In addition to the oft used “cost” argument, I would like to add that there are other benefits to doing runoffs instantly:

Reduces negative campaigning (don’t want to alienate voters in case of a runoff round)
Eliminates campaign expenditures and activity after the initial vote (no more signs and debates for now please!)
Increases voter participation (turnout was already too low, imho)
Assures a majority winner (more democratic)

And to be clear:

Everyone gets one vote in each round they choose to participate in.

What is so hard to understand about that?

J

That’s the problem Mr. Mulligan…you are about “feelings” and appear to care very little about facts. Yet again, we see you blowing a whole lot of smoke about an issue (this time it’s IRV, last time it was the Moran Plant, next time who knows!) where there is literally no fire.

“after the recount of the paper ballots and if everything goes well.. I may feel better about IRV.”

What recount?

“I do not mean look at studies from other places.”

And let the demonstrated facts be damned eh??

“It went well but many people there did not support IRV.”

IRV was passed by the voters of Burlington, passed by the VT Legislature, and allowed to become law by VT’s GOP Governor. Sure, there are people that will never be in favor of IRV, but most of them, IMHO, are just sticks in the mud…

Anyway, after the recount of the paper ballots and if everything goes well.. I may feel better about IRV. I’ve really been back and forth on my support for it.

There are good reasons for that and I try to keep an open mind but my key issue is election integrity. If the paper ballot recount shows the machines operated correctly and without any glitches or mistakes then I may change my mind. I still do not know.

I still think we need to pay close attention to how IRV will effect our city over time, turnout and other factors. I do not mean look at studies from other places. Each place is unique and esp. Burlington.

There also needs to be more outreach and education of IRV for voters. This is clear and I think everyone can agree on this. I had done some of this before the election using the Front Porch Forum in my ward and also hosting an IRV meeting at Cathedral Square to help voters understand how IRV works. It went well but many people there did not support IRV. It wasn’t until after this meeting I started to change my mind.

Exactly.

“We all agree that’s a virtue, right?”

I’m not exactly sure that we’re all on board with that concept. I am though.

“Bob Kiss and Kurt Wright are not that similar, in fact.”

I completely agree with this statement, but Wright tried really, really hard to play the “I’m a pragmatist and can work with all sides” line…that’s why he ended up getting so much support in this past election IMO.

“I think the nature of IRV, and the fact that a candidate needs the second place votes of his opponents, creates the illusion that the candidates are more similar than they are.”

I’ve heard people say that IRV elections are more “positive” than other types of elections, but I haven’t seen any hard evidence that this is true across the entire country. I also don’t think that a more positive election cycle is necessarily a bad thing.

“Ranking the candidates isn’t so much about comparing them to each other as it is about comparing them to your own views.”

Exactly.

As to the low voter turnout, it appears that Burlington voter turnout was somewhere around 30% or so this time around (I haven’t seen any official numbers yet), which is higher than all other available turnout numbers since 2001…with the exception of the first year that IRV was introduced (2006) and last year (when the big event was the still contested Democratic primary for President).

According to the VT Secretary of State’s office, VT Town Meeting Day turnout (where there is some kind of Australian ballot available) has ranged from 16-40% statewide since 2001, and Burlington turnout has ranged from 19-39% since 2001. I would argue that if one was really concerned about voter turnout, then one might want to look at the ass-backwards way/time that VT deals with most local voting issues…in the middle of winter when it usually cold and/or snowy…

vermont-elections.org/elections1/townmeetingturnout.html

Most people I’ve spoken with said that no one candidate stood out from the rest and that the person they ended up voting for was chosen because he’d be fine or slightly better than theother guy.

That’s why I think we would have benefited from a run off. Bob Kiss and Kurt Wright are not that similar, in fact. They are very different and their policies and governing styles would have been very different. The same can be said about any two of the candidates when thoroughly examined side-by-side.

I think the nature of IRV, and the fact that a candidate needs the second place votes of his opponents, creates the illusion that the candidates are more similar than they are.

Each one needs to say, in effect, “I know you support his guy; here’s how I am like him. Make me your second choice.”

Absent IRV, I think the debates would have been very different. But, even if they were not initially, a debate between the final two before the run-off would have revealed vast differences.

In this election, we had four competitive candidates. Up until the actual ballots were cast, no one really knew who was going to come in first, last, or in between. It was an exciting election, with lots of debates and media coverage, but it was a lot for the average, non-political-type to follow.

I think this is why we saw a low voter turn out.

I have to respectfully disagree here. Yes the candidates were competitive, or at least comparable but I don’t think it was an exciting election. Most people I’ve spoken with said that no one candidate stood out from the rest and that the person they ended up voting for was chosen because he’d be fine or slightly better than theother guy. If candidates don’t spark any type of passion among the people then the desire to go vote is lessened.

I was also on the fence until about an hour before I went to vote but it was because I didn’t see much difference between the candidates and would have probably been OK with any one of them winning. I paid close attention during the campaigns and don’t think another debate would have changed this.

Why would you want to “vote for someone else after the first round”?? Do your political endorsements really mean that little to you?? Why would you change your mind in a “real” runoff??

“I believe that IRV does have some impact on turnout”

Where is the evidence for this statement? IRV has been in use for a much longer time in other parts of the country, and I don’t believe that it has had any negative effect on voter turnout.

“I also want to say that if we had a traditional runoff I would be voting differently from the way I voted on March 3rd.”

Why??

“I also do not like how majority is defined….with IRV it’s 50+1….with city council races it’s 40%.”

I agree…IRV should be used for ALL races in Burlington IMO.

“To say the majority of voters chose any candidate is not true anyway because you only had a small percentage of voters turning out compared to what’s on the checklist. Most of our elections it’s the minority of voters choosing the winners, whether you have IRV or not.”

This is just nonsense…using this kind of “logic”…we shouldn’t even bother having elections at all, since a lot of people don’t even bother to register to vote or show up to vote all the time. Please…

“do you believe in a democracy that represents most of the voters, or don’t you?”

This is exactly my point in the first place.

“But however you count it you each got the same number of votes.”

Exactly!

“Kiss ended up winning with 4,313 votes…how is that a majority of voters or how does that reflect the will of the people and how is that defined as democracy?”

It sounds as if you are having a hard time wrestling with what a real, functioning democracy is all about. Your concerns really have nothing to do with IRV. Sign up for more “get out the vote” drives if you are so “concerned”. If you want to know why people in Burlington stayed home during this past election cycle, why don’t you try and ASK THEM…instead of just assuming that “they are disgusted, apathetic,lazy or do not trust that Burlington elections.”

As per usual Mr. Mulligan, it likely that you are the one that is “a complete and utter joke.”

“I do not believe that low turn out is irrelevant to this thread.”

Well too bad…because it IS irrelevant to this thread. IRV has never been cited as the cause of low voter turnout. Voter turnout on Town Meeting Day has been a joke for many decades now.

In the original post, Charity wrote, “I even changed my mind the morning of the election. And I blog about politics for a living. Imagine what it was like for the average, non-political person trying to make that decision.”

I think that says it all. For me, the issue in this election wasn’t the question of whether IRV is too confusing or not as fair as old-fashioned run-off elections; the issue was that none of the candidates were so much better –or worse– than the others. Honestly, I could have lived very happily with any of the top four candidates winning, so I suspect that, for a lot of people, the choice wasn’t as clear cut as it might have been given a more polarizing or differentiated slate of candidates.

Charity wrote, “If we had the benefit of a run-off, we would get a second chance to listen to Mayor Kiss and Councilor Wright debate each other, one-on-one…Democracy would benefit from getting a second look at the top two…”

There’s the crux of the big difference between IRV and run-offs: The IRV potentially has more than two voting iterations (via the ranked list each voter submits), while the run-off election has exactly two iterations: Round one, the original round with all the candidates (in this instance, five), and round two, with only the top two vote-getters, regardless of whether the third-ranked person was even 1 vote behind the number-two person.

Which is more fair? Going from five (or more) candidates to two without any intermediary steps seems arbitrary. Why just the top two? Why not the top three? Or four, if the original round had contained six or more folks?

You see what I mean? It’s not at all clear to me what’s so righteous about discarding all but the top two people right off the bat without the voters having had a means to influence the winnowing process in the first place. IRV is a structured method of winnowing the votes via direct voter influence, i.e., the ranked list that each voter submits. It just seems more fair than that second and final “only two guys” step of a run-off election. As Bill Simmon nicely puts it, “IRV is way more little-d-democratic than the old system”.

If you want to argue that voters are too dumb to be able to deal with IRV…well…I may have a hard time proving otherwise.

Charity wrote, “…a traditional run-off would have given voters more information on which to base their votes.”

Yeah, and so would extending the term of a mayor to 10 years, and having people campaign for 5 of those years. Right? There’s a point of diminishing returns vis a vis getting voters more information on the candidates. If the candidates’ web sites, door-to-door campaigning, newspaper opps, and gazillion debates hadn’t provided voters with enough information by March 3rd, it’s not at all clear to me that another couple of weeks could have helped, even if we voters did “only” have two guys to focus on.

Taylor wrote that IRV “allows a certain population to vote more than once in the same election for the same race. The people who voted for Andy, Dan, and Green Guy essentially got to vote again while everyone who voted for Kurt and Bob didn’t.” That’s actually a funny way of looking at it. Haik goes as far as calling it a moral flaw.

Another way of looking at it is this: The people who voted for Andy, Dan, and Green Guy…lost. Their preferred candidates? Gone at the get-go. What IRV did was let them, the losing voters, still have an opportunity to influence the election so that, even though their #1 candidates were gone, they could help another candidate who might be closer to their thinking, ideologically. That’s not voting twice, that’s increased participation in democracy. We all agree that’s a virtue, right?

Ryan wrote, “If Wright had been a strong enough candidate that a majority of voters wanted him to win, he would have won, plain and simple.” Hear, hear. That’s the crux of this election: None of these guys were superstar Barack Obamas.

Om wrote, “All this talk about “the will of the people” is a complete and utter joke.” So, what, give up on democracy altogether? After 233 years, what we’ve got on our hands is ugly beyond belief, fraught with inadequacy…and the fairest system we’ve been able to produce. It’s the best we’ve got.