Low Turnout
Tuesday's runoff primary saw a record-low turnout. The election, which included only one statewide race, attracted about 1.9 percent of voters to the polls, according to the State Board of Elections. Six weeks ago, the initial primary brought a record-shattering 37 percent turnout. Tuesday's vote featured only a race for the Democratic candidate for labor commissioner and two local legislative races. "It might be the election officials who are the largest bloc of voters," state elections director Gary Bartlett said during voting Tuesday.
Bob Hall, executive director of Democracy North Carolina, said in a news release that Tuesday's vote took about $4 million to operate about 3,000 polling places and process the ballots of about 75,000 voters. That comes out to more than $50 per voter, he said. "Local taxpayers foot the bill, not the state, which may be one reason why state lawmakers have been slow to address the problem of expensive, low-turnout runoffs," Hall said. Hall supports instant runoff voting, in which voters can mark a first and second choice on the ballot. The state has tested the system, but it is not used widely. "There's got to be a better way than these embarrassing statewide runoff elections," Hall said. (Mike Baker, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, 6/25/08; Dome, THE NEWS & OBSERVER, 6/26/08).
3 comments:
There is no way that IRV could have saved us from this runoff election.
There is no certified software to tabulate the IRV votes, so they would had to have been tabulated by hand. At the rate the Wake BOE went in October 2007, we'd still be sorting/stacking and counting Wake County's 150K Democratic ballots from the May primary until the middle of July.
That is assuming that IRV didn't cause an election meltdown. Our own State Board of Elections knew in March 6, 2007 that we would "...not use IRV in May 2008 because it poses too much of a risk." Something that poses a risk is not safe or solid.
The millions of voters who use IRV without problems use it overseas in parliamentary elections where they elect the party - not the candidates in our more democratic American-style elections.
IRV did not do well when it was used in Cary. When 25% of votes who show up to vote don't know they are expected to rank their choices - those voters were disenfranchised. And it is certainly not easy to count - the Wake BOE messed up tabulating a little over 3000 IRV ballots. And while IRV advocates claim that IRV ensures a 50% plus one vote majority winner, the winner of the Cary election 1401 votes - less than the 1512 votes that made up 50% plus one vote of the 3022 first-column votes.
IRV is not being used in many other states in statewide elections. IRV does not save money - because the implementation and voter education costs will cost more than what we spend on runoff elections we rarely need. Using costs per registered voter calculated by the Maryland State Legislature when they considered and rejected IRV three times, IRV could cost NC taxpayers $18 million to implement and $2.4 million each subsequent election years for voter education. Over 33 years - IRV could end up costing North Carolina taxpayers $40 million more than paying for runoff elections only when they are needed.
If you want to get other information about IRV from people who are not getting paid to push it - check this out:
Center for Range Voting rangevoting.org/IrvExec.html
Libertarian Reform Caucus reformthelp.org/issues/voting/runoff.php
North Carolina Coalition for Verified Voting www.ncvoter.net/irv.html
The Problem with Instant Runoff Voting minguo.info/election_methods/irv
And check out this research paper on IRV: http://electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/US/RCV-IRV/InstantRunoffVotingFlaws.pdf
Thanks for a great response. This is posted as information only. We do not neccesaarily endorse opinions posted in the blog that comes from outside resources.
So why do you feel that the information presented in the newspapers is accurate?
That article in the N&O was pretty much just a rewrite of a press release from DemocracyNC - an outside source.
So why not present the other side of the low-turnout runoff elections?
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