Instant Runoff Voting
The Literacy Test of the 21st Century
Demand one person, one vote, on paper, publicly audited, no exceptions
North Carolina adopted a pilot program for instant runoff voting for up to 10 cities in 2007 and up to 10 counties for 2008.
"The State Board of Elections shall closely monitor the pilot program established in this section and report its findings
and recommendations to the 2007 General Assembly." The city of Cary used IRV for municipal elections in October 2007
and the city of Hendersonville will use IRV for municipal elections in November 2007.
The IRV proponents' next step is to quickly rope in 10 Counties.
Instant Runoff Voting is not Instant, and not as easy as 1-2-3
San Francisco re-named it "Ranked Choice Voting" because it isn't "instant"
It opens us up to a gaming of the ballot, and makes election transparency as clear as mud.
We have done a lot to clean up elections in North Carolina.
Some special interests kept us from ditching all the touch screens, so we are still very vulnerable in some parts of the state.
Efforts to block the vote just keep coming:
1st, only certain people could vote.
then, some people only had 3/5 of a vote
next, came poll taxes,
then, came literacy tests,
We would never tolerate these barriers to our franchise today.
Today's barriers to voting are more sophisticated and promoted sometimes by people we trust and respect.
Paperless Electronic Voting.
Votes are lost, switched, added or subtracted by voting machines with no paper record to check the electronic count against.
We corrected that by passing the Public Confidence in Elections Act in August, 2005.
Voter registration databases.
When registering to vote, people have to provide a social security number, and a drivers license number (if they have one) etc on it.
Then the State Board of Elections has to match this information with the DMV and the Social Security databases.
20% of social security numbers don't match, and they don't give a reason why.
The last 4 digits are what are used to run the match, and any woman who has had a name change,
or anyone with a mis spelling etc can be disenfranchised. They aren't registered.
We corrected the "No Match No Vote" rule in August, 2007
I don't know if the DOJ has approved it yet, but when approved, if you don't match,
you will just have to provide the typical NC required id the first time you vote.
You will still be registered!
What is new in Blocking the Vote?
How about Instant Runoff Voting, a new, sophisticated voting method -marketed as "Its as easy as 1-2-3".
Lucky you, you get to mark 3 choices for one contest in a local election.
Many people will be embarrassed to say - but I don't get it, how is my vote counted?
What if I rank the only candidate I care about - 3 times? (hint - your 2nd and 3rd choices won't count)
What if I don't have a 2nd and 3rd choice, will my vote count as much as other peoples? (No!)
What if I don't read the same papers and hear the same radio that "educates" the public about IRV? (You won't be on equal footing.)
Even SOME intelligent, well educated people in Cary found it confusing:
Cary election previews vote in Hendersonville By Jordan Schrader, October 15, 2007
...When the count ended, Frantz led by a couple of dozen votes, with an official total due Tuesday.
Frantz said he wouldn't support another instant-runoff.
Hundreds of people he met left the polls not understanding the system, he said.
He prefers an actual runoff with a clear choice of two candidates.
"Even after all this is said and done, none of us got a clear majority," Frantz said.
More on What They Don't Tell You about IRV:
1)negatively impacts election integrity,
2)increases costs and labor for elections, audits and recounts, making them more onerus,
3)disenfranchises certain segments of the population,
4)does not meet its political promise,
5)does not allow voters 2nd chance to elect their preferred candidate,
6)it does nothing about the problem of ballot access for third parties.
Have a conversation with one of your friends and try to explain to each other how the ballots are counted.
See the instructions here (pdf file)
IRV is more compatible with countries like Australia, or Ireland - that have only 1 or 2 contests on the paper ballot counted by hand.
But Australia and Ireland don't vote for lots of contests like we do in the US.
They vote for party tickets, or parliament, and then most other offices are appointed.
Third parties are still mostly shut out.
North Carolina doesn't even have "real" IRV, it has a "modified" form that ranks only three candidates
and eliminates all but the top two.
Cary, North Carolina's election was a mess, provisional ballots weren't even counted until canvass,
after the "first" and "second" rounds, perhaps because the law was so poorly written.
Wake had to back up and re-insert the approved provisionals.
IRV is just a 21st century version of a literacy test.
Learn more at Instant Runoff Voting US
