We have several concerns with Instant Runoff Voting (IRV). At first it seems simple and appealing, however, a closer look reveals concerns and unappreciated consequences, including:
- IRV can be confusing and difficult for voters to understand. It can result in a much bigger ballot, requesting voters to rank multiple candidates and not make a mistake. A single race may take an entire ballot that today can handle an entire municipal election or a combined state and Federal election.
- IRV does not solve the problems it is intended to fix. It claims to prevent the “wrong” candidates from being elected by providing a runoff until one candidate has over 50% of the votes. In reality, sometimes it does and sometimes it does not. IRV can cause different candidates to be elected than real runoff voting and different candidates to be elected than when the leading candidate from the first round is selected. Often IRV awards a race to a less popular candidate than these other methods.
- IRV is complex and time consuming to count, especially in races covering multiple polling places. This is because elimination requires exact information on each ballot ranking be centrally counted or each round centrally counted. Each round is critical to the final result, thus each round may require all absentee ballots and provisional ballots be counted and perhaps require a manual recount to determine the eliminated candidate.
This last point is covered in an editorial from Minnesota – counting a municipal race my take eight weeks and involve spreadsheet calculations <read>
Minneapolis won’t have the assistance of scanning machines to tabulate votes if no candidate receives over half of the first choices, delaying results for up to eight weeks. Since Minnesota does not certify machines that can count ranked choice ballots, and because cities are prohibited from using non-certified machines, city elections workers must hand-count each ballot. Fortunately, the city attorney has assured elections officials that they can use Microsoft Excel to help tally. Otherwise, votes would still be being sorted well into 2010.
Update: It did not take 8 weeks to count. Perhaps because of IRV voters stayed away: <read>
What if they gave an election and nobody came? Well, almost nobody came to the City Election last Tuesday. R. T. Rybak got 73 percent of the vote for Mayor, but that was only 33,217 votes. That’s the smallest amount a winning candidate has gotten running for Mayor since 1910. Rybak’s total was less than 15 percent of the number of registered voters. In the last three municipal elections the LOSING candidates for Mayor polled almost as high as Rybak’s winning total
Update: But it is eight days and some races are still being counted <read>
Several races may be announced Wednesday, the paper says, but the closest council races, in the Fourth and Fifth Wards, won’t come until a later batch of counting.
Update: 17 days past the election and still counting<read>
But the biggest surprise for O’Connor and the elections staff has been how quickly the hand count process has gone. Originally, O’Connor expected that they wouldn’t be ready to announce unofficial winners until December. But they’ve been able to do so several weeks earlier than planned.
Here are some video’s that graphically explain IRV:
- A clear explination of IRV, what could go wrong, what the MN Supreme Court said and what happened in Aspen Colorado <video>
- A more detailed version of how a candidate can loose by gaining support <video>
- We often think of IRV for a single candidate, but it can be used when we vote for several people for town council. Yet its not simple. Here is one way of counting the votes <video>
- Third parties tend to like the idea of IRV. Watch this video to be disapointed <video>
