IRV Really Will Save! You! Money!

2012 Approval Voting results in an experiment with a heavily Democratic district in Michigan.

With apologies to a much younger Jim McIngvale for the title (and to those who could never stand his commercials), this entry in inspired by PDiddie's most recent post on an entirely different topic, in which he tangentially links to an Atlantic article about Ranked Choice Voting in Maine (to which I may have linked recently as well).

PD lives and votes in Houston's Council District K, one of the two districts birthed by the 2010 census, when Houston's population count breached two million and a provision in the city's charter kicked in. As we have discussed previously, K's thus far only council member Larry Green died suddenly last month, forcing a special election to fill his seat through 2019. Nine candidates queued up to take his place, including Martha Castex-Tatum (note: paywall), who had worked as his constituent liaison.

When a Council seat is vacated by death, retirement, term limits, or a member seeking higher office, here in Houston we just expect a whole crowd of hats in the ring. (I haven't really looked, but I'm sure it happens in other cities as well.) The more candidates, the less likely any candidate will receive a majority, and thus the more likely a runoff election will be required. This is especially true when there are two or more well-known candidates in the race.

​Check it out, though: Castex-Tatum won handily. There will be no runoff this time​. This is the exception to the rule.

Note another key figure at the top of the page: Turnout for the special election was measured at less than 6%. That's fairly typical for special, non-primary or non-November elections around here. A runoff between the top two vote-getters probably would have drawn 3% of the registered voters.

The city spent quite a wad to staff the regular polling places on 5 May, as well as the three early voting locations in the week prior, so that about 5,000 residents could cast their votes. A runoff would have doubled that cost, for maybe 2,500 voters. While I'm for democracy at whatever cost, I'm also in favor of trimming those costs where such trimming does not inhibit democracy. It will happen again in the 2019 election for mayor, controller, and several of the 16 City Council seats.

Hence, I favor introducing some form of Instant Runoff Voting in Houston.

Or, to put it another way...

OMFG, HOUSTON! WHY CAN'T YOU GET SOME BLOODY SENSE AND IMPLEMENT IRV IN YOUR MUNICIPAL ELECTIONS? WHYYYYY?????

Nobody likes runoffs—except maybe campaign consultants. Let's eliminate those horrid squanderings of time and democracy. The runoff elections, that is, although the campaign consultants should probably go away too.

Among Texas Greens, we have two schools of thought on IRV: Ranked-Choice and Approval. Both have their advantages and disadvantages, but both yield better outcomes than the system we have now. The GPTX bylaws call for Approval Voting in all internal elections.

Ranked-Choice Voting
This is what the state of Maine is trying out in its party primaries next month, following the 2016 referendum on the matter. Primary voters can also vote on vetoing the legislature's attempt to put the kibosh on RCV. As the Atlantic article notes, RCV has been used for municipal elections in San Francisco CA, Minneapolis MN, and Portland ME. An interesting phenomenon observed in San Francisco is that candidates for mayor or supervisor with overlapping policy positions campaign for and even with each other, because voters can vote for both of them.

RCV is also the system used in Australia, where voting is mandatory, and in various sports polls here in the US.

Scenario: Candidates Álvarez, Bookman, Cho, Dinwoodie, and Estep are running for mayor. Your favorite of the bunch is Cho, and you really can't stand Estep. The other three are various levels of acceptable to you.

When you vote, you put a 1 by Cho's name, 2 by Bookman, 3 by Dinwoodie, 4 by Álvarez. You don't even bother to rank Estep.

At the end of the first round of counting, nobody has 50% of the vote. Cho finishes dead last and is eliminated from the counting in the second round. All votes for Cho are transferred to voters' second choices, in your case to Bookman.

It continues like that until one candidate emerges with a majority of the count, which always happens eventually, even if it takes paring the field down to the last two candidates. Estep may still win, but at least the majority of the voters didn't completely reject her.

Approval Voting
This somewhat simpler solution is championed by longtime Texas Green leader katija gruene. This page has some information on where the process has been used, including in the United Nations, and why it has never gained much traction in the US.

Scenario: Candidates Álvarez, Bookman, Cho, Dinwoodie, and Estep are running for mayor. Your favorite of the bunch is Cho, and you really can't stand Estep. The other three are various levels of acceptable to you.

The ranking part of Ranked-Choice Voting is removed. You simply cast a vote for each of the candidates you wouldn't mind having as mayor: everyone but Estep. If you like all of them, you can vote for all of them, but that's essentially the same as voting for none of them.

The votes are counted. Most likely, at least one candidate wins approval from more than 50% of the voters, and the candidate highest count wins. If no candidate gets 50% approval, the jurisdiction overseeing the election could follow Australia's example and require that the election be run again, with different candidates. It could also eliminate the bottom vote-getter and redistribute that candidate's votes, fractionally, to the other candidates until one does achieve a majority.

On the Electology page linked above, check out the results of the experiment conducted around the 2012 Presidential election, including the two eye-popping graphs (one of which I have included above).

Does approval voting help major parties or minor parties?While this may sound impossible, we contend that Approval Voting is fairer to both major and minor parties (emphasis dbc's). Under the current system, popular major party candidates sometimes lose when a strong minor party or independent candidate draws some of the support that would have otherwise been theirs. Approval Voting addresses this by allowing supporters of alternative candidates to also support a more electable frontrunner as a compromise.

Additionally, alternative candidates get an accurate level of their support. One alternative voting experiment surveyed voters at polling places in Manhattan’s 69th State Assembly District. The group was granted credentials from the NYC Board of Elections to conduct the exit-poll style experiment inside the city’s official polling places. The experiment compared Plurality Voting (traditional “vote for one” method) with Approval Voting, Score Voting and Instant Runoff Voting. Below are graphs revealing the totals for [two of] these four systems.
​
Let’s first look at the Plurality Voting results, to establish a baseline.

While this district was clearly not representative of the overall American electorate, note the relative strength of the minor party candidates compared to the major party candidates. For instance, Green Party candidate Jill Stein received one vote for about every 27 votes for Obama. (The study authors note that their results were consistent with the official election results.)
Now compare to Approval Voting.

The Green Party now receives 58% as much support as the Democratic Party. This is over a 15x improvement in the Green Party’s strength relative to the Democratic Party, compared to where they were with plurality voting. The other minor party and write-in candidates also fared dramatically better.

So let's talk about it, Houston. I hope to start pestering my councilmembers to look into proposing it, for the 2019 election if possible, for 2023 if not. If it works here, it could go statewide.

Don't believe the pearl-clutching Republicans in the Atlantic article who talk about reduced turnout resulting from RCV, as if they care. Maybe a large percentage of voters are as stupid and stubborn and resistant to change as those Republicans say. But if they take their franchise seriously at all, they should be willing to adapt to a system with more democratic outcomes and fewer tax dollars spent.