beverly Cunningham 2 emails on October 16:

1) In Hendersonville's 2007 IRV election, did the Henderson County BoE count or record or report any of the 2nd or 3rd choice votes? No, we stop counting when a threshold of victory is met.

2) What plans does the Henderson County Board of Elections have in order to count, record and report the 2nd and 3rd choice votes for the 2009 IRV election? I understand we will follow the same procedures as explained in No. 1).

3) In the 2009 IRV election, which if any of the 2nd and 3rd choice votes will be publicly reported and or counted? Only votes needed to determine the threshold of victory will be reported.

4) Provide the method, algorithm and spreadsheet that will be used to report and tally the IRV results. Still waiting on state to provide info.

5) Provide the "rules" to sorting and re-allocating the IRV 2nd and 3rd choice votes. (this is a second request) Still waiting on state to provide info.

Beverly W. Cunningham, Director
Henderson County Board of Elections
828 697 4970

Email 2, info requests continued:

4) Provide the method, algorithm and spreadsheet that will be used to report and tally the IRV results. The method of tabulation is a manual process utilizing Microsoft Excel to augment the sorting and totaling.

5) Provide the "rules" to sorting and re-allocating the IRV 2nd and 3rd choice votes.

1. Tabulation

o Determine the two (2) candidates with the most votes that are in the instant runoff.
o The candidates retain all the votes from the 1st round of tabulation. All ballots for the contest that have votes for candidates in the runoff are removed from the tabulation (they have
already been tabulated).
o Review (2nd Choice) to determine ifthere is a vote for either runoff candidate. If yes, add the vote to therunoff candidate and no further examination of the ballot is necessary.
o If there is no vote for either runoff candidate in (2ndChoice) then
review (3rd Choice) to determine if there is a vote for a runoff candidate.
If yes, add the vote to the runoff candidate and no further examination of the ballot is necessary.
o End of ballot examination. The runoff candidate with the most votes is declared the winner.

Beverly W. Cunningham,Director
Henderson County Board of Elections
828 697 4970

Hendersonville Contests and Candidates for November IRV election:

CITY OF HENDERSONVILLE MAYOR
Timm Kurtz
Mary Jo Padgett
Barbara G. Volk

CITY OF HENDERSONVILLE COUNCIL
Diane Caldwell
Jeff Collis
Ralph Freeman
Jerry Smith
Ron Stephens

Want to see what Hendersonville's ballot will look like?

If you vote in person, you will cast your ballot on a touchscreen machine. Here are screen shots of that ballot. Its easy to see how confusing the ballot would be when presented on a touchscreen machine.

If you cast an absentee by mail ballot, here is a copy of the paper ballot and some information: CITY OF HENDERSONVILLE w/ Instant Runoff Voting

About us: The North Carolina Coalition for Verified Voting is a grassroots non-partisan organization fighting for clean and verified elections. We study and research the issue of voting to ensure the dignity and integrity of the intention of each voting citizen. The NC Voter Verified Coalition has consistently fought for increasing access, participation and ensuring the voter franchise. Contact Joyce McCloy, Director, N.C. Coalition for Verifiable Voting - phone 336-794-1240 website http://www.ncvoter.net/ and also http://www.instantrunoffvoting.us/


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Instant Runoff Voting Not So Good Polls: Cary NC, Hendersonville NC, Pierce Co WA, and San Francisco

FairVote touts polls saying that many voters like instant runoff voting. The idea is that if you like something, don't worry, be happy. FairVote does not mention that a significant number of voters do not understand IRV (whether they say they like it or not). While IRV might be "fun", if people don't understand it then they don't benefit from it and may have their vote count for less than other voters' ballots. If a voting method disenfranchise vulnerable segments of our voting population, then we shouldn't use it. We may like the taste of anti-freeze, but we shouldn't drink it.

Do voters understand Instant Runoff Voting? Here's what some polls say:
Cary, North Carolina tried Instant Runoff Voting in 2007 and said No More. The results of Cary NC’s 2008 bi-annual citizen survey indicate that a significant percent of voters do not understand IRV. The mean was 5.83 with 58.6% on the “understand” side (above 5) of the scale and 30.6% on the “not understand” side (Figure 19). This includes 22.0% who indicated they do not understand at all. Overall this indicates a degree of misunderstanding among the respondents. Keep in mind that Cary is the city with the most Ph.D.s per capita in the U.S. for towns larger than 75,000 people.
There also was an exit poll of voters conducted by Fair Vote and other volunteers. One volunteer even boasted of helping to shape voters views of IRV. See Slanting the exit poll of Cary's instant runoff voting election

Hendersonville, North Carolina participated in the 2007 IRV pilot. This town of "snow birds" never counted the IRV votes. Some voters went to the polls and didn't even realize they were ranking choices (Hendersonville votes on touchscreens), and some were surprised, IRV was deemed a success. An exit poll (conducted using IRV advocates) admits that one third of voters polled came to the polls unprepared to rank their choices. Hendersonville will use the single contest method IRV for their multi-seat elections again and thwart any efforts for bullet voting.

Pierce County Washington adopted instant runoff voting/aka ranked choice voting and tried it one time. 56,751 of 90,738 Pierce County Voters polled said they did not like instant runoff voting. In May of this year, the Pierce County Auditor found that IRV was costing too much and the county could save $600,000 if they scrapped instant runoff voting asap. This November voters will consider an amendment to the county charter repealing ranked choice voting.

Take a look at some of the findings in these studies of San Francisco’s 2004 & 2005 IRV election, conducted by the Public Research Institute at San Francisco State University:
An Assessment of Ranked-Choice Voting in the San Francisco 2004 Election
SUMMARY
The majority of voters appear to have made the transition to Ranked-Choice Voting with little problem: about seven out of eight we surveyed said that, overall, they understood it "fairly well" or "perfectly well." However, that leaves one in eight who expressed some lack of understanding.
…We found differences across racial and ethnic groups in regard to their prior knowledge of RCV, their overall understanding, and their propensity to rank candidates on the ballot.

2005 was worse for voters than 2004:
An Assessment of Ranked-Choice Voting in the San Francisco 2005 Election (pdf)

IRV was re-named Ranked-Choice Voting because it can take days or weeks to get the results.
Prior Knowledge of Ranked-Choice Voting (RCV)
- A narrow majority of voters surveyed (54%) knew before voting that they would be asked to rank candidates for City Treasurer and Assessor in the 2005 election.
- The proportion of voters who had prior knowledge of RCV was lower in 2005 (54%) than in the 2004 election for the Board of Supervisors (67%).
- Those with lower rates of prior knowledge tended to be those who were less educated, reported having lower incomes, and spoke a primary language other than Spanish.
- African Americans were considerably less likely than other racial and ethnic groups (41.9%) to know they would be ranking their choices for these offices.
-The majority of voters reported ranking three candidates in the race for City Treasurer (57%), while 33% reported selecting only one candidate.*
*That means that in the event the first choice does not win, 33% do not participate in the "run-off".

So it looks like instant runoff voting hurts the vulnerable populations that we normally try hard to assist.

Then there's this, 3 years later:
Grand jury report
*The 2007-2008 San Francisco Civil Grand Jury review of five elections for the city/county of San Francisco*
Ranked-Choice Voting and Absentee (Vote By Mail) Ballots RCV ballots were used in the November 2007 election for the offices of Mayor, District Attorney, and Sheriff. *Some pollworkers and voters told the Jury that they did not understand how to vote for candidates where RCV ballots were used... Additional education and outreach need to be provided to the voters to clarify the RCV process so that the ballots accurately reflect the intentions of the voters.