All credit for this victory goes to my able counsel, Ruth Wyman of the Kirchner Law Office.

At a noon meeting of the LWV, Durl Kruse and I presented our views on the IRV concept (under severe time constraints). The meeting was recorded, and I presume it may appear on UPTV Channel 6.

Critiques invited.

Update 12/15/2007:

The official findings and decision of the Board were delivered to me this morning. The gist is:

The Board FOUND:

“That it is uncontroverted that Respondents’ petition contains a little more than half of the signatures (1,062) required by statute.”

“That Respondents’ testimony and argument are not persuasive, in that, they apparently seek to have this Board ignore the relevant and controlling state statute without providing any case law or contravening statute(s) that allows or mandates it to do so.”

The Board DECIDED:

“That because the numbers of signatures for placing a binding public question on the ballot to change the way a home-rule municipality elects its officers is set by statute and therefore, not able to be amended by this Board, it is despositive of this matter. Consequently, this Board need not decide on the Petitioner-Objector’s other objections.”

” … Therefore, the referendum question put forth in Respondents’ petition may not be placed on the February 5, 2008 ballot.”

In my opinion this is just further evidence that this referendum was put forward with very little forethought or advance research.

The argument is: The IRV petition appears to call for a “binding referendum” for a municipality. State law requires that a referendum binding the City of Urbana be supported by a petition from 10% of its registered voters (about 2,000). The petition filed by “IRV for Urbana” purports to have only 1,062 signatures. Therefore, the petition is void, and the referendum cannot be held.

Durl Kruse, leader of the IRV group, confirmed that the petition did call for a binding referendum. Mr. Kruse stated that Mark Shelden had assisted him in the preparation of the petition and had suggested the lower signature requirement. Mr. Shelden acknowledged making that suggestion, but testified that he had also advised Mr. Kruse to check everything with the State Board of Elections. Mr. Kruse said he had sought other counsel instead before filing the petition.

The hearing was recessed until next Tuesday 10 a.m. Thursday 12/13.

Yes, Thomas Hare proposed a “Single Transferable Vote” (STV) system in the 19th century to elect members of parliament. I assume it was used that way at Colorado, to elect members of student government? I’m not surprised that college students would quickly learn how to game STV and skew the results, as you observed.

“Instant Runoff Voting” (IRV) today is essentially STV employed to elect a single winner. It might better be called “Instant Sequential Runoff Voting” to distinguish it from the traditional (plurality) Runoff Voting used to pare down a long list of candidates before asking the voters to make their final selection. That method trims several candidates at once from the bottom of the list; “IRV for Urbana” trims them sequentially from the bottom of the top. Another difference: Runoff Voting gives voters time to re-evaluate the reduced list before the final vote is taken. To save money, the IRV computer will be programmed to transfer your vote “instantly” to as many less desired candidates as required to both trim the list and produce the winner in one fell swoop.

PS: An “Instant Runoff” may not produce timely results, but that’s another story.

What happens if after the “instant” run-off, still no candidate gets 50% plus 1? The ballot question doesn’t address that. What really gets me is that in a 4-way race, we could have a result where the winning candidate was the third choice for many of the people who are recorded as voting for him/her. This would happen if most of the voters who chose the 3rd or 4th place candidate chose the other 3rd or 4th place candidate as their second choice. How can any honest person claim that an elected official has majority support when the candidate was the third choice of perhaps half the voters who “elected” him/her? If these 3rd choice votes put the second runner-up ahead of the one candidate of the four who received the most votes on the first “ballot”, I would call instant run-off “instant rip-off.” It certainly is not closer to real democracy than we have now.