Tuft’s IRV Election
Last week, Tufts University held their annual election for president of their student government, and like every year, Tufts used Instant Runoff Voting. Colleges across the US have been at the forefront of adopting IRV in the US and have provided great demonstrations of its success on a small scale. Half of the Ivy Leagues — Harvard, Princeton, Darmoth, and Cornell — already use IRV, and a recent op-ed in the Columbia University newspaper argues for its adoption there as well. IRV was actually invented down the road at MIT in the year 1870 and is naturally used for student government elections there too.
After the first round of counting in the Tufts election, no candidate mustered a majority of support. The leading candidate, Duncan Pickard, garnered 42% of the first-choice ballots, followed by C.J Mourning with 32% and Elton Sykes with 24%. Our current plurality system would have been satisfied with electing a candidate who demonstrates only a minority of support, but fortunately IRV does not. After all, with plurality how would we know if Sykes spoiled the election for Mourning? With instant runoff, Sykes was eliminated in the first round, and Pickard prevailed over Mourning in the second round, 56% to 44%.
College students around the nation are increasingly becoming accustomed to preferential ballots, which bodes well for the future of IRV in the U.S.
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August 11th, 2008 at 1:17 am
Not really sure if this bodes well for the future of IRV in the US.
First, college elections do not require the same election integrity measures that real elections require. At NCSU in Raleigh, NC, the IRV elections were done on a $1800 computer program written by a recent graduate. There was no way to audit the election and the student “Board of Elections” didn’t even count the votes. In the real world, our election software must be federally certified and should be auditable.
The NCSU election also required that each student rank each and every candidate in each and every election on the ballot, otherwise no votes would be counted. That can’t happen in the real world either.
And even with that requirement, NCSU still admitted that you might not get a majority winner even after all the ballots were exhausted – and a traditional runoff election might still be needed.
It does not bode well for elections if college students are getting used to voting on computers with no certified software, no ability to audit, and if most of them don’t really understand who they are really voting for. Just because you have more choices doesn’t mean that you always make intelligent choices. In Australia, many of the votes that voters are required to cast are “donkey votes” – votes that are just cast because they are forced to rank all candidates in all elections.
August 11th, 2008 at 1:32 pm
Wake, IRV elections can and have been audited in the same manner as non-IRV elections. California election law requires percentage audits of all elections, including the IRV elections in San Francisco. Those audits were conducted in SF without a whiff of any integrity or security problems. Nor is there a whiff of any integrity issues in Australia.
I prefer optional-ranking IRV (where a voter is not required to rank all the candidates) over mandatory-ranking IRV. All IRV elections for public office in the US are optional-ranking and no IRV organization in the US is proposing anything different. There’s no need to get all wound up about mandatory-ranking when no is proposing it.
August 27th, 2008 at 7:10 pm
Wake IRV elections were not audited in the way that non-IRV elections are audited in NC. It’s not possible to audit a percentage of precincts in an IRV race since you need to have an accurate count of all the first column votes in all the precincts, and you can’t do that with IRV. The only way to “audit” IRV races is to do a full recount of all the votes to see if you have made any mistakes, which will take lots of time and cost more money, and will move election administrators to cut corners and either do less rigorous audits if not do away with them altogether.
And I challenge you to produce any evidence that the same kind of rigorous audits were done of any RCV elections in San Francisco. People have tried without success to get an idea of what sort of audits have been done there.
Mandatory ranking in IRV is called a full preference ballot, and there are some colleges that require you to rank every candidate in every race – even the ones you don’t like – in order for ANY of your votes to count. Not being required to rank every candidate in every race – uin other words you might get some undervotes – is called a partial preference ballot. And with those you always run the risk that you will exhaust all the ballots and not have a majority winner – and then you need to have a traditional runoff. That is what happened in Cary – 1401 votes is not 50% plus one vote of the 3022 ballots that were cast in the District B race. There is a reason to get wound up about how some people claim that IRV ensures a majority winner in one election when it simply isn’t true.