Ridley-Thomas and Parks in runoff? Please, no.
Somebody -- anybody -- please just get 50% plus one tonight. Otherwise, like the folktale of the political consultant who comes out of his hole on election day but doesn't see his shadow (that's how the story goes, right?) we have five more months of campaigning.
But it's looking grim in these early hours. With a still-paltry 1.35% of precincts reporting, Mark Ridley-Thomas has a comfortable lead over Bernard C. Parks in the race for Los Angeles county supervisor in the Second District. But it's not comfortable enough. Ridley-Thomas has 47.12% of the vote to Parks' 35.57%, but he needs 50% to avoid a runoff.
That might be tough. There are seven other candidates in this race, and even if none of them captures more than a few thousand votes, it could be enough to prevent anyone getting a majority. As it stands now, even Morris "Big Money" Griffin, the man who came up with the idea of an "ethnic lottery" so that winnings would only go to people of the same ethnic group as those who bought tickets, has 2% of the early vote.
So if the campaign ending now was all about Ridley-Thomas and Parks, the next five months will be, well, more Ridley-Thomas and Parks.
It's that way in any non-partisan race with more than two candidates. There will likely be at least a couple judicial runoffs in November.
It's a good opportunity for the New America Foundation to move forward with its plan for instant runoff voting, in which the runoff takes place simultaneously with the election. San Francisco currently uses IRV, as the insiders call it. Hear KPCC's Frank Stoltze report on New America's presentation yesterday at Los Angeles City Hall.
By the way, this 50% plus one issue doesn't apply to partisan primaries, like state Senate and Assembly. A Democrat just needs one more vote than his or her competitors -- same for Republicans -- to win the primary. There is a general election between party winners in November, but most districts are virtually owned by one party or the other, so it's really all being decided today.
FYI, what San Francisco has is something called Ranked-Choice Voting. Thanks to Greg Dewar, who says /opinion was wrong to call it IRV in the past.
Posted by: Tim Cavanaugh | June 04, 2008 at 08:00 AM
San Francisco has Instant Runoff Voting and Dewar is seriously misinformed about why they chose the term "Ranked Choice Voting". The avoided the term "Instant Runoff" because they didn't want to leave people the impression the result would necessarily be available "instantly" on election night. If no candidate receives more than 50% of the vote on election, the SF election commission runs the "instant runoff" process the following day. It had nothing to do with constitutional issues.
IRV worked extremely well in San Francisco, received high marks from voters, boosted participation in local races, and saved the city a ton of money. Call it instant runoff or ranked choice, but by any name, it works.
Posted by: Greg | June 04, 2008 at 03:27 PM
Wow, two comments referring to old blog posts, all of which misinform the readers of the LA Times. Thanks!
The proponents have changed the name of IRV/RCV more times than I can recall, hence the earlier use of the term "IRV". It would be nice if people would stick to one name and keep it that way, but no such luck.
It has NOT been the cure to problems with elections in SF. All the candidates in 2004 that tried the "buddy buddy" gimmicks lost big, and most elections since then have been not been seriously contested. The fact remains if you are not the top vote getter on election night, you are not likely to win. That's been proven EVERY single time we've had an election in SF.
While the latter is not necessarily the fault of RCV/IRV/Whatever, it is an indication of the fact that a problem it was meant to solve, which was making elections more competitive didn't pan out because as always in SF, incumbents have such a big advantage, whether you have IRV/RCV whatever or not made no difference as to making elections more open. etc.
But hey thanks for links to the blog, it's great to know so many wise readers of the LA Times not only read it, but link to it - more pageviews for the blog. Thanks again!
Posted by: Greg | June 09, 2008 at 11:30 AM
San Francisco's "IRV" is a hot mess. And expensive. SF spends about $2.00 per reg voter on education, and will spend about $12 million on new voting machines soon.
Where is the net savings?
The IRV ballot is a portal into hell. An article by Electionline quoted San Francisco voters as describing IRV this way:
"Voters also questioned the value of ranked-choice voting."
"There are a lot of people who only mark one [candidate] or the same person three times,"
"I don't want to vote for a second one, I want this one."
Jay Bordeleau, an election inspector at Notre Dame Des Victoires in Union Square concurred.
"There are a lot of people who only mark one [candidate] or the same person three times," he said.
And what a sick waste of money on printing ballots for the Nov 2007 election:
there were three places on the ballot to rank candidate choices for the sheriff's race, in which only two candidates were running and the district attorney race in which Kamala Harris ran unopposed.
And in 20 consecutive IRV elections in San Francisco, since its adoption, the end result was the same as if the election were a "winner take all" or plurality. In other words, the person who won the first round ended up being the winner of the final round.
Oh, and I keep seeing the phrase "incumbent protection" in articles explaining why the mayor did not have a serious challenger and as a reason for the unchallenged DA contest.
I hope other places in the country will look before they leap.
Posted by: ncvoter | June 09, 2008 at 11:44 AM
Oh and by the way, the city did not "save a ton of money" in the last Mayoral race. Because the city wanted to use illegal voting machines, they ended up having to do the entire election by hand.
Also, no serious candidate challenged the incumbent Mayor, but SF still had to manually count the ballots (at an elevated cost) to comply with RCV/IRV, even though it was clear Newsom won re-election outright.
Turnout was the lowest it's been in years in a citywide race as well. All well documented at City Hall.
Posted by: Greg | June 09, 2008 at 12:12 PM
I am the Greg that wrote the first comment, but not the next two. I support IRV, but that other Greg does not. That Greg mysteriously thought it wise to use a username that had already commented on the article.
Equally bizarre is his criticism of IRV. For some reason he obsesses over the particular name for the system -- Instant Runoff or Ranked Choice -- as if the particular name reflects on the qualities of the system. The "Ranked Choice Voting" name was chosen by the city of SF, not the proponents -- who generally prefer "Instant Runoff Voting".
Both San Francisco's former system (top-two runoff) and the current system (instant runoff) address the spoiler problem and lead to greater competition. IRV eliminates slightly more spoilers than top-two runoff, but in practice they won't produce radically different results, nor should they.
The benefit to SF voters for IRV were huge cost savings, major improvement in voter convenience, and increased voter participation. The undervote rate from 2000 (non-IRV) to 2004 (IRV) in SF municipal elections fell by about 50%. All those voters who took time to vote in the presidential election weren't forced to trudge out again weeks later to vote in any runoff.
Sure, a new voting system will require some upfront investment, perhaps in new machines and voter education, but the long term cost-savings (and often the short-term cost savings) are substantial.
As far as the turnout in the Mayor's race, that's because the Mayor had no serious opponent, as mentioned. This had little to do with IRV and everything to do with the Mayor's own extremely high popularity.
IRV was a big success in SF, and the poll numbers show strong majorities preferring over the previous system. NCVoter -- who does in fact live in North Carolina -- would like to tell the voters of SF that the voting system they liked so much is actually a "portal into hell" -- her extreme rhetoric should give you indication of how in level-headed this person is.
Instead of snipping one quote from one person about IRV in SF, NCvoter should actually look at the actual data. Over 60% of voters ranked their top three choices, and over 70% ranked at least their top two. That's the facts.
Posted by: Greg D | June 11, 2008 at 10:37 AM
(1) The problem with San Francisco's voting machines was not caused by IRV. The machines would have been decertified even if they had not been modified to run IRV elections.
Therefore (2) the manually inspection of ballots in the non-competitive mayoral race was not required to "comply with IRV". It was required because the scanners don't work well enough to use in any election, IRV or otherwise.
(3) Implementation costs are recovered very quickly because you eliminate an entire election. This will be just as true in Los Angeles as in San Francisco, because the second round in both places is not consolidated with any other election. ncvoter's $2 per voter for education is a one-time cost in spite of her wording it to make it sound like a recurring cost.
(4) ncvoter and a few other opponents of IRV are very fond of isolated quotes in the media about voter dissatisfaction. They rarely mention the far more meaningful results of large-scale surveys that show overwhelming public support for the change to IRV.
Posted by: Bob Richard | June 11, 2008 at 11:37 AM
NCVoter is a critic of IRV, Joyce McCloy, a very partisan Democrat from North Carolina with her own agenda apparently of not really desiring more competition from third parties in elections, yet she uses that argument to attack IRV constantly.
IRV is not a system that CAUSES more choices... there are many factors involved in whether more candidates decide to compete for an office. For instance, 80% or higher of incumbents in research get re-elected. The idea presented here and implied that IRV somehow makes this worse is ludicrous. The idea that IRV affects ballot access laws, helps identify alternative and qualified candidates to challenge incumbents, and creates supportive community activist or political groups to support more local candidates is also ludicrous. Yet these authors (continually) ignore the full spectrum of causes that play into these issues and instead attempt to fault IRV as the cause of these effects.
The arguments here against IRV are pathetically riddled with inaccuracy. The premise that so many election experts and political scientists have been duped is laughable by these amateurs.
Posted by: Anthony Lorenzo | June 11, 2008 at 11:52 PM
I support Instant Runoff Voting.
Bottom line: 2 elections cost more than 1 election. So whether its long or short term savings, money is saved. And at the very least, less paper costs.
Also if voter turnout is a problem in election 1, than of course less people show up for election 2. So it makes sense to boost voter turnout by consolidating the possibility of a second runoff election into election 1.
Finally, IRV is not a new system. Its been around -- I just learned IRV is used to election the President of Ireland-- and there are implemented models here and abroad to ground some of the concerns, like with voter education.
Posted by: Betty | June 12, 2008 at 12:45 PM
NCVoter says that voters only voted for a person once or voted for a person three times and that is a huge problem. If that is what the voter wants to do, that it their perogative. That is what already happens in a non-IRV system-- you vote for one person and if your candidate will not be winning then you are done with the process of voting. But with IRV they have the OPTION to vote for another candidate if they choose to and have that vote count. And in SF about 90% people understood that they had the option to do so. About 60% of people choose to rank their candidates. And isn't that basically what democracy is-- you have the option to vote for who you want. The upside with IRV is that voting is easier and effective so more people turnout-- and that is really great for democracy.
I think the comment about wasting money on printing ballots is especially hilarious. What about the money spent on printing more ballots for the runoffs? That is just wasteful especially when the process could have been accomplished on one ballot. How about the money spent on months and months of continuing campaigning, on more poll workers?
Posted by: Monika | June 12, 2008 at 01:22 PM
"Instant-runoff voting" is a name that was invented in 1996 as a political device to sell the system to jurisdictions using Top Two Runoff (TTR), on the argument that it "simulates" real runoff elections. There has been long-continued deception in the arguments over IRV. For example, FairVote claims that Robert's Rules "recommends IRV." Actually, Robert's rules says that preferential voting is preferable to plurality, but TTR isn't plurality, and meets the criteria, as normally implemented, of what Robert's Rules does approve. The Roberts Rules version requires the election to be repeated if a majority of votes is not found. In seven out of nine instant runoffs in the U.S. since 2004, when IRV elections started up in SF, no majority of votes was found. IRV is a plurality method that *sometimes* --not most of the time -- can find a majority that Plurality will miss. No voting method in use can guarantee a majority vote -- except TTR. If you want to *reduce* runoffs, it can be done much more cheaply and more fairly than what happens with IRV, which reproduces the results of Plurality right down the line. (Exceptions take place with *partisan elections,* very rarely with nonpartisan ones.) See Antony Green on the performance of Optional Preferential Voting in Australia. FairVote wants you to look at Preferential Voting with full ranking required, used in most places in Australia, which, of course, does always find a majority, by coercing voters to rank *all* candidates. Imagine that in San Francisco with over 22 candidates in one race.
Most seriously, in real runoffs the runner-up "comes back" to win the runoff. That is not happening with IRV in the U.S. This can be predicted by looking at OPV performance in Australia, but it makes sense with nonpartisan elections. The situation is different with partisan elections, because with them, votes transferred from a third party may greatly prefer one of the top two candidates, so comebacks are seen, and FairVote will point to those elections, such as the one in Ann Arbor, MI, in the 1970s. San Francisco voters were lied to in the voter information pamphlet, and, sadly, none of the opponents noticed it. The pamphlet said that winners "would still be required to gain a majority of votes," but the actual proposition struck the majority requirement from the election code, replacing it with a method which finds a "last round majority," discovered by eliminating from consideration all exhausted ballots, ballots not containing a vote for the top two. Why don't we take the elimination process just one step further? Then we could claim that the winner was by unanimous vote!
Posted by: Abd ul-Rahman Lomax | June 13, 2008 at 10:30 AM
Anthony Lorenzo tries to denigrate my comments by claiming I am a partisan democrat. Lorenzo himself is quite partisan, his hope is that IRV will help his third party candidates.
But the truth is, if my attitude towards IRV was shaped by "Democratic partisanship", I should be pushing FOR IRV, since it keeps third party candidates weak.
The problem is that the advocates for IRV base their support on theory, and not on actual use and or results.
Look at San Francisco, IRV is keeping the democrats in office. It helps the incumbents. Not the weaker parties or weaker candidates.
Posted by: NCVoter | September 14, 2008 at 10:44 PM