Bob Hall says instant-runoff voting could have saved the state millions.
The executive director of Democracy North Carolina says that North Carolina could have avoided today's primary runoff, which will cost from $3.5 to $5 million, by asking voters their second choice in the initial ballot.
"Today is really a case where we have this miserably low turnout, and it really is not democratic," he said.
Under instant-runoff voting, voters mark their first, second and third choices in a given race. If no candidate gets a majority in the initial round of voting, the second-choice votes of people who voted for the losing candidate are counted.
State Rep. Paul Luebke proposed a bill to allow the method in statewide party primaries and judicial races in the 2005 session, but it was scaled back to a pilot program for municipal elections. The towns of Cary and Hendersonville successfully used instant runoffs in the 2007 races.
Hall, a campaign finance reformer, said that instant runoffs also help candidates budget wisely.
"You don't have to worry about squirrelling away money for a possible runoff," he said. "And you don't have a situation where the candidate who can raise a lot of money real quick has an advantage."
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Re: Hall: Instant runoffs could have saved N.C.
Something isn't more democratic just because you repeatedly say it is. Why would IRV be more democratic than a traditional runoff election? Bob Hall knows if you don't that the SBOE didn't want to use IRV in the May primary election for county elections because it posed a risk. So there is no way it could have been used in the May 2008 primary for any statewide elections.
We have no software to tabulate IRV, so we'd have to tabulate it by hand like they did in Cary in October 2007. If you go by the ballot tabulation rate set the first time the Wake BOE counted the IRV votes, it would take you 7.5 weeks to process 150,000 Wake County Democratic ballots - until the middle of July. And then you would have to go back and tabulate them again to check your work before declaring a winner. And God Forbid we would have had more than one statewide runoff race - we might not know who the runoff winners were until after the November election!
Before considering this risky and expensive voting method, our state legislators should hold public meetings not only about IRV in general but how the State Board of Elections conducted the 2007 pilot program. Non-profit groups like DemocracyNC and FairVote had way too much influence in the planning of the pilot and implementation of the voter education and exit survey effort. There is evidence that the volunteers who did the voter education and exit surveys had some pro-IRV bias. Other interested groups like the political parties and verified voting groups were shut out of the process.
And even if IRV supporters have conned people here into thinking that IRV is cheap, there is ample evidence that IRV is much more costly than traditional elections and rarely needed runoffs. Using costs per registered voter from the Maryland State Legislature and multiplying that times the 5.8 million registered NC voters, it would cost $18 million or more to implement IRV in the first year, and $2.8 million each election year after that for voter education. Over 33 years, it would cost NC voters $40 million or more to implement IRV over having traditional elections and rarely needed runoff elections.