Ranked-Choice Voting Ain't Rocket Science

Voters that do not know if their votes were counted when IRV methods are used were absolutely correct. IRV does not count the 2nd and later choices of all voters when their 1st choice is eliminated. To be sure that your 2nd choice candidate is counted before they are eliminated, be sure to rank the least favorite candidate 1st if you can figure out who that is.

IRV is just like plurality voting but even worse because:

1. you must rank one of the top-two vote getters first or risk helping your least favorite candidate to be elected, and

2. IRV is worse because you'll never know if casting a 1st choice vote for a candidate helped their chances to be elected or hurt their chances due to IRV's nonmonotonicity whereby increasing your ranking for a candidate can cause them to lose, whereby they otherwise might have won.

See http://kathydopp.com - my IRV page there for links to more information about the transparency and rights-eviscerating IRV method for counting rank choice votes.

Lots of other fairer, simpler, rights-preserving alternative electoral methods are available such as Bucklin, Borda, Condorcet, approval, or party list,..

So 84% of the survey respondents answered the question correctly!

That's because depending on the interpretation of the question, the correct answer is Yes, it was counted (tabulated), or I'm not sure (it depends on the situation, whether my vote would make a difference in the final outcome).

The ambiguity and subtlety of the survey question runs deeper than Joe acknowledges. It is possible for voters to make a difference in the overall outcome of the election, even though their votes are not counted in the final round. This is also true of any two-round runoff election system, whether it is top-two runoff or partisan primary / general election. For any runoff system, it is not an unusual strategy for a leading candidate to work to face the weakest possible opponent in the final round. That means a previous round can be as critical, or even more so, than the final round in determining the final outcome. In those cases, what really matters for some voters is that their vote is cast and counted in an early round.

For example, most of us are familiar with cases using partisan primaries, say for the state legislature, where in a heavily Democratic or heavily Republican district the real competition for an open seat is in the primary, the voting in the final round, the general election, is almost a formality. Even where the parties are evenly matched, an the incumbent seeking re-election may campaign actively, if not openly, to influence a victory for a weaker opponent in the other major party's primary. The most critical competition doesn't always happen in the last round. Just pointing out that this behavior is not limited to RCV.

It would appear then, that it is not voters, but the SF Chamber of Commerce and the Chronicle that are confused and ill-informed about not just RCV, but many other kinds of more common elections.

Sure you can say it's as easy as picking your 1st, 2nd and 3rd choices, but what if you don't know enough about all the other candidates to make those 2nd and 3rd choices? What if RCV encourages the candidates to be so well liked that no real differences stand out in terms of what sort of elected leader they will turn out to be?

As for me, I'd rather make a choice of the single best candidate that I like, and if he or she wins the election with a majority - that's great! If he or she doesn't win and someone else does - that's democracy. But if my guy or gal doesn't win a majority, and no one else does either - I'd rather come back and chose between the top two candidates who would then have a real chance to show us the differences between them.

I'd feel really left out of the whole process if the three candidates I voted for never made it to the top two. Let's say that in a field of 13 candidates A-M, I voted for A, B, and C in that order. And when the first round was counted, E and J were the top two. Only my first round vote for A would have been counted. Since none of my second and third column votes were for E or J, none of those votes would be counted.

In a traditional top-two runoff election. I'd have been able to come back and chose between E or J - something that I couldn't do under RCV. Or if I didn't like either E or J, I could just not vote at all. My choice. But at least the choice between voting for E or J or not voting at all is a real choice. In RCV, my choices for B & C in the 2nd and 3rd columns are a waste of time.

And that's just how RCV is a waste of time for voters at the polling places. It's an even bigger waste of time trying to watch and observe and understand how the votes are counted. The European courts have said that you can't have a vote counting process so complicated you need to be a computer scientist to observe and understand it. The process needs to be so simple that the least advantaged and educated among us (them) can understand it. RCV fails that test and so is less democratic than a single column race that anyone could witness as an observer and understand.

It wasn't that long ago,

that no reputable news outlet would publish the results of a poll without giving the details of the 'instrument' (questions). Binder is an in-house pollster for Downtown and has been for years. When you don't get the details (nice of you to lay covering fire so that Erin could escape back into the bushes) ... when you don't get the details as Erin filed to do, you run into the age old journalists problem ...

Garbage in ... garbage out.

Giants won 7-0 and they need to give Belt another 20 at bats before they break camp.

h.

Like I said in my comment to your earlier post on this: citing a poll put out by the Chamber of Commerce is a joke. Good on you for printing the absurd wording in the poll the Chronicle saw fit to put above the fold today. I'm surprised only 55% of people said they weren't sure. I've read the thing three times and I still don't get it.