| Subject: Re: [EL] problem with winning strategy in IRV elections (and Quan's final % was 45%) |
| From: Douglas Johnson |
| Date: 11/12/2010, 10:25 AM |
| To: 'Rob Richie' <rr@fairvote.org> |
| CC: 'Election Law' <election-law@mailman.lls.edu> |
1) Continuing the debate on the impact of using IRV:
The first point (about traditional runoffs) seems a red herring. Candidates research their opponent, regardless of whether there is a traditional runoff or not. And Quan did not play "hardball" -- the entire point of the article is that Quan "played nice" with every candidate except Perata.
The rebuttal points about Ed Jew appear to make my point for me, though I know they are not intended that way: Jew dominated the election, because IRV presented a massive deterrent for any other candidate who might have said anything about him. In retrospect the candidates still lost, but candidates do not get the retrospect of hindsight and must make decisions based on the situation ahead of them. Oakland shows that candidates continue to make the same decisions the candidates running against Ed Jew made (and, under IRV, those are usually the right decisions).
Tangent on personal attacks: If it is ok for you to term my using Ed Jew to criticize IRV as "lazy," imagine what ad hominem terms I might use to describe IRV supporters who think "the media" will do thorough background checks on every candidate in every local election if campaigns stop helping with them -- but let's keep the analysis professional, shall we?
The reality is that the media lacks the resources to do serious investigative reporting on candidates for local office -- even when "local" is as big as San Francisco. No political reform debate or vote is going to change that, and it is not realistic to expect the media to conduct Watergate-style exposes on candidates for county, city, school, or special district elections. My guess is that today over 95% of all articles in newspapers revealing something critical about a candidate rely significantly on information and/or tip-offs from opposition research by the other campaign (or its supporters), going all the way up to the Presidential campaign level. This is not the fault of the reporters or even of the media outlets -- it's that the campaigns have many more resources to dedicate to such research and much more chance to identify and activate "inside" sources aware of such information.
2) Quan won with 45% of the vote
Quan DID NOT get a majority of ballots cast, even after all the IRV tallies: 119,293 valid first-round votes were cast. Quan's final count was 53,778, or 45.1% of voters casting ballots in this election (Perata's was 43.4%). To credit the IRV advocates, an apples to apples comparison to a traditional run-off would be the run-off winner's votes divided by the total ballots cast in the primary election which often falls even more short of a majority (but not always). But it is worth mentioning that IRV does NOT result in a candidate winning with a majority of votes cast.
The reason Quan's numbers come up short is many voters do not fill in all 10 blanks on the ballot. In this election, over 11 percent of voters never put Perata or Quan on their ballot on any line. In the Oakland election it's a very interesting pattern: 0.1 to 0.2 percent of voters drop off (stop marking additional candidates) in each of rounds two through six. Then 0.7% drop off in round seven, 1.0% in round eight, 3.0% in round nine, and 6.6% drop off in the critical tenth round.
Similar failures to reach a true majority are found in most SF Supervisor elections using IRV.
3) I'd like to join the thanks to the Alameda County Registrar for that great summary table of the voting by round, which made that analysis possible. Very well done!
- Doug
Douglas Johnson
Fellow
Rose Institute of State and Local Government
Claremont McKenna College
o 909-621-8159
m 310-200-2058
douglas.johnson@cmc.edu
www.RoseReport.org
From: Rob Richie [mailto:rr@fairvote.org]
Sent: Friday, November 12, 2010 9:44 AM
To: Douglas Johnson
Cc: rick.hasen@lls.edu; Election Law
Subject: Re: [EL] problem with winning strategy in IRV elections
Well... I'll take the bait
First, we don't have runoffs in most of our elections. So your point is a non sequiter for most of voting. We have key primaries won by plurality all the time -- "Meet Ben Quayle, the new Congressman from Arizona" (winner with some 22% in his primary in a safely Republican district in Arizona). And without runoffs you have the spoiler dynamic -- "Meet Paul LePage, winner of the governor's election in Maine" (with 38% over Elliot Cutler's 37%, and a Democrat with 20% whose backers overwhelmingly would have preferred Cutler as second choice).
Second, it's a misnomer to say that ranked choice voitng (RCV/IRV) elctions turn into lovefests. Quan played hardball too in Oakland, and she had to do well in first choices to win (earning second in first choices in a 10-candidate field is good). RCV doesn't mean the ned of negative campaigning. Rather, it makes it less determinative --- and undercuts the advantage big money edges can give you when it is determinative. What Quan ALSO did - -and :Perata did not do -- is work the community. She went to every debate and community meeting. She shook a lot of hands. She reached out to a range of associations, both old ones and new ones.
This was very much the same in at least two of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors races too. Candidates who worked hard and reached out across a district were able to overcome being outspent and not getting traditionally detemrinative endorsements.
This brings us to Ed Jew, the poster child for lazy RCV haters in San Francisco. I'll admit it: not everyone who wins with RCV is going to be an angel - obviously. But here's the thing. First, Ed jew won the most first choice ranings -- so he wins by plurality voting. Second, Ed Jew was BY FAR the candidate of choice of Asian American voters in an Asian American majority district. He worked the shoe leather, got to know people, and the big media jsut completely missed the story. Is that his fault that the media did such a crappy job by being so out of touch with his district that they didn't realize how well he was doing? You can blame the electoral system, but I blame the medai that has to learn to work harder -- and smarter.
Third,, runoffs in these kinds of races can be quite erratic in who advances. Believe me, you'll discover that soon enough in California with Top Two. In San Francisco, for example, there's one RCV race where no candidate earned even 13% of first choices. The candidate who wins with RCV is an African American in a distirct historically represented by African Americans (the only such distict in San Francisco). But she's not in the top two in first choices, so she and all the other African American candidates would have been shut out of a traditional runof -- a colossal misfire. But again, get ready for that with Top Two (which is why I suggest going to top three or four and using RCV in the final round).
- Rob RIchie, FairVote
On Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 12:17 PM, Douglas Johnson <djohnson@ndcresearch.com> wrote:
At the risk of re-opening an earlier discussion that some probably wish stay closed, I would point out that the strategy to "Concentrate on Being the 2nd or 3rd Choice" means "Don't say anything negative or revealing about your opponents" -- and that lack of information for the voters is how a jurisdiction (even one as large as San Francisco) ends up with electing someone who claims to reside in a vacant building and who, upon taking office, immediately starts committing extortion.
Voters may say they dislike "negative campaigns," but in this era if the other candidates (and their campaign teams) are not checking up on their opponents, who will?
- Doug
Douglas Johnson
Fellow
Rose Institute of State and Local Government
Claremont McKenna College
o 909-621-8159
m 310-200-2058
From: election-law-bounces@mailman.lls.edu [mailto:election-law-bounces@mailman.lls.edu] On Behalf Of Rick Hasen
Sent: Friday, November 12, 2010 5:47 AM
To: Election Law
Subject: [EL] Electionlawblog news and commentary 11/12/10
See this report from "The Bay Citizen" (as reprinted in the NY Times Bay area edition). More on the Oakland race from Fairvote (and here).
Posted by Rick Hasen at 05:37 AM
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