For much of the past ten years, proponents of Instant Runoff Voting (IRV) have pointed to a short list of cities that have adopted the system for their elections.\u00a0 These included four cities of any real size.\u00a0 San Francisco uses it for its city assembly elections; Tacoma Washington and a few other smaller cities (up until Minneapolis and Saint Paul adopted it in the past two elections).<\/p>\n
I observed at the time that IRV seemed to work, sort of, in places with pretty monochrome politics, where elections were usually one-party blowouts with very little chance of needing <\/em>IRV’s byzantine choice-ranking process, its lack of a paper trail, and its turning over of the counting process to an opaque, “black box” algorithm that is utterly unaccountable to people outside the election process.\u00a0 Places like, well, San Francisco and Tacoma Washington and Minneapolis and Saint Paul; hopeless one-party liberal cesspools.<\/p>\n I also observed, at some length, that I had plenty of vocational, non-partisan issues<\/a> with IRV from my background as a usability guy.\u00a0 I’m hoping to download a ballot from the Minneapolis election sometime today and start taking a formal whack at that <\/em>angle (although I suspect the worst parts of the process lie behind the scenes).<\/p>\n