finalgirldom:

May 09, 2011 
The Honorable Nichi S. Farnham
Committee on Veterans and Legal Affairs
100 State House Station
Augusta, ME 04333

Re: Support of LD 1126: “An Act To Require That the Governor Be Elected by the Ranked-choice Voting Method”

Madam Chairwoman and Members of the Committee:

As a citizen and a former independent (un-enrolled) candidate for the Maine State Legislature, I wish to express my support for LD 1126.

Municipalities and governments that have implemented Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) have expressed satisfaction with how the process has led to an increase in cooperation among candidates during election seasons, citizen participation in elections, and the seriousness with which candidates address issues. Equal amounts of satisfaction have been expressed for how the system has helped to reduce the frequency of negative campaigning and mud slinging, as candidates who must also rely on being the second and third choice of their opponents can’t afford to reduce their campaign narratives to a series of nasty, off-topic, Ad hominem attacks that distract from a constructive, issues-specific dialog. 

For these reasons alone, it is no wonder RCV enjoys support from the left and the right. Both President Obama and Sen. John McCain have expressed support for the system in the past.

If these facts have somehow not provided reason enough for the support of this system, implementation of RCV in Maine would honor the state’s independent political class. Independents represent a third of Maine voters. Independent candidates, some of whom have proven to be more viable than party candidates, are, regardless of their viability, regarded as second class by the assignment of the “spoiler” stigma. RCV would remove said stigma by eliminating the “winner take-all” voting model we have, to this point, settled with.
 
As I am sure that many of my colleagues and fellow supporters will express the need for a system from the standpoint of the underrepresented constituent (also a fundamental reason for supporting RCV), I will stick to encouraging you to support this system to enrich the dialog, help to keep campaigns issue-focused, so that it acknowledges and better accommodates Maine’s independent voters.

So many thanks for your consideration,

Alex Steed
Cornish, Maine

It takes a lot of energy to recognize the voting system as an issue and to look at alternative methods. But I would urge you to reconsider your support for IRV as an alternative single-winner method.

Our traditional Vote-for-one/Plurality/FPTP is no good. That’s obvious. You can’t vote your favorite, it’s extremely inexpressive, votes split between similar candidates, and minority candidates don’t get an accurate reflection of their support so that they’re marginalized. Plurality’s simplicity and familiarity are the only positives this turd of a system has going for it.

Now IRV. At first glance, it looks pretty nice. (I had my brief love affair with it at one time as well.) So the perks: more expressive, strongly resistant against fringe spoilers.

The other claims are really without a basis, though organizations like FairVote repeat them anyway. Voters have repealed IRV in numerous cities including Burlington, VT; Cary, NC; Pierce County, WA; Aspen, CO; and Ann Arbor, MI. I’ll grant you that voters repealing IRV isn’t a hard case alone. Many times these campaigns against IRV focused on falsehoods like violating one-person-one-vote. That’s not true. Anyone who actually read the Reynolds v. Sims case would know what one-person-one-vote actually means (it refers to weight of votes, not expression).

Here’s the more critical look. IRV splits first choice preferences the same way Plurality splits votes in general. IRV eliminates those with less first choice preferences, so this eliminates good candidates. This can easily eliminate the Condorcet winner as well (the candidate who can beat all others in head-to-head matchups, the beat-all winner). You can see this visualized here. IRV also encourages voters to betray their favorite. See here. So while IRV may reasonably handle fringe spoilers, it does a bad job of handling multiple competitive candidates.

Further, IRV is nonmonotonic. This means that in an IRV election, you can hurt your preference by rating her higher and help a preference by rating her lower. This occurs about one in seven elections. This has happened in several elections when the ballots were made available, including Burlington, VT. This is so embarrassing that the main US IRV promoter, FairVote executive director, stated that he thought IRV ballots shouldn’t be released. He thought candidates should “move on.”

Also, IRV is hard to count. You’d think we’d get good at having computers do this, but somehow we still screw it up. Handcounts are possible but also difficult.

So now what, you ask? How should you elect your Governor? I would strongly recommend Approval Voting. It’s a simple method. It’s just like Plurality except you can vote for as many candidates as you want. There’s no ranking. Add ‘em up. Most votes wins.

Perks:

• More expressive
• No vote splitting or spoilers, ever
• Always vote your honest favorite
• Significantly less spoiled ballots
• Results are easy to understand, just like Plurality
• Ballots are familiar to voters and look essentially the same as Plurality
• Alternate candidates get a more accurate measure of support

Approval Voting is also very good at electing a Condorcet Winner.

You can find a lot of great information on Approval Voting here.

I hope that helps your search to find a more suitable method for electing your governor.