Morris Sun Tribune: IRV: Neither complex nor expensive election choice
October 15, 2008
Commentary by Jeanne Massey, FairVote Minnesota
The Oct. 11 Talking Points column (“Tabulating the True Cost of Democracy”) makes Instant Runoff Voting seem complicated. It’s not.
IRV simplifies elections by consolidating two rounds of voting into one. This is possible by allowing voters to rank candidates in order of preference. If no candidate has half or more of the votes after the first round of counting and a runoff is needed to determine a majority winner, voters don’t have to come back to the polls to choose among the top two – their backup choices are already indicated on the ballot. The candidate in last place is dropped and his or her votes are reallocated to remaining candidates based on those voters’ second choices. First-choice votes continue to count for all other voters. If, after all the votes are counted in round two, one of the candidates has majority of votes, the election is over. If not,
the same process is repeated until one candidate does.
IRV makes election administration easier and less expensive because there is only one election to run.
IRV elections can be counted by machine or hand. Machines can help speed up the counting and reporting process, but counting IRV elections by hand is not difficult and is simpler than counting two elections on two different days. Minneapolis will be implementing IRV next year for local elections and is planning to do a hand-count, foregoing the purchase of new voting equipment, which isn’t due for replacement until after 2010.
Most IRV elections in the U.S. are machine counted. Pierce County, Wash., and San Francisco are using IRV-capable Sequoia machines this November to count their elections. San Francisco, Cambridge and Burlington have all been tallying IRV elections by machines for years.
To date, IRV machines have been special order equipment. But the next generation of voting machine technology is IRV-capable, which means that IRV would NOT “cost an exorbitant amount of money to buy and program” if a jurisdiction is already scheduled to replace voting equipment.