[EL] (Not Really) ranked-choice voting in SF
David A. Holtzman
David at HoltzmanLaw.com
Tue Nov 8 00:13:11 PST 2011
Joe - you clearly understand the concepts.
You understand that voting machines, counting equipment and software
must be certified for use in elections.For municipal elections in
California, state level certification is required (with the possible
exception of a hypothetical city that exempts itself from this via
charter authority).Federal [HAVA] certification is required too for
equipment used in municipal contests consolidated with elections for
federal office.
As far as you or I know, the availability of fully certified ranked
voting equipment is quite limited, so that the only options are ballot
styles providing for three (or four?) rankings.This is the "hardware
limitation" I mentioned. The desire to implement RCV despite the poor
availability of equipment is why the S.F. City Charter explicitly
requires ranked-choice voting even when the only available equipment can
only handle up to three rankings.The eventual availability of better
equipment will relax the hardware limitation.
(Below, Rob R. says a 10-ranking machine is in the pipeline.Good!)
For ballot style samples and ideas, please have a look at this page I
put together years ago <http://www.lavotefire.org/ballots/>.Mechanized
optical character (numeral) recognition is not necessary. The Cambridge
ballot is exemplary, but I think the hardware to use it is no longer on
the market, and it never got California or U.S. certification anyway.The
Portland, Maine, ballot in today's election may not be federally
certified but is of the "matrix" form you're looking for --see the last
page of the official sample ballot at
http://www.portlandmaine.gov/voter/11082011ballot.pdf . It looks a lot
like the Cambridge ballot.
Each full certification costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, I'm
told.And new certification may be required for revisions/improvements,
including software upgrades.That's what I meant by regulatory barriers
to market entry.
Now, election officials' resistance to hand-counting is for entire
elections -- 100%, not 1%, of ballots.(I have observed 1% audits.They go
reasonably quickly, but since the election results have already been
released, there is no time pressure.)Right after polls close, newshounds
and politicians are impatient.Election officials publicly emphasize cost
considerations in declining to hand count entire elections, but
privately talk of the pressure to release results quickly.
[By the way, in my opinion, the easiest RCV ballot to count by hand
looks like this:
1 ______________________
2 ______________________
3 ______________________
4 ______________________
5 ______________________
6 ______________________
7 ______________________
8 ______________________
9 ______________________
10 ______________________
11 ______________________
12 ______________________
(etc.)
Voters fill in the blanks with names of candidates.(Perhaps in the
future they'll use a ballot marking device with a touchscreen and
printer.A drag-and-drop touchscreen user interface could make it very
easy to list your choices in your desired order!)
The counting is easy, not at all a "total nightmare," because once
you've looked at each ballot and put it in a counted stack for its first
choice, the only ballots you have to look at again are those in the
smallest piles -- the ones whose top choice just got eliminated. And
then all you have to look for on each ballot is the top choice who's
still in the election.If you'd like someone to conduct a mock RCV/IRV
election & count for you or that advisory board you're on, just let me
know.]
- dah
p.s. The SF Chronicle published a letter from me on RCV/IRV yesterday.A
reporter had made a big deal of candidates trying to disparage the
frontrunner in the mayoral contest, as if that was happening because of
ranked-choice voting.So I wrote:
*A vote for ranked-choice
*Re: "Rivals target Lee in effort to get leg up in ranked voting" (Oct. 31).
In any election system, a way for a challenger to move up is to pull the
front-runner down.
If you're a candidate, ranked-choice voting actually offers you another
way to improve your chances:
You can ask voters to rank you as a backup choice, behind their first
choices, in case their first-choice candidates are eliminated from the
election before a runoff.
The League of Women Voters of Los Angeles advocates using ranked-choice
(we call it instant runoff) voting for all single-winner elections, and
we appreciate San Francisco's leadership by example.
/David A. Holtzman, president, League of Women Voters of Los Angeles /
[San Francisco Chronicle and SFGate.com, Monday, November 7, 2011 p. A9]
[http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/11/07/ED5E1LQRIB.DTL]
On 11/7/2011 12:43 PM, Rob Richie wrote:
> Note:
>
> * Ireland just counted more than 1.7 million ballots in its
> presidential election without much fuss, with 7 candidates and four
> rounds of counting -- see the link in my blog I sent in my previous
> post. Took a day and a half. St. Paul (MN) will do a hand count, if
> one is needed , in its current city council elections with a ballot
> allowing 6 rankings (ballot will notify voters of errors and get quick
> first choice results, but system isn't certified to record rankings).
> Telluride, a small town in CO, will do it for mayor this week too. Not
> ideal, necessarily, but doable.
>
> * One of the major vendors (Dominion) has a system in certification
> that allows 10 rankings, using a ballot design along the lines of the
> in Portland that 95% of voters said they "fully undertood" in our
> early voting "snapshot survey' that's linked from fairvote.org
> <http://fairvote.org> - Portland has 15 mayoral candidates and 15
> rankings. We've heard the Dominion system could be certified early
> next year. Not only does it allow more rankings, but we think it's
> easier for voters than the current Bay Area ballot design on
> Dominion's current optical scan system (e.g, the old Sequoia one).
>
> Rob Richie
>
> On Mon, Nov 7, 2011 at 2:56 PM, Joseph Lorenzo Hall <joehall at gmail.com
> <mailto:joehall at gmail.com>> wrote:
> > On Mon, Nov 7, 2011 at 2:40 PM, David A. Holtzman
> <David at holtzmanlaw.com <mailto:David at holtzmanlaw.com>> wrote:
> >>
> >> San Francisco's hardware limitation of three rankings is a function
> of the availability of equipment and the unwillingness of elections
> officials to administer ballot counts conducted by hand. Those
> problems, in turn, are related to political unwillingness to invest
> public funds in upgrading the actual machinery of democracy,
> compounded by regulatory barriers to private sector entry into the
> election equipment market.
> >
> > Hmmm, this doesn't seem exactly right. I may be misinterpreting your
> > words. If so, please correct me!
> >
> > First, to run an IRV/RCV election using optical scanning technology,
> > as it currently exists in elections, each "choice" in an IRV contest
> > gets it's own space on the ballot (you essentially have an election
> > for first ranking, an election for second ranking, etc.). This is
> > because current optical scanners can only reliably detect one kind of
> > mark (which varies by vendor but is usallay an oval, square, rectangle
> > or the wacky "broken arrow" scheme). Current equipment cannot detect
> > hand-written ranking numbers and no vendor has certified a system that
> > uses a "matrix" style IRV/RCV ballot design (where each candidate is
> > listed as a "row" and the rankings are "columns" and there can only be
> > one choice per column, once per row or no choice).
> >
> > I'm not sure what the unwillingness to count by hand refers to. Of
> > course, each county in CA must perform the 1% manual tally per CA
> > Elec. Code 15360, which is a count conducted by hand (and there is
> > currently a statutory pilot program, on which advisory board I sit, to
> > develop methods much more accurate and efficient than the 1% tally).
> > Counting hundreds of thousands of IRV/RCV ballots with arbitrary
> > numbers of rankings sounds like a total nightmare.
> >
> > best, Joe
> >
> > --
> > Joseph Lorenzo Hall
> > Postdoctoral Research Fellow
> > Media, Culture and Communication
> > New York University
> > https://josephhall.org/
> > _______________________________________________
> > Law-election mailing list
> > Law-election at department-lists.uci.edu
> <mailto:Law-election at department-lists.uci.edu>
> > http://department-lists.uci.edu/mailman/listinfo/law-election
> >
>
>
>
> --
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> "Respect for Every Vote and Every Voice"
>
> Rob Richie
> Executive Director
>
> FairVote
> 6930 Carroll Avenue, Suite 610
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>
> --
> David A. Holtzman, M.P.H., J.D.
> david at holtzmanlaw.com
>
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