In Elections Commission meetings, public comment comes first. And these
spectators have come to comment, one after another, on the same subject:
exactly one year ago, the voters of San Francisco passed Proposition A,
making instant runoff voting the designated method of electing local
officials. Exactly one year later, they argue, implementation of the
proposition is still uncertain. What, they ask, is the commission doing to
make sure the voters’ will becomes a reality?
In private meetings with interested citizens, Department of Elections
acting director John Arntz has offered assurances that everything is
falling into place. But the lack of a signed contract with software vendor
ESS (Election
Systems and Software) offers no reassurance. Nor does a
Chronicle article, published on February 17, that begins,
“San Francisco's oft-maligned Elections Department fears it may not have a
new voter-approved "instant runoff" system - the largest of its kind ever
attempted in the country - ready for the November mayoral election.”
The speakers say their piece and the commission goes into closed
session to consider an entirely separate matter. The question, repeated 20
times, goes unanswered.
Two days after the Elections Commission meeting, the Department of
Elections holds a brown-bag lunch to educate candidates on the ins and
outs of running a campaign. The seven or eight participants receive a
quickie course in the election calendar, how to access voter registration
databases, and the status of instant runoff voting (or ranked choice
voting, as the process has now been renamed). The Call has acquired a memo
that describes the last part of the meeting:
By Chris MadenI attended a meeting at the San Francisco Department of
Elections on Friday, March 7. It was a brown bag seminar for
mayoral candidates and their staff; I attended for Michael
Denny's campaign. The main purpose of the meeting was to
introduce ranked choice voting to the candidates and their
campaigns; we had a very frank presentation from Eugene Tom,
who I understand is the ballot designer.
First, they are going ahead with RCV. Barring any
legal challenges, this will be the method used for the
November 2003 elections for mayor, district attorney, and
sheriff. They have a worst-case plan prepared to do a manual
count and calculation.
Second, the Department of Elections is calling this "ranked
choice voting" (RCV) instead of
"instant run-off voting" (IRV) to dispel any
notion that there will be instant results. Because they need
to know not only who got the most first-place votes, but more
importantly, who got the fewest, they have to have
all ballots in before they can proceed. Unless the
winner has a clear and overwhelming majority, that means they
have to tally all absentee and provisional ballots, which will
take until Saturday or Sunday after the election.
If they receive full vendor support from the ballot machine
company, they can then produce results in a day or two after
that; it's just number-crunching. However, without that
support, they will need to tally each ballot manually under
the rules set by the Secretary of State, which involve the
procedure some of you may have seen in Florida after the 2000
presidential election: an official, an observer, and two
recorders go through a pile one at a time, holding up the
ballot, declaiming its number, and reading off the votes.
Under this scenario, the actual number-crunching will still
only take a day, but it may take five weeks to declare a
winner. Note that they expect about 240,000 votes for over
twenty candidates for mayor. (For comparison, the two eastern
cities that use choice voting have about 19,000 ballots to
deal with.)
The law as passed in March, 2002, requests that voters be
able to rank all choices, but mandates a minimum of three
choices in the face of logistical difficulty. The current
plan is to go with three choices. The vendor's Eagle Optech
machines can really only handle one-of-many votes; they are
certainly not equipped for tallying standardized-test-type
bubble fill-ins. So the plan is to have three lists of
candidates for each race: Mayor, first choice, pick one:
Brown, Smith, Jones; Mayor, second choice, pick one: Brown,
Smith, Jones; Mayor, third choice, pick one: Brown, Smith,
Jones.
The reporting problem is that the software is currently
designed to tally the votes in each race separately; i.e., it
could report that Brown got 100,000 first-place votes, 70,000
second-place votes, and 20,000 third-place votes, but it can't
say that there were 30,000 ballots with Brown-Smith-Jones,
22,000 with Smith-Brown-Jones, etc. The actual correlation
between the votes on each ballot is critical for tracking
which second-choice votes get used.
So the machine vendor is working on this reporting
capability, but there's a Catch-22 situation, as reported by
Caleb Kleppner of the Center for Voting and Democracy. Eugene
Tom was very frank about this. There's not a new contract to
sign; they're already locked into ES&S,
per "our wise predecessors" (Tom's words). However,
ES&S says that this isn't in their
contract, and they want more money to develop it. The city
doesn't want to pay unless they can guarantee certification;
ES&S doesn't want to work on it unless
they're going to get paid; and the Secretary of State can't
guarantee certification of something they haven't seen.
So the good news is that RCV is going to
happen. The bad news is (a) it might be a hugely complicated
affair, and (b) it's not complete IRV because the
voters only get three choices.
The Department of Elections is looking to the candidates,
campaigns, and parties to publicize this and to educate the
voters on the new system. Please help them out as best you
can when talking with friends.
Finally, I have had nothing but positive dealings with the
folks at Elections. They are a very patient bunch, very good
at explaining procedures to candidates and potential
candidates, and they seem to be doing their best in the face
of a bad situation with regard to the logistics here. Anyone
who isn't directly involved in a campaign should offer to help
out with the manual count, should it become necessary; they're
going to need a lot of staff to get it done.
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