[Mpls] IRV will help ensure endorsement

[Greg Abbott]

Personally I'm a big supporter of IRV.  Adopted city-wide, I think it 
would have positive effects and reduce the temptation for candidates or 
their supporters to engage in negative campaigning (negative campaigns 
work because two-candidate races, like city general elections, are a 
zero-sum game, what hurts one candidate helps the other despite 
negative feelings which attach to the candidate who starts throwing the 
mud).

I don't think IRV fits in a DFL endorsing convention right now.  First, 
an endorsement requires 60 percent, not 50 percent.  It's not clear to 
me how IRV would work in a super-majority situation.  Standard IRV says 
the lowest vote getter's votes are reallocated according to preference 
until someone gets above 50 percent.  In a 60 percent situation, 
however, I could see that leading to having only 2 candidates 
remaining, one with 58 percent, the other 42 percent, for example.  At 
that point, should candidate B's votes be reallocated to see if 
candidate A can get over 60 percent?

I raise this hypothetical because under the standard rules, in a 
two-candidate race where candidate A gets to 58 percent, it is 
virtually certain that he/she gets over 60 percent on the next ballot.  
The truth of the matter is that a large majority of convention 
delegates want an endorsement and would willingly change their 
preferences in order to achieve an endorsement.  In my experience, 
getting into the high 50's quickly leads to endorsement (the rare 
exception to this IIRC was the Kress-Niziolek Ward 10 convention).  And 
IRV, as it stands now, would not permit that.  I would oppose any 
formulation of IRV for the DFL that would prevent convention delegates 
from switching their preferences to achieve an endorsement.

Secondly, there are practical matters relating to tabulation of 
ballots.  Having served several times as head teller at DFL conventions 
in the past, I understand and can quickly implement reliable, 
verifiable counting procedures under the standard rules. To be sure, 
reliable procedures to hand tabulate an IRV ballot exist, or can be 
created, but at this point neither I nor anyone else in the DFL has 
done it.  I would hate to be a candidate going through this process in 
the first place - the uncertainty and possibility for error would be 
much higher than usual.

Lastly, I suspect that the rules of the DFL would have to be amended in 
order to permit IRV (or so I've been told).  The only body with the 
authority to do that would be the City Convention (assuming -- a big if 
-- that we wouldn't have to go through the state DFL central 
committee).  A ward convention cannot amend the city DFL rules on its 
own.  This raises the specter of a DFL endorsement obtained through IRV 
being declared invalid, and having to do the convention over entirely.

In short, I think IRV is great.  I would like to see it adopted by the 
DFL.  However, adopting IRV as a short-term response to the rules 
dispute in Ward 2 is both unwise and (likely) against the existing 
rules.

What I would be willing to do is this:  I can chair a study group to 
examine IRV and propose amendments to the city rules which would permit 
use of IRV in future conventions.  Ideally, we could come up with a set 
of standard IRV rules, parallel to the existing standard rules, and 
then future conventions could adopt IRV or the old rules as they see 
fit.  We could also discuss and recommend tabulation procedures.  As a 
delegate to the city convention, I can move to amend the rules to 
conform to what the study group recommends.

I'm too far removed from Ward 2 to have a candidate preference.  The 
political scientist part of me would like Ward 2 to rush into an IRV 
situation, just to see what happens.  But the former DFL official in me 
smells a train wreck in the making.  It would bad for the DFL to 
experiment with IRV under these circumstances: at the last minute and 
under partisan pressure from assorted camps to manipulate the rules to 
their advantage.

Greg Abbott
Linden Hills


On Mar 9, 2005, at 3:36 PM, Elizabeth McCann wrote:

> Dan Miller and his campaign fully support the use of an Instant Runoff
> Voting process (IRV) to ensure a fair, accurate and efficient system to
> select a candidate for endorsement at our Ward 2 convention on April
> 9th.