Discover Politics

by Andy Cilek, Minnesota Voters Alliance
www.MNvoters.org

It’s being billed as a “new” idea in elections that will save Democracy. Its advocates vociferously declare its ability to empower voters, provide more choices and make elections fair. So what is this “new” idea that will bring “fairness” to our elections?

It’s a preferential voting system called Instant Runoff Voting (IRV). This “new” system has been around over one hundred years. It comes in various forms, but it is merely a vote-ranking system in which voters rank candidates in order of preference rather than picking just one. If no candidate gets more than 50% of first choices, the candidate with the least first choice votes is eliminated and the secondary choices from those ballots are transferred to the remaining candidates, and a new count is tallied. This process is repeated until a winner emerges.

The people pushing this idea are generally Left of Center activists, primarily “FairVote Minnesota,” and others who are upset with the so-called “third party spoiler effect.” The real objection is that minor candidates draw votes from favored candidates – such as Ralph Nader siphoning votes from John Kerry. But Ralph Nader, Ross Perot, or anyone else, has a right to run for office, and the so-called “spoiler effect” is a legitimate form of political speech, known as a “protest vote,” which voters have a constitutional right to use in expressing their will.

The “majority” issue is a major bugaboo for the pro-IRV crowd, but it’s completely unfounded. A plurality winner, i.e. a candidate with less than 50% of the vote but more votes than anyone else, is perfectly acceptable in a representative constitutional republic. After all, we are not electing dictators. In fact, the tendency for majorities to tyrannize the minority is a primary reason our Founders specifically avoided creating a majority-rule Democracy.

The fact of the matter is that IRV does not create a true majority winner anyway simply because the exhausted ballots are not counted in the denominator in the final round. This means that the final percentage total does not represent all the voters, so any claims of a majority winner are false and misleading.

IRV advocates tout its many supposed advantages, such as the claim that it will reduce election costs by eliminating primaries. Ramsey County elections manager Joe Mansky has repeatedly stated that IRV will be no less expensive than the current system, and possibly more expensive. And the logistics of counts, recounts and more recounts will lead to chaos, confusion and an erosion of voter interest, as has already happened in San Francisco. In Pierce County Washington, a recent IRV election saw election costs double.

Proponents also claim IRV will invigorate debate. Yet by eliminating primaries, IRV actually shuts off debate. The current mayoral race in Minneapolis hasn’t even had one debate yet and we are just a couple days away from the election. Also, the confusing array of multiple candidates will reduce elections to popularity contests in which issues are virtually irrelevant.

If FairVote they truly cared about debate, would FairVote have bragged in their 501c3 documentation: “neutralizing any opposition: By getting out early… we headed off criticism of the system…?” Apparently they hope to implement their scheme without having to debate it.

They probably wanted to “head off criticism” because they knew preferential voting has already been ruled unconstitutional by the Minnesota Supreme Court and wasn’t working out to well in other cities. They claim the 1915 Brown v. Smallwood ruling doesn’t apply because it was specific to the Bucklin Method, the method in question at the time. This argument won’t wash in our As Applied legal challenge in December.

The 1915 Court did NOT specify any particular method, but rather said, “The preferential system directly diminishes the right of an elector to give an effective vote for the candidate of his choice.”

In the upcoming 11th Ward Minneapolis City Council race, there are three candidates listed on the ballot along with their party designation. There are two democrats and one republican. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that someone is will be getting the short end of the stick here. Some voters will clearly be disenfranchised. This is one example of what the court meant by being able to cast an ‘effective’ vote. It will also prove to be a good equal protection argument.

But IRV’s deadliest flaw is that the effect of one voters’ ranking order is altered by the ranking orders of other voters in an unknown and unknowable way. Voters can even hurt their favorite candidate just by ranking them first. This is known as the
‘nonmonotonicity’ paradox.

In Aspen, Colorado, a candidate in a recent City Council election, Michael
Behrendt, would have won if 71 to 79 of his supporters had ranked him second instead of first. This is now referred to as the “Michael Behrendt effect,” which clearly demonstrates that in IRV a voter can unknowingly harm his own cause by ranking his preferred candidate first. That is a perversion of democracy.

In IRV the only way to know for sure you are helping your favored candidate is if you know how everyone else ranked their ballots, and use a computer to figure out how you should rank yours. Otherwise you are voting blind. This is disenfranchisement in its truest form.

Claims about majority winners and cost savings are deceptive and irrelevant. It is the vote as cast by the individual voter that is at stake. And because voters in IRV can’t know their vote will have its intended effect, it is meaningless to them, and any outcome from such a system is also meaningless.

As the 1915 Court stated, “… when a voter votes for the candidate of his choice, his vote must be counted one, and it cannot be defeated or its effect lessened, except by the vote of another elector voting for one.” IRV violates this defining democratic principle.

The Court also said the Constitution implicitly forbids any elector to cast more than a “single expression of opinion or choice.” Proponents argue that IRV passes this test because of the multiple votes cast, only one is actually counted – the one applied to the voter’s highest preferred candidate eligible to receive it – utterly laughable rhetorical trickery! The issue is NOT how votes are counted, transferred or otherwise manipulated, but how many votes (choices) each voter may cast. Since IRV allows voters to rank multiple candidates, it also shares this fatal flaw.”

Preferential voting violates the principles of representative constitutional government. In any form, it is an undemocratic and unconstitutional scheme which, if successfully foisted upon an unsuspecting public, will minimize the power of the voters by diluting their votes and removing them further from the electoral process.

St. Paul voters should fully investigate IRV and not simply accept the word of self-interested activist groups and politicians, especially when they misrepresent the facts in promoting their scheme. We believe that once IRV is fully understood, the people and the courts will ultimately reject it.

It must be noted also that prior to IRV being placed on the 2006 MPLS ballot, City Attorney Burt Osborne warned against placing IRV on the ballot citing the Brown decision. Sadly, the City Council and Mayor failed to heed this warning and pushed it through anyway which will turn out to be a huge mistake.