Tuesday quick hits

IRV successful? It depends on who you ask.

One would think that once the pilot program was approved in 2006, the SBOE would have developed some sort of system to measure the experiment to see if it was a success or failure.

The survey was laid on at the last minute and it was administered by a group that advocates for IRV. Hardly the type of people who should be administering a survey about IRV for the purposes of gathering data. And hardly the way to run an experiment - unless it is just a sneaky way to slip IRV in the back door.

Is there going to be any exit polling in Hendersonville? If so - will the State BOE follow proper exit polling guidelines and hire an independent marketing company to conduct the survey? Will they publish their methodology before conducting the survey? Will they prevent IRV advocacy groups from hijacking the survey?

If you had been in the Wake County BOE conference room on October 11, you might have heard the two candidates and a current Cary Town Council member comment how they saw several problems with the count, and that they didn't like IRV.

The guy who won using IRV doesn't like it - and he wants us to have traditional elections with separate runoffs.

Did it save Cary any money? If it did, it wasn't the $62,000 that backers were claiming it would. That figure would result only - and I repeat only - if they needed to have a city-wide runoff in all 36 precincts at $1722 per precinct. Using that per precinct cost, Cary only saved $13,776 over doing a traditional runoff in the 8 District B precincts. But only if they didn't also consider the voter education and other related costs.

IRV backers aren't counting all the costs for voter education and for the more complex vote counting process. So far, most everything about IRV has been done under the table and off the books - the costs haven't been carefully kept track of. The value of volunteer in-kind contributions hasn't been accounted for.

Where's the raw voting data for the election? That's the only way to figure out if voters were confused or not - especially when there are questions if proper exit poll guidelines were followed.

We won't know how the IRV experiment worked until and unless we have a full and thorough investigation of how the experiment was conducted in the first place.

Taxpayers and voters have a right to know if the experiment was impartial and unbiased, or if the fix was in for IRV from the get-go. They were allowed to attend a public hearing last year to see the new voting machines and comment on them to the Wake BOE before the decision was made to pick paper op-scan over DRE. Why wasn't that done for IRV?

Why isn't the public allowed to have a say in the matter of IRV before this experiment was foisted upon them in Cary?

I hope the County Commissioners in Wake County as well as every other county in NC will decide to have a full public hearing on IRV before they decide to participate in the pilot program at they county level. And that they will listen fairly to both sides. If they do, they will probably make the same decision that Asheville, Atlantic Beach, Raleigh and Rocky Mount did - and that was to reject IRV.

Only Cary and Hendersonville participated in the IRV pilot project - and that was after hearing from only the pro IRV people before they took a vote with little advance warning to the public they serve.

And let's hope the N&O actually takes a look at both sides of the IRV issue - and has reporters who talk to people who don't like IRV before their story deadlines and/or as more than just an afterthought.

Good to see that McIntyre has no commitment to his beliefs. Way to tow that party line.

Thanks for the catch. It's been corrected.

— RTB 

That's the Hendersonville City Council (in Henderson County), not the Henderson City Council (Vance County). Common mistake. Both are named for NC Supreme Court Chief Justice Leonard Henderson, by the way.