Our friends at the Minnesota Voters Alliance – including regular NARN guest Andy Cilek – have taken the first step in their battle to try to stop the Instant Runoff Voting juggernaut, which has already absorbed Minneapolis and threatens Saint Paul.
A group called the Minnesota Voters Alliance filed suit Thursday in Hennepin County District Court seeking to keep instant-runoff voting from starting up in Minneapolis.
The group’s lawyer, Erick Kaardal, cited an opinion from Attorney General Lori Swanson saying the system of ranking candidates by preference probably isn’t permitted by the state Constitution. That opinion, issued this year, stopped short of calling the system unconstitutional.
Kaardal also referenced a 1915 state Supreme Court case that struck down a Duluth system that ranked candidates.
All the best to the Minnesota Voters Alliance.
I have objections to Instant Runoff, too. But they’re not personal; it’s just business.
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Background: I analyze systems – software, hardware, processes, print publications, what have you – to empirically determine how *usable* they are.
And speaking not as a partisan, but as a professional whose entire line of work involves figuring how to make things easier for real people to use, there’s a truism at work whenever people design systems; the designer *always* thinks he/she has designed something
so intuitive that someone’d have to be an idiot not to be able to figure out how to do it. It’s true for programmers writing websites, for executives designing processes for other people, for engineers building freeway ramps, for architects designing public spaces; *everyone* designs things to be blazingly intuitive – to other programmers, executives, engineers or architects.
And when those programmers, managers and engineers watch real people in controlled usability tests actually trying to do real-world things with those websites, processes, ramps and spaces, and making mistakes and doing things they were not intended to to, they tend to have one of the following reactions:
- “Nobody’s that stupid!” But it’s not usually a matter of stupidity. It’s human nature – especially if that human is not a programmer, executive, engineer or architect.
- “It’ll never happen in real life!” But it just did!
- “Wow. Who knew? We gotta redesign this!” These are the good ones…
Allowing that everyone who’s stumping for IRV expresses it via rose-colored glasses (that, too, is human nature), I can see several places where confusion is potentially built into the system.
Allow me to walk through a fairly simple conundrum that faces usability people and, by the way, real people using real systems, drawn not from political ideology (of ANY sort!), but from the experience of someone who has had to ask these questions of programmers, executives and engineers for a living for the past decade:
IRV proponents respond “but it’s simple! You just rank your preferences!”
So when “simply” ranking, say, five candidates from top to bottom, do you number them 1-5, or 5-1?
Remember – in many Asian cultures, 1 is “better” than 5, while many people think bigger numbers are “better” than smaller numbers (like a hockey score).
And if you answer “that’ll be explained in the instructions”, please bear in mind that people – REAL people – tend not to read instructional writing, and retain even less for any amount of time. So – how do you make sure everyone gets the directions the same way? Verbal instructions from poll staff? (Mightn’t those be potentially legally-problematic?)
Will people be able to cast “Tie” votes if they have no preference? Rank everyone “1” (or “5”), or rank five candidates “1,2,2,2,3” or “1,1,3,3,5?”? (If you don’t think people will try, think again!) What’ll happen to the ballots if people try to do that? More importantly, how will people KNOW the consequences of trying that, whatever they are, and whether it’s OK or (emphatically) not?
On what medium do they cast their vote – a paper ballot? Marked with what? Pencil? If they change their mind before submitting the ballot, how are changes made? Erasing numbers? How does one know, for audit purposes, WHO erased the number, then? What if they do a poor job of erasing (with older people with arthritic hands, this is not uncommon); how are ambiguities caused by poor erasing and faint handwriting resolved? How about people who don’t erase, but scribble or overwrite? And let’s not forget that immigrants frequently write numbers differently than Americans do; I run into this myself, since I usually use German numbering, and sometimes people read my “1”s as “7”s, and my “7s” as “4”s (I cross my 7s, European-style); how are these ambiguities to be resolved? And if the answer is “by telling immigrants to make sure they use American numbers”, do you realize the problems you’ll run into?
Indeed, how are the votes of the handicapped to be tallied? How would someone with, say, arthritic hands vote? (I won’t even ask the obvious question about voting for the blind; I’ll have to assume SOMEONE’s on top of that one).
And none of this even touches on the issue of “how the ballots are designed”. And that is a huge issue. Remember – whomever designed the infamous Broward County Butterfly Ballot thought they had a perfectly workable, usable design!
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Bear in mind that NONE of the issues I raised above is, in my decade’s experience as a usability geek, outlandish, or even especially far-fetched; certainly none of them are remotely political. These are the sorts of issues someone in my field EXPECTS to see when ANY new system intersects with new users. Smart system owners run usability tests before their system “goes live”, and fix the issues they encounter. Dumb ones…well, thank goodness for them, since usability disasters keep me employed.
I’d be very interested in seeing a real, live, end-to-end, empirical test of an IRV system and all of its components – the ranking system, the ballot and media, the counting process, the system of explaining the process to new voters in various languages – and seeing how it REALLY works in a reasonably-complex, contested polling. (I say “contested” for a reason, by the way; IRV seems to have only been tried in locales with relatively monobloc politics, from what I’ve seen. Without trying to judge the politics themselves, professionally speaking, that’s not necessarily a thorough workout).
In first past the post – single member district plurality systems, it’s possible for the majority of voters to vote for one party, but have another party win the majority of seats.
That seems unfair.
The important thing to remember is that every electoral system can produce results that are arguably different from what the voters intended.
That’s not every system we know of, but every system that can theoretically be described, inherently, can produce results that don’t, in some way, reflect the apparent wishes of the majority.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_different_voting_systems_under_similar_circumstances
a question — does the irv apply to all races on the ballot (president thru city park commissioner) or just the local races(necessitating 2 ballots with different rules)?
“…please bear in mind that people – REAL people – tend not to read instructional writing, and retain even less for any amount of time.”
And in scatterbrains like myself, the 1-5 or 5-1 thing will stick in my mind just long enough for me to start reading the names on the ballot, then I’ll have to go back and reread. Kind of a tough loop to break out of sometimes. (And no angryclown and peev, despite some appearances I’m not an idiot and I read pretty well; it’s just that the two settings have the exact same value in my mind, and they are so easily interchanged that it happens really quickly.)
Mitch, I have to say, I love seeing how people who basically figure out how to break things for a living think.
“IRV seems to have only been tried in locales with relatively monobloc politics…”
That would make sense, since the only case where IRV makes the least bit of sense to me is when the candidates are all so similar that the noise in the system is high enough to create a near-tie between more than two candidates.
I agree with Mitch that IRV can be confusing. That said, I’m elitist enough to think that a voting system that implicitly gives more power to people who can reason more clearly is, all in all, a good thing.
In terms of breaking the DFL stranglehold on the Minneapolis City Council, I think it’s the best shot that we’ve got.
What are the proponents of IRV really up to? Look at who’s been pushing it.
The Greenie puke party. The party of Zimmerman the Jailed, a man who used his position to extort money out of a developer for his personal enrichment.
The Greenies want people to make people more confortable voting for idiot candidates (Greenies) who’s political positions are based on enviro-communism. The only place they win is in Minneapolis, which says more about the stupidity of that city than anything else.
Dave and Joel, yes to both. The idea orginiated (at least as far as I can tell) so more fringe candidates have a chance in big elections. So if 1 Republican is running against 1 mainstream Democrat, 1 liberal ex-Democrat independent, and 1 greenie, the liberal vote split won’t be as bad for the left.
Joel, good point. In Mpls, the center-right (or even center-center) candidates are the fringe choices.
(thanks for the password reset, must write it down this time)
Mitch,
While the problems you’ve raised are real enough, they are, seemingly, also fairly easily solved, that’s one of the nice things about the nature of human ingenuity, we pretty well can solve most things, and this one isn’t a hard problem, as problems go. It’s a lot less than mapping the human genome, for instance.
Some thoughts:
First, ballots can have you punch your first choice, then your second in a new row, etc.. or mark (as is the case here). That’s just off the top of my head. You could also list the names horizontally along the left, the preference along the bottom of that particular section, and instruct them to draw a line from the appropriate X for a candidate down to the number rank of order of selection as “Win” “2nd Choice” “Third Choice” etc.. Like this
Bob +
Mitch + Y
Sally + Y z
Flash + X Y z
Peev + X Y z A
Win 2nd Third Fourth Last
That’s off the top of my head, but it solves every question you raised outside of punch ballots, which as I said above can be dealt with by allowing one punch per line only (please), punch more than one candidate, and your vote, for that position in that race, is discarded, sorry. That’s no different than voting for two candidates for the same election. I think there were complaints about stupid Florida voters when there were complaints about people who didn’t vote properly and I think some of those complaints came from Republicans, so I don’t think it’s such a reach to believe people are capable of distinguishing one choice line from another, especially over time. I don’t think such instructions are either onerous or so extensive as to confuse very many voters, they’re certainly no worse than we get right now in Minnesota in general.
IRV offers third party voters the chance to have a vote that matters if a plurality exists. Third parties offer the option and catalyst for real change. I believe most of the opposition, whether left or right, stems from a perceived threat of losing races, much more than logistical concerns about how such ballots would exist. I think assuming they’ve not dealt with the problems you’ve named is a pretty long assumption. Would there be problems, perhaps, but that’s not a reason not to do so, if we think it will result in better elections.
The basic concept of Murphy’s law – which your anecdotes describe – is that whatever can be broken, will be. But it’s not about fatalism, it’s about the fact that good designs account for and plan for, their failure points, and that even good designs should be open to continuous improvement (Kaizen). I suspect they’ve probably have thought of many of the things you’re objecting to here, doubtless not all possible problems though – but that should hardly stop progress. Ballots can, and have been adapted over time. Butterfly ballots, Diebold Machines, paper ballots, all have flaws, yet were adopted – sometimes in error. If the goal is both functional improvement, which it should be, and just general improvement in capturing the overall will of the people, then in additon to functional changes, we must be willing to seriously consider process change as well.
I’m not exactly a fan of the Greenies, but I am very much a fan of giving Minneapolis a chance to get non-DFLers on the City Council.
And, who knows? It may happen that one of them, some time, might be a moderate, or even a conservative. Under IRV, it might happen. Under the present system, the chances of a non-DFLer on the City Council are exactly equal to the chances of getting a non-Party member on the Supreme Soviet.
As an initial point, do you really want to be on the side against majority rule? Does it really make sense to have a system where majorities lose just because they happen to split their vote? Seeing that as a problem isn’t a “liberal” perspective, helping to explain why both Barack Obama and John McCain have backed IRV and lots of members of all parties in Minnesota
On usability, check out an example of a ballot design used in Cary (NC) at http://www.caryvotes123.com. Note that Cary has hotly contested elections — a Republican mayor was just defeated by a Democrat, say, and both parties are well-represented on the city council. It wasn’t at all hard for voters to do — in 96% said it was easy in a city of more than 110,000 where less than $10,000 was spent on voter education. It was all in the design.
Lots of exit polls on voter attitudes posted at:
http://www.instantrunoff.com/exitpoll.php
All possible voting systems are open to the possibility of perverse outcomes. It’s a mathematically proven fact.
FPTP can lead to perverse outcomes, yes. But IRV can also lead to perverse outcomes. So why trade one for the other?
FPTP results in two-party politics, in which each party, in order to have a chance of winning, must consist of a broad coalition. Compromise of necessity is the bread and butter of politics within each party, from the caucus level on up.
IRV results in multi-party politics, in which each party represents only a cohesive block, and the necessary compromise exists only as governments form, among the elected politicians.
It’s my belief that the former – FPTP and “big tent” political parties – has better results.
IRV is a move towards European-style Parliamentary politics – and that is _not_ a good thing.
Peev,
Most of those problems ARE solveable. I wrote it (actually, I wrote it originally in another forum) to broach questions that I didn’t think IRV supporters had really thought of.
Here’s the most damning one, and one I didn’t even touch on in my piece above; many of IRV’s most fervent advocates are the same people who oppose electronic voting, convinced that Diebold is in the bag for the GOP. So – do you really want to turn our electoral process over to an even more picayune, less transparent system?
Remember – if you’re trying to disentangle vote irregularities, IRV introduces a geometrically more-complicated calculation into elections, one that will leave much less of a trail than the current boxes of ballots.
That concerns me. I oppose electronic voting machines; since IRV will do everything electronic voting does (indeed, votes will likely have to be calculated by machine), IRV sounds like every bit as bad an idea.
Good points, Mitch.
Furthermore, this country has existed for hundreds of years on the one-man, one-vote principle. But, under IRV, some people get to vote multiple times.
What happens if I voted for, let’s say, Ron Paul. Then did not put in a second choice. I voted, but when Ru Paul is tossed out and they look for my second choice…I have none. Which means, you just disenfranchised me.
This whole idea is stupid. Which doesn’t surprise me, considering the Greenies are running this sham.
“IRV is a move towards European-style Parliamentary politics – and that is _not_ a good thing.”
As much as we bitch about it, the two party system works best for our country. Some have said the with IRV, every election will be like the California govenor election was….with many candidate, many of them not really serious, in the running.
Amen amen amen – Great engineering is simple engineering. That’s when the web took off, when it got simple enough via HTML, URL’s etc.
As for IRV itself, I’d rather have a full Primary – all candidates, the top two go to the General. That might mean DFL vs DFL in Mpls, but GOP has no chance anyway and at least we get some entertainment value watching them try to out-left each other.
IRV = complex solution to a non-problem
Please, solve the “split the vote amongst interchangable candidates” problem with primaries, or admit you candidates are actually different flavors of crazy.
Commenting on a DS is tough!
AH,yes.Perhaps a real world example of people who DON’T read instructions: anyone remember hanging, pregnant and dimpled chads? Even though the voting instructions were very clear and prominent to check the ballot over before submitting it, and the designer of the infamous “butterfly ballot”was a Dem. Yup, lefties are just idiots and devious on both ends of the ballot.
Valid questions, Mitch. I don’t know how seriously they are being taken, but usability design should receive attention from the SoS office. I was a member of an American Institute of Graphic Arts group that offered Mary Kiffmeyer help in assessing Minnesota’s ballot design after the 2000 fiasco in Florida. She had zero interest because she perceived we didn’t have a problem.
Maybe Rybak and Ritchie will be receptive since IRV will require a new ballot.
Charlie,
I’d be interested in hearing more about the 2000 effort. I wasn’t aware that there was a huge usability issue with Minnesota’s ballots back then (unless there are different ballouts outstate; we use the optical counters in Saint Paul).
The Broward ballot was, of course, a mess; I was teaching Web Writing and Design at Metro back then , and we did a review of the Broward ballot; it had, obviously, tons of problems.
http://www.mngun.com/post/ballot.png
That’s not significantly different than the fill-in-the-ovals ballot we currently use in much of the state. It has no more than the same limitations of that format, recognized as the golds standard for simple, relatively idiot-proof, human-countable balloting methods.