The First Shall Be Last: The Dangerous Decline in Primary Turnouts

This all begs the question, just why is the government involved in primaries anyway? Primaries are a process by which private associations – e.g., political parties – select their nominees.

An excellent point. Of course, Approval Voting is a simpler and superior voting method to IRV. We just change our current "vote for one" rule to "vote for one or more". It's also a better way to break up two-party duopoly, since IRV doesn't (just look at Australia's history of two-party domination in their IRV-using house of representatives).

See some extensive discussion of this here:
http://bluenc.com/open-thread%3A-still-hot-edition#comment-63861

* Note that Approval Voting is the simplest form of Range Voting.

IV assumes an informed and educated electorate.

It has already been used in San Francisco since 2004.

Money is no object for their elections department - they spend about $2.00 per registered voter (that equals about half most jurisdictions' annual budget) in voter education.

SF also has about 600 public meetings and events a year to "educate" voters about IRV.

Voter Education is essential to ensuring that voters come to the polls expecting to rank their choices.

Still yet, many came to the polls in 2005 less prepared than in 2004:
An Assessment of Ranked-Choice Voting in the San Francisco 2005 Election

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".

http://www.sfgov.org/site/uploadedfiles/election/Elections_Pages/July1706.pdf

There's no reason to depend on talking points any more, there is plenty of research to show how IRV really works in actual municipalities. That is why so many turned IRV down.

Ask questions, read the research, go past the talking points.

the purpose of a partisan primary is for the party to select the most viable opponent to the other party's candidate (since the purpose of a party is to win control of the government through elections).

if a primary election fails to achieve that end because it is no longer sufficiently representative of the general public (because of low turnout), then surely the answer isn't to reduce public input with instant runoff voting.

maybe we should reconsider primary elections and return to allow party professionals to choose the most viable candidates through conventions?

Rop Richie claims that IRV eliminates negative campaigning.

That is probably true.

Unfortunately, if candidates are afraid to be "negative" and expose their opponents defects, it can result in something like the election of SF Supervisor Ed Jew, who didn't live in his district, and wasn't anyone's first choice, and who soon was arrested by the FBI for bribery. With a REAL primary, voters could have discovered the problems with Ed Jew before the election, instead of afterwards. (but thanks to IRV, candidates didn't want to go negative).

Now, how did this guy get elected?
John Diaz, San Francisco Chronicle, 06/10/07
IN RECENT years, San Francisco voters have set up systems promising to encourage the election of citizen-politicians from the neighborhoods and to raise voter participation and the prospects that our elected leaders arrive in office with a "mandate." So...
So, how did it come to pass that the city's newest supervisor, Ed Jew, apparently did not even live in the Sunset District and was the choice of just 5,125 (or 26.2 percent) of voters? And the FBI is looking into what this "citizen politician" was doing with $40,000 in cash from tapioca-shop owners who had sought his help with city permits.

It turns out that both of the voter-installed "reforms" -- district elections, instant-runoff voting -- helped make it possible for the flower-shop operator, who once served as vice chairman of the local Republican Party, to get elected in San Francisco on a "grassroots" campaign.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2007/06/10/EDGCUQBP7F1.DTL

SAN FRANCISCO - Supervisor wants 'to get it over with' - He decides to insist on his right to a trial within 60 days
Wyatt Buchanan, San Francisco Chronicle, 08/21/07
San Francisco Supervisor Ed Jew asserted his right Monday to a speedy trial on the nine felony charges he faces for allegedly lying about where he lived to run for office and vote in local elections. Jew, who represents the city's District 4 in the Sunset...
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/08/21/BA92RM3L1.DTL&hw=ed+jew&sn=002&sc=716

The idea that IRV will reduce negative campaigning is based on the notion that a candidate would want to try to earn second and third place votes. But a more rigorous analysis shows that the best strategy in IRV is to vote for one's favorite of the two apparent front-runners - which means that the #1 issue for a candidate is to win _first place_ votes, even at the cost of second or third place votes. That's just the statistical/mathematical reality, understood by election experts.

http://rangevoting.org/TarrIrv.html

IRV, like all preferential voting systems, is seriously flawed in that it changes the nature of a vote in such a way as to make it virtually impossible for the voter to know how his or her vot will affect the election, and will make it difficult for the voters to have confidence that the winner is actually the winner.

Preferential voting was invented to eliminate "Pluralities" - where the candidate with the most votes wins even if it's less than 50%. This is an unwarranted objection in a constitutional republic such as ours.

If this were a pure democracy, then maybe a 50% majority would be required, but, since eleced officials are bound by Constitutions and Charters; and since there are multiple branches of government providing checks on the power of government, there is no reason to object to a plurality winner in an election.

See NYU report: http://bcn.boulder.co.us/government/approvalvote/altvote.html

If such a winner does a bad job in office, the voters will have a chance to show their disapproval. There is no reason a plurality winner can't be an effective public servant. In fact, the lack of a so-called "mandate" might serve to keep an elected official honest.

In light of this, it should be pretty obvious that those who are pushing IRV have something other than the voters' best interests at heart. IRV may help political insiders, but it will hurt voters. They like to bring up San Francisco, but that is a disaster...just like it is everywhere it's tried.

Ty Allen,

While I am a vocal opponent of IRV, your interpretation of voting theory is very flawed. Consider a scenario like this one:

#voters their vote
28 A>B>C>D
25 B>C>D>A
24 C>D>B>A
23 D>C>B>A

In this situation, A would lose to any opponent in a head-to-head election by a huge 72-to-28 margin, far larger than the hugest "landslide" in US presidential election history. And A is ranked dead last by 72% of the voters.

But thanks to the insanely idiotic plurality, aka "first past the post" voting system, A is elected with 28% of the vote, beating out everybody else (each with ≤25%).

Candidate A may indeed be the plurality voting winner, but would lose to any of his opponents head-to-head. If you say that A should be the winner, you are then ignoring the common sense axiom of "independence of irrelevant alternatives". That is, if any of the other 3 candidates were to drop out, but all preferences were to remain identical, then your plurality logic would schizophrenically change its mind, and say that A was no longer the best candidate.

Instant Runoff Voting is severely flawed, but it is important not to attack it for the wrong reasons. It makes your argument seem dogmatic and un-objective. We have to do better than the IRV salesmen like Richie, who will say whatever it takes (even flat out lie) to push IRV.

As for the motivation behind those pushing IRV, we (the Range Voting community) largely believe that people like Richie are pushing IRV as a possible stepping stone to proportional representation. Unfortunately they fail to understand that Range Voting is a better stepping stone to Reweighted Range Voting and Asset Voting - two superior forms of PR compared to the archaic STV system that Richie & Co. are pushing.

But we see evidence that they'll come around, with people increasingly becoming more educated about voting methods, and starting to see the through the FairVote propaganda.

My name is Clay Shentrup, and I live in San Francisco, CA. I can be reached at clay at electopia.org, or 415 240 1973. I invite anyone curious about these issues to contact me for a more in depth discussion if you are interested.

Best regards,
Clay Shentrup
San Francisco, CA

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