IRV gives Third Parties an unproportional amount of political power Here’s an example of IRV at work that helps shed light on why minority parties are so crazy about this and why majority parties are not. First, select the correct answer from the following four choices:

A Democratic Republic containing 100 million voters holds a presidential election in which there are three candidates. The two most popular candidates can each garner 48% of the vote. The third party candidate controls 2.5% of the vote, and the other 1.5% is up for grabs.

The $60k question is: How many people will get to determine the outcome of this election?

1. Just over 48 Million?
2. 2.5 Million?
3. 1.5 Million?
4. 1?

Because the third party candidate controls a solid block of swing votes in the election, the IRV process has put him in the enviable position of Kingmaker and the correct answer is of course D. He alone will go to both of the deadlocked candidates and negotiate the terms of his support for them. Depending on which candidate accedes to his agenda/demands most satisfactorily, he will announce who he supports to his supporters and they will vote accordingly for that candidate to be the #2 choice on their IRV ballots on election day.

“With widespread adoption of instant-runoff voting, progressive third parties would have the opportunity to grow and gain influence without the adverse effect of throwing elections to the GOP.” Eric C. Olson National IRV Proponent

IRV gives rise to Vote-Brokering Note that “the process” has really determined who makes this decision since no voters are actually involved in this phase of IRV. Additionally, the arrangement may or may not be in anyone’s best interest other than the third party candidate’s because there’s no way to tell what went on in the negotiating session. In fact, a political agenda supported by only 2.5% of the electorate may now be thrust on the other 97.5%, just because of IRV. Imagine the possible consequences.

No matter how you look at it, IRV means that in a close election, the voters are essentially turning their votes over to vote-brokers who negotiate each vote’s final resting place. IRV does not produce a majority winner unless you mean a winner that a majority of the candidates have chosen. What does IRV really mean? Well, to the grassroots people it means Involuntarily Reassigned Voting: A system as good as the name sounds.

“Instant Runoff will end the wasted-vote and spoiler syndromes that keep third parties down, and multiply their chances of victory.” Nathaniel Krause Midwest Democracy Center

IRV Creates Leadership Vacuums What is the impact of a voting system that encourages multiple people (Australia has DOZENS of people running for every office) to run for a high profile office? Take the 2nd Cong. District for example, if everyone runs for 2nd District, who is going to run for State or County positions? .i.e… If our 30 best and brightest are all running for 2nd Congressional because it gives them more exposure (and believe me, there is future political capital bought by running for a high profile office) and they’re not “splitting the vote,” who does that leave us with for State and County candidates?

IRV panders to delegates with “Fast-Food Balloting” Promoters of IRV laud the voting method’s ability to “capture” as many voters as possible before they go home. When the Founders created the constitution, it took them days on end of meetings to do it. No one went home. They stayed until it was done. Are we to throw in the towel now on our present system of voting in deference to people who care so little about our political system that they can’t spend an extra hour or two once a year to make it work? The fact of the matter is this: The people who stick around are the ones who make the party work. They’re the ones who volunteer for mailings, campaigns, committees, phone-trees, fund-raising, meetings, get-out-the-vote etc. If we’re going to adopt a form of fast food balloting to pander to superficial delegates who don’t have the time to do their job, what message are we sending to the public at large? How can that possibly benefit the party long term?!?

IRV has NO national conservative or mainstream party support A quick review of the sites and information bits around the Internet reveals that neither the Democratic Party nor the Republican Party endorses IRV anywhere. If it is such a panacea for the voters, how could this be possible? There are two reasons. The first is that both parties know that with IRV, they lose control of the political landscape. Dozens, even hundreds of candidates could register for each position (it happens in Australia), causing any coherent message or candidate to be obscured in the blizzard of information (in Australia, the voters are confronted by dozens of people handing them IRV voting guides as they approach the voting booths, with each guide showing how to vote but never explaining why). The second reason is that IRV accords third parties an inordinate amount of political power, especially in close elections. Right now, the major parties know what the rules are and they know how to play the game that has been in place for over 200 years. Third parties currently must support a mainstream party and try to further their agenda within the confines of that party. That prevents them from inflicting their activist agenda on the public at large. With IRV, 100% of the public can be saddled with 100% of the political agenda of a third party with the support of as little as 1% of the electorate. Thankfully, the major parties insulate us from this at the moment.

Additionally, the conservatives believe the system we have inherited is important and worth preserving. After all, it got us where we are today. So they tend to shy away from something that might create change, especially wholesale change whose effects cannot be predicted. They also don’t support IRV because the groups who do support it acknowledge their goals are to eliminate the Electoral College and give third parties more power. Several of the pro-IRV sites on the web go into why this is in detail, and it’s probably enough to help convince the conservatives that what we have is at least predictable, if not a majority rule system.

IRV has unknown long-term political consequences None of the proponents of IRV has described what the long-term consequences of adopting this form of voting are. Why is that? The reason is that they don’t know. Some proponents say it will help reduce the two-party system. Australia has had IRV for over 70 years and they still have the same two-party system so that’s not true. Australia is often used as an example of how “great” IRV works. Well, voting in an election is REQUIRED BY LAW in Australia and you have to vote FOR EVERY CANDIDATE so we’re not talking apples and apples with our form of voting no matter what anyone says because they never have low voter turnouts. Other proponents say it lets the voters choose candidates in the order they prefer them. With dozens of candidates running, how many voters know enough about them to rank them in any intelligent order? In the 2002 2nd Congressional District convention elections, almost all of the ballots had every single candidate named on them. How likely is it that all those delegates knew enough about all 12 candidates to make an informed choice on all of them? Not very, so that’s not true either. The fact of the matter is that with IRV, you get a big question mark when the impact to the form of government we have now is discussed. In this case, is it prudent to adopt it?

“We indulge in conscious efforts to tear down the two-party system only at our peril, since we cannot predict with any confidence what the character and structure of American politics would be like without it.” Michael Quaid http://www.vermontgop.org/quaid_irv.shtml

IRV discriminates against the Elderly, Minorities, and the Uneducated A review of elections in Australia found that the error rate is always very high when compared to any of the other developed democracies but particularly high in provinces with a high percentage of Elderly, non-English speaking, or uneducated voters. Some areas reported spoiled ballot rates as high as 7%.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/1644898.stm

IRV may violate the ‘one-man-one-vote principle’ In a recent election on whether to adopt IRV in Alaska, one of the main points of concern was whether this form of voting violated the ‘one-man-one-vote principle’ established by the U.S. Supreme Court. IRV was soundly defeated in Alaska in part because this issue was not clearly resolved.

IRV is too complex and expensive for our present voting infrastructure The millions of dollars currently being spent on voting equipment (computers, machines, software etc.) would have to be re-spent to accommodate an election system that now allowed or even encouraged dozens of candidates/parties for each elected position. Millions more would have to be spent training voters, candidates and parties on the idiosyncrasies of IRV and it would have to be ongoing to keep the error rate down to an acceptable level. In effect, IRV would guarantee Florida-type elections in multiple states every time an election was held.

IRV will decrease voter turnout Preferential voting would decrease the voter turnout due to the complexity of the process. Historically, statistics show that when the voting process is complicated, voter turnout decreases.

Australian Press report: “The Senate ballot paper in Australia can be extremely large and the chances of making a mistake in numbering it are great. However not all informal (incorrect) votes are deliberate, and it may be that those which present a prima facia case of deliberate informal voting are in fact a result of frustration and inability to understand a complex voting system.”

IRV promotes Lackluster candidates IRV promotes boring, consensus candidates. The general public’s main complaint about politics is with this type of elected official. As a party promoting individual responsibility, the GOP should be promoting candidates that stand up for what they believe is right and correct for the public rather than those candidates who will do and say anything to get elected. IRV discourages firebrand candidates because this type of candidate typically generates the most first place and last place votes, while the Go-Along-to-Get-Along candidate can easily get elected by being the 2nd or 3rd choices of many voters just because they “don’t really have anything against the candidate” since the candidate has no clear position/stance on any particular issue.

IRV avails itself to election manipulation By strategically placing candidates in a certain order, popular candidates can be defeated even though they would have normally won an IRV election. As evidence of this, Australian voters approaching voting booths are bombarded with dozens of voting pamphlets telling them exactly which order to vote in, rather than with candidate campaign material. Obviously, those handing out the material understand why the order is important and the voters do not.

IRV avails itself to other interesting strategies. In this case suppose one of the popular candidates, through a healthy grassroots effort, is able to inch ahead of the other by 49.5% to 46.5%. What can be done to influence the outcome of this election? Well, 96% of the vote is tied up and it would appear that all is lost to the most popular candidate since he is out of reach even when taking the third party 2.5% into account. However, the third party could now be very motivated to support the 46.5% underdog since he would obviously be in the market to make significant concessions to them to get their support. Then, with a two-pronged media campaign against the leading candidate and/or his party, and in support of the lagging candidate, the third party might be able to sway just enough of the uncommitted voters to their side to provide the margin needed to win this close election. Think of it, an election won by people whose only political actions involve either campaigning for an opponent or campaigning against an opponent of an opponent. To win, they do not campaign for their own candidate or engage in any other “normal” campaign activity. Their whole intent being to game the system to promote a minority agenda!

Quote from Australian press article: “The merits of the system are still debated by Australians, especially by those who don’t like to see a minor party or independent holding the balance of power in the Senate as a result of proportional representation.”

IRV goes against our Parliamentary Authority Robert’s Rules of Order pp. 414 line 3: “The system of preferential voting just described should not be used in cases where it is possible to follow the normal procedure of repeated balloting until one candidate or proposition attains a majority.”

Line 7: “it affords less freedom of choice than repeated balloting, because it denies the voters the opportunity of basing their second choices on the results of earlier ballots”

IRV Balloting can result in Deadlocks Deadlock Scenario: 100 voters, five candidates, each candidate gets 20 votes (or any similar combination of candidates/voters).

Multiple ballot (any kind) - The candidates get to speak again and create coalitions to reduce the field. A few voters may leave, creating a new voter dynamic and thereby facilitating a reduction of the field even more.

IRV - The voters have all gone home because they know the main selling point of IRV is that it lets them “vote and run”. The field is deadlocked because no one is eliminated and no one can become a consensus candidate. Few voters are left so the election is called off if there is a quorum requirement and planned again for a special meeting or continued until the next meeting or, if there is no quorum requirement, the voting is done again by the remaining voters (the candidates, their poll watchers and the election committee). Since the candidates and their poll watchers will vote along candidate lines, the victor will be determined by the election committee, which has to stick around until the end of the election. A final note – using IRV can cause a deadlock at ANY stage of the voting process. So, the more candidates you have, the greater the odds of a deadlock since there will be more rounds of voting as candidates get eliminated.

IRV Balloting guarantees computer voting If there is a technical question, or challenge to an election using IRV, the more candidates there are, the more impossible it is to verify the election results are accurate since only a computer can verify an election using IRV with dozens or hundreds of candidates across an entire state (i.e. the Governor’s race in California). On the other hand, a single ballot, plurality-voting method is easy and inexpensive to verify and it is much easier to detect fraud using this type of balloting method. The inherent complexity of IRV makes running the election difficult and fraud detection without computers impossible as the number of ballots increases.

Example of how to verify a 150-candidate IRV election (per Robert’s) with 10 million voters:

Take 10 million votes and put them in 150 different piles, according to the names of all first place ballot choices (an average of 66,667 each). When finished, take the ballots from the candidate table with the fewest first place choices and distribute them according to their second place choices. Each table would then have an average of 67,114 each. Do this 147 more times or until a candidate has a majority or the remaining ballots (or primary-determined threshold) and by-the-way, you are increasing the ballot total each time by about 10% (on average) until you are sorting millions of ballots in each iteration near the end. The odds of making a mistake are so great that only a machine could do it right, assuming it was programmed correctly of course…

IRV promoters pretend that leaving an election is not voting Robert’s Rules of Order discusses the “Right of Abstention” on p.394. People who have left an election may in fact be voting to abstain, since their candidate may have been eliminated and they no longer care who wins. IRV promoters ignore this fact and instead provide IRV as a cure for an ailment that may not exist. If you want the voters to stick around you give them something worth staying for, you don’t provide a balloting band-aid that artificially increases vote totals.

Dana Dickson, R.P. is the President of the Utah State Association of Parliamentarians