OpenGov - Open Government Brainstorm

Sounds great, I'd love this. Having worked at a polling station, I can see this change paralyzing people. Some folks don't understand "fill in the bubble", let alone casting a run-off vote. Its something they'd have to learn though. This is what we should have.

Check out my "Citizens' elections security tracking tool..." (idea #400), for an online tool that could educate voters about the benefits of instant run off, and help them to bully their representative into voting for it.

Good luck though. The two parties would consider a vote for instant run off to be treason. Anything that rocks the two-party paradigm is toxic in their eyes.

I suggested this at a citizens' meeting recently and one of the other participants suggested a similar alternative, Acceptance Voting.

Acceptance voting is already in place for certain local candidates. These are the positions where they say, "Vote for no more than three," for example. One position is vacant, but each voter chooses up to three acceptable candidates and the one who gets the most votes wins.

You don't get to rank the candidates under this system, which was less appealing to me. But tabulating the results is simpler and doesn't require a computer (which would make it more likely for any attempt to manipulate the results to be noticed, because anyone can tabulate).

I haven't decided yet, but wanted to throw out the idea to see what other people thought.

1980 Independent US Presidential Candadite John Anderson has advocated for this concept for many years. Makes sense.

Instant-runoff voting is crucial to our democracy. It would let me vote for the best candidate, instead of (in effect) being forced to vote against the worst candidate.

Seems logical... but what about mail-in ballots being counted? Most places have 30 days to complete the count. I've never noticed that it changed the outcome once the electronic ballots are counted -- the winner is announced thenext day. So mailing in a ballot is a bad idea, even if it has more transparency.

breakthematrix.com

This does not seem to be an entirely appropriate discussion for this forum.

I thought it was organized by the Obama Administration in order to give ideas to the Administration regarding the sorts of legislation and Executive initiative that the public would most want the administration to get behind.

Whether one wants it or not, voting procedures (like marriage) are largely a state issue, not something that a federal administration would really have much to do with.

Re: state vs federal issue: A national standard would simplify the process and make it more fair.

IRV/RCV is a really bad idea. I was an observer of the 2007 IRV pilot program in my county, and it didn't work as advertised. In fact, our county BOE wasn't able to follow what they called the relatively simple IRV tabulation procedures as written, missed some votes entirely, screwed up the count, and then did a secret recount that gave the election to the candidate who did not get a majority of the 1st column votes cast. So it's not true that IRV ensures a majority winner in one election.

I've done analysis of IRV elections in other jurisdictions and have seen the problems with majority failure and how IRV costs more than backers claim. And from an election integrity standpoint, IRV is a nightmare! In the recent Aspen elections, they brought in some freelance election company to run the IRV elections since it was too complicated for the local election board to do. They used the wrong software, and in tests did the count in ascending order - so the guy with the lowest vote count won!

Check out my blog for more info about IRV - http://noirvnc.blogspot.com/

Chris Telesca

Wake County Verified Voting

I tend to agree that IRV is no solution or panecea for the problem of getting genuinely democratic representation. It seems to me that nearly everyone on this entire website, from right to left and back again seems to be looking for get rich quick solutions to whatever it is that ails them or irks them, IRV being one of the more popular shiboliths. IMHO there is simply no short cut to building a real, and democratically organized mass movement for social change from below. That is the only basis for real and guaranteed change of any kind. Of course it takes hard and mostly mundane work to build such a movement, which is undoubtedly why most people avoid it, or even thinking about it for that matter.

IRV is not "as easy as 1-2-3", it is very complex to count and requires central tabulation, opening it up to fraud.

It actually hurts third parties unless they are already strong. That is why countries like AU are controlled by two parties, and Ireland has basically a single party in control.

Implementation of IRV corresponds with drastic drop in voter turnout in San Francisco's mayoral contests;

IRV consistantly suffers from majority failure and several states' fiscal analysis show that IRV creates new and high costs in elections. Additionally, IRV increases reliance on more complex technology, making audits and recounts more prohibitive, further eroding election transparency.IRV does not help racial minorities and may even impede them IRV may negatively impact the disabled.

We need to get better at counting votes the plain old vanilla way, and in a transparent fashion. Voters should be able to understand the process of the election and not require an "interpreter" or expert to tell them how the votes were tallied. IRV's tallying process is not simple, nor tranpsrent.

On the other hand, from the point of view of democratic representation, proportional representation does make sense and would create an opening for minority views. However, this would require larger representative bodies at the local level and also ward-based, as opposed to at-large representation, which would create a greater opening for more points of vies. But again, none of this is at all meaningful in the absence of a well organized democratic mass movement. The nuts and bolts of organizing such a movement are neither easy nor especially interesting. On top of that, this is not the appropriate forum for such a discussion. My understanding is that this is for Obama to get ideas and the last thing he would want is a mass movement that he couldn't control.