At 01:15 AM 5/12/2008, Jonathan Lundell wrote:
On May 11, 2008, at 10:00 PM, Kathy Dopp wrote:
However, I had not even thought of the need to
count all state-level races at the State-level, rather than the county
level, or about some of the other issues you mentioned.
I don't see that as a significant problem these days. There has to be
a roll-up *somewhere*, and it's probably easier for the counties to
send the ballots, via some electronic method, to a central counting
facility where they're counted once, rathr than do a bunch of local
counts and send those results.
It's a problem. It's one thing for an election in a single city, but
a state-wide election in a large state, that's a lot of ballot
movement, if it is physical. I agree the problem can be solved by
moving ballot images instead of ballots.
voting security people have become less than thrilled about automated
counting, and, I agree, if that is all that is available, it's
dangerous. If the ballots can be hand-counted in local batches, and
the ballots are kept locally, it's more secure and more difficult to
manipulate wholesale.
Ballots are currently hand counted using fairly tedious procedures
involving clerks and observers and officers. If the counting is moved
to a central location, all those people need be there, instead of
being distributed among the polling places
The essential point, though, is that IRV is much more complex to
count than certain other methods on the table. The complex counting
makes verification more difficult. The sequential elimination in IRV
is quirky, each round depends on the round before, so it is not
enough to look at a sample set of ballots and extrapolate to the
general results. When many rounds are involved, the method becomes
sensitive to the far more common ties that take place.
I've argued that if IRV were an excellent method, the extra expense
might be worth it. But it is not. Most IRV elections are concentrated
in Australia, where STV is used for proportional representation, and,
for that purpose, the complexity may well be justified, and then it
probably seemed natural to use IRV. STV has problems similar to IRV,
*but they don't become important until the last member being elected
from a district is being chosen.* Single-winner STV is IRV, and all
the relatively minor problems of STV become concentrated in IRV.
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