Ranked choice voting is what separates us from the voter apathy current in political races. In Seattle the candidates for Mayor were chosen by less than 5% of the registered voters. Do we want to go back to that typer of system. I would prefer to have a larger percentage of the voters choosing the candidates which is what the council is trying to eliminate.

As to who is funding the two sides, I would much rather go with money from a respected organization such as FairVote than dirty money from folks who are looking for handouts and paybacks from the County Council.

And from the looks of that glossy, expensive mailer, it seems like all they know how to do is attack, attack, attack. No wonder Bunney couldn’t win his RCV race against McCarthy, even though he out-spent her almost 4 to 1.

I say Reject.

The FairVote talking points were used to sell IRV. Pierce Co certainly learned that the claim of majority wins and cost savings were not true.
Cary, NC learned the hard way that it did not improve elections and reduced debate and clear choice of top two.

FairVote has a 50 state strategy, they do the same thing state after state.
If no one speaks up, jurisdictions learn the hard way and election integrity is harmed. Many compromises in transparency have to be made in order to enable IRV. It isn’t worth it.

Rob Richie says a majority of Cary, NC voters polled said they liked IRV. There’s an interesting story about FairVote’s involvement in that exit poll here:
http://instantrunoff.blogspot.com/2009/08/slanting-exit-poll-of-carys-instant.html

Rob Richie says people like IRV.
Well, anti-freeze tastes good but you shouldn’t drink it either.

The big problem is that a significant % of voters do not understand IRV:

An exit poll (conducted using IRV advocates) of Hendersonville NC voters in 2007 indicated that one third of voters came to the polls unprepared to rank their choices. In Cary, North Carolina’s 2008 bi-annual citizen survey, 30.6% did not understand IRV, and 22.0% polled did not understand IRV at all. That is shocking when you consider that Cary has the most Ph.D.s per capita in the U.S. for towns larger than 75,000 people
http://irvbad4nc.blogspot.com/2009_09_01_archive.html

And it doesn’t get better.

July 3, 08 San Francisco Grand Jury Report: poll workers and voters do not understand instant runoff, voting machines not yet certified…. Grand Jury Report
http://www.sfgov.org/site/uploadedfiles/courts/divisions/Civil_Grand_Jury/year-of-five-elections-for-sf.pdf

I should emphasize that these are partnerships. All but one of the more than a dozen communities adopting instant runoff voting in the past decade did so after a vote of their city council or a charter commission (the one exception, Sarasota, passed IRV 78% to 22%), and there always have been local volunteers supporting the reform. Pierce County is a good example. The Pierce County charter commission recommended instant runoff voting on its own. The League of Women Voters of Washington and the League of Women Voters of Pierce County studied and supported instant runoff voting on their own.Volunteers like Kelly Haughton, Rich Anderson-Connally and local League members have put in incredible numbers of hours leading reform efforts.

In your home state of North Carolina, the state legislature passed the IRV pilot bill in 2006 and the governor signed it without FairVote spending a dime on lobbying. North Carolina groups like Common Cause, League of Women Voters and Democracy North Carolina have reviewed IRV and backed it — with the League voting overwhelmingly doing so after the experience of the 2007 pilots and all your “hate-IRV” information. The state legislature in NC rejected your views and expanded the pilot to more jurisdictions and extended it for three years.

You like to talk about Cary (NC) not using IRV this year, but seem to skip over the reality of the city’s survey in 2008 that echoed the findings of an NC State exit poll: landslide support or the IRV system they had just used. On a scale of 1 to 9, with 1 being most opposed to IRV to 9 being most in favor of IRV, 67% indicated a 7 or higher (including 51% indicating the highest level of 9) while only 7% indicated 3 or less. Furthermore, the county’s board of elections indicated its support for administering its new system, reporting that it saved more than $20,000 by avoiding a second-round runoff in one city council race.

On voting machines, I would hope you would agree that new machines should be ready to run IRV elections, as they could do so. You have fought against that in NC, however, and then bemoaned the fact that machines can’t run IRV elections as they should. Ironically, you have finally joined our call for publicly owned, public interest voting equipment — perhaps there we can find common ground as long as you will agree that this equipment should be ready to run election methods that local majorities want to use.