This is a marvelous example of a pure character attack. You fail to provide a single issue on which Ms. Holloway failed to represent you well, and you vaguely reference incoherent floor speeches.

We based our endorsement on our own personal encounters with Ms. Holloway, her performance at at-large candidate forums, and her issue statements and resume.

If there’s something you feel the need to bring to our attention from her background, I’d be happy to review it. In the meantime, I can safely say that I’d prefer to be represented by Ms. Holloway than by by J.B. Loring, Ronnie Greer, or Charlie Tygard based on similar knowledge I have about them and their past council experience and statements about the next council.

If she was such a bad elected official, it surprises me that she won re-election in your district, as few before her were able to hold that seat for more than a single term.

Go back and review some of the incoherent speeches Councilwoman Holloway gave in the Council chamber. You will soon be asking yourself, “What the **** is she talking about?” And then, hopefully, you’ll ask yourself this: “Why in God’s name did we endorse this numbnut?!”

Consider this hypothetical election using IRV.

#voters - their vote
10 G > C > P > M
3 C > G > P > M
5 C > P > M > G
6 M > P > C > G
4 P > M > C > G

C is the clear Condorcet (condor-SAY) winner, meaning he is preferred by a landslide majority over all his individual rivals. C is preferred over G, P, and M all by an 18-10 margin.

But… M wins, even though he also has fewer first-place votes (6 voters) than C with 8.

Also:

1. P is preferred to M by 22 of the 28 voters, yet he’s the first candidate eliminated.
2. G also has more first-place votes (10) than M’s 6.
3. So M either loses pairwise to, or has fewer first-place votes than (or both) every rival, but still IRV elects M.

The example above was intended to be “realistic,” perhaps somewhat resembling the situation in the (now evolving) 2008 US presidential race with G=”Green”, M=McCain, C=Edwards, and P=Paul. But if you are willing to drop realism and construct artificial election scenarios, then this demonstrates how to construct arbitrarily-severe election examples of this kind: http://rangevoting.org/IRVamp.html#bad

IRV sounds initially appealing, because people picture a weak third party candidate who loses in the first round. The myth is that this takes away the fear of voting for your sincere favorite candidate, and gives third parties a fair chance to grow; but if that candidate or his party ever grows to be a contender, he is statistically more likely to hurt the party closest to his own than to win. It doesn’t matter how unlikely you imagine the above scenario to be - it’s still _more_ likely than the odds “Green” will win. And so third party voters will learn to strategically vote for their favorite major-party candidate, because it will more often be a good strategy than a bad one. You don’t have to buy my math; you can look at decades of IRV usage in Australia’s house, and Ireland’s presidency. Both use IRV, and have been two-party dominated. So much for the myths that IRV allows you to “vote your hopes, not your fears”, and eliminates spoilers. Now you can see why the Libertarian Reform Caucus calls IRV a “bullet in the foot” for third parties, and why Australian political analysts at AustralianPolitics.com say that IRV “promotes a two-party system to the detriment of minor parties and independents.” Ironically, most of the many countries in the world who use a genuine _delayed_ runoff have broken free of duopoly. Yet third parties just worked to help replace that system with IRV in Oakland, CA. This can be chalked up to a result of massive public ignorance, largely perpetuated by groups such as FairVote and the League of Women Voters (http://RangeVoting.org/Irvtalk.html).

Electoral reform advocates (especially third parties!) should be demanding Range Voting - score all the candidates and elect the one with the highest average. Its simplified form, Approval Voting, is probably the most feasible to implement. It simply uses ordinary ballots, but allows us to vote for as many candidates as we like. Consider the benefits:

* More resistant to strategy: As we see above, IRV strategically “forces” voters not to top-rank their sincere favorite; the general strategy with IRV is to top-rank your favorite of the front-runners (typically the major party candidates). But with Range Voting and Approval Voting, this _never_ happens. The worst a voter may do is exaggerate his sincere scores to the max and min scores allowed. But with Range Voting, a vote for your favorite candidate can never hurt you, or the candidate, whereas with IRV it can hurt both. — http://RangeVoting.org/StratHonMix.html

* The previous fact helps to explain why IRV results in two-party duopoly, just like plurality voting. — http://RangeVoting.org/TarrIrv.html

* Spoiler free: Whereas IRV merely _reduces_ spoilers. — http://rangevoting.org/FBCexecSumm.html

* Decreases spoiled ballots: Since voting for more than one candidate is permissible, the number of invalid ballots experimentally goes down with Range and Approval Voting. But IRV typically results in a seven fold increase in spoiled ballots when we started using IRV. — http://rangevoting.org/SPRates.html

* Simpler to use: In 2006, the Center for Range Voting conducted an exit poll experiment in Beaumont, TX. There were 5 gubernatorial candidates, and voters were allowed to rate them 0-10 (or “abstain”). They all seemed to find the process as simple and intuitive. There were no complaints of complexity, or any questions for clarification. And the fact that spoilage rates go down with Range Voting, but up with IRV, shows that there is some objective sense in which RV is simpler. Voters literally make fewer mistakes.

* Simpler to implement/tabulate: A simple one-round summation tells us the results, whereas IRV’s potential for multiple rounds can cause long delays before the final results are determined. A positive side-effect of Range Voting’s simplicity is that it makes the necessary transition to manual counting, and away from voting machines, more feasible. And Range Voting can be conducted on all standard voting machines in the interim. Whereas IRV’s complexity leads most communities implementing it to purchase expensive and fraud-conducive (electronic!) voting machines, the fraudster’s best friend. — http://RangeVoting.org/Complexity.html

* Greater voter satisfaction: Using extensive computer modeling of elections, a Princeton math Ph.D. named Warren D. Smith has shown that these methods lead to better average satisfaction with election results, surpassing the alternatives by a good margin. But IRV turns out to be the second _worst_ of the commonly proposed alternatives. This mean that all voters will benefit from the adoption of either of these superior voting methods, regardless of political stripe. — http://RangeVoting.org/vsi.html

* Reduces the probability of ties: While they are not extremely common, they do happen. IRV statistically increases them, but Range Voting decreases them. — http://RangeVoting.org/TieRisk.html

* In case you’re going to say, “But IRV has more _momentum_ than Range Voting”, you should consider this. — http://RangeVoting.org/IRVsplitExec.html

* In case you wonder why groups like FairVote and the League of Women Voters support IRV, maybe you should consider all the misleading and even patently false claims they’ve made about it. — http://RangeVoting.org/Irvtalk.html

Get the facts at RangeVoting.org and ApprovalVoting.org

And if you’re in the market for a better system of proportional representation (http://RangeVoting.org/PropRep.html) than the antiquated STV system, check out Reweighted Range Voting and Asset Voting.

http://RangeVoting.org/RRV.html
http://RangeVoting.org/Asset.html

Clay Shentrup
San Francisco, CA
415.240.1973
clay@electopia.org