If there’s one thing that encourages me, it’s that people on both sides of the aisle are working against “Instant Runoff Voting”, which is going to get its first, sure-to-be-disastrous workout in Minneapolis’ next election.  There are elements in Saint Paul that also wat to institute “IRV” in Minnesota’s capitol city.

Of course, the NARN has has spoken with Andy Cilek of the Minnesota Voters Alliance for many years now.  The MVA states a pretty convincing case; IRV is a lousy idea.

And if you need to be convinced, still?  There’s opposition on the left as well.  It was my pleasure to interview one of my longtime political sparring partners, Chuck Repke of Saint Paul, yesterday on the NARN.  Chuck is with No Bad Ballots.  He and I disagree on just about every subject imaginable – and I imagine it’s at least mutual between Repke and Cilek.

But IRV is such a terrible idea, it’s hard to even know where to start.

• While proponents say it’ll result in elections with true majorities, it’s patent rubbish; the experience in San Francisco shows that in the end, after all the “spoiled” ballots (ballots whose ranked choices never wind up including one of the finalists), the “Majority” can be south of 40% of voters.
• For all the lefties who were caterwauling about the evils of electronic voting machines between 2000 and 2006, it’ll be comforting to know that IRV counting machines will use a highly complex algorithm, leave no paper trail, centralize all vote counting (and thus make skullduggery that much easier to conceal) and rely entirely on the integrity of the vote-counting authorities.
• Oh, yeah – the machines don’t exist yet, so the Minneapolis election will be hand-counted, and not be certifiably until December.
• And as a usability guy, the just plain usability issues involved with the ballots and the procedure for filling them out are – I’ll be diplomatic – mind-boggling.

I don’t care what  side you’re on.  IRV is just plain stupid, and needs to be gassed.  Three of the cities that adopted it with much fanfare over the past decade – including Tacoma Washington – are dropping it with extreme prejudice.

Let’s be done with this lunacy.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Sunday, October 25th, 2009 at 1:49 pm and is filed under Geekery, St. Paul. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.