Subject: Re: [EL] FW: Oakland Mayoral Race
From: Rob Richie
Date: 11/12/2010, 9:49 AM
To: Joseph Lorenzo Hall
CC: Election Law <election-law@mailman.lls.edu>

I agree, Joe. Alameda County registrar Dave Macdonald did a lot of things really well. Check out the website for their educational materials.
 
Two indications of the general success of his deparment's voter education work:
 
* A far lower percentage of Oakland voters skipped over the mayoral race than had been true of the 2006 open seat election with the allegedly "simple" non-RCV system won by Ron Dellums -- and tens of thousands of more voter particpated
* Of those voting in the mayoral election, 99.7% cast a valid vote, even though many voted by absentee without benefit of overvote detection. The rate was even higher in neighboring San Leandro, which had a hotely contested race for mayor with a reversal of first choice results.
 
Note that North Carolina held a statewide RCV-IRV election for the first time in American history (for a general eletion.) More than 1.9 miillion voters cast an IRV ballot in a race with 13 (!) candidates in a nonpartisan judicial race for Court of Appeals. Of the four other Court of Appeals races (three contested), the IRV race registered more valid votes than three of them. Final results wno't be tallied for awhile, as the state is going to get everything else done first, but without IRV, the seat would have gone to a candidate with just 20%. See www.ncvotes123.com
 
Rob

On Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 12:30 PM, Joseph Lorenzo Hall <joehall@gmail.com> wrote:
For the information design-interested out there, do take a look at
Alameda's presentation of the rounds of IRV (one choice is dropped
each round):

http://www.acgov.org/rov/rcv/results/rcvresults_2984.htm

Granted, if you don't know much about IRV/RCV, you might have a hard
time figuring it out... but if you know that it's a round-based voting
mechanism that drops and redistributes votes, it's a remarkably clean
and intuitive presentation.  Bravo!

best, Joe

On Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 8:06 AM, Lloyd Mayer <lmayer@nd.edu> wrote:
> The story below, sent to me by one of Election Law students, may be of
> interest:
>
> The Oakland mayoral race was finally resolved yesterday and it seems the
> star of the show is Oakland's ranked voting process:
>
> http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/11/10/MNKV1GADKC.DTL&feed=rss.bayarea
>
>
>
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--
Joseph Lorenzo Hall
ACCURATE Postdoctoral Research Associate
UC Berkeley School of Information
Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy
http://josephhall.org/
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