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Added on November 24, 2010

On Local Government

Bob Pinzler

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On Local Government: OK, I was

wrong.

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During the past year, I was voluble in my support of a new kind of election
structure called either ranked choice voting or instant runoff voting. The
idea was to eliminate the expensive and, usually, low turnout runoff election that
localities use when a 50 percent plus one electoral majority is required.
The concept makes sense. When a voter fills out his or her ballot, they rank the
people listed so that, in the event none of them get the required majority, the
votes of the lowest vote getter would be re-tallied based on the second choice
listed.

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The process would continue until the top vote getter reaches 50 percent plus
one.
The City of Oakland used this system in the election just conducted for mayor
and city council candidates and the results were devastating to the concept. In
many of the contests, a person who won majorities in none of the Citys precincts
ended up winning the election. In some races, the person with the most votes in
each precinct ended up losing.
Part of these results could be attributed to an anybody-but-the-leadingcandidate scenario where not nearly a majority liked the leading candidate, but
everybody else didnt want to come near him. However, a more logical
explanation of the results was, frankly, how ill-informed, bored and, frankly,
lazy, some (or maybe) much of the voting constituency is.
Take one of the races for city council, where 21 candidates were running for a
single office. For this system to work perfectly, every voter would have had to
rank all 21 candidates so that when the low vote getters were removed, a proper
reallocation would occur.
Could you, or would you, go to that trouble? Thus, the system is immediately
flawed. However, even if the election were determined after five or six
recalculations, who is to say that the voters who didnt enter alternatives, and
there were a significant number of those, or those who over voted, meaning that
they messed up the ballot by entering the ranking incorrectly, didnt
dramatically affect the outcome?

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Therefore, it is clear that while this system may, and I stress may, work for
elections with three or, possibly, four candidates, it is unlikely that it will result
in an acceptable conclusion when the list of candidates gets long. Now, Oakland
is stuck with elected officials whose credentials as receiving a mandate to serve
may be seriously undermined.

Endless Session

Runoff elections remain less than satisfying ways of selecting candidates.

However, in the light of the Oakland experience, they may be the best of the
available evils. Until we get an electorate that can handle the subtlety and
nuance of a complicated ballot, and we have no evidence that they can handle
something as simple as properly filling in a write-in ballot, we are stuck with it.
ER

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