Luebke will keep pushing instant runoffs

Rep. Paul Luebke says he'll press for instant runoffs in 2009.

The Durham Democrat, who sponsored a pilot project for municipal elections in 2005, says that the concept was "scary" to a lot of legislators, but after elections in Cary and Hendersonville he thinks they may be more open to it.

"In 2009, if I'm back I expect to participate in a discussion about how we could use instant-runoff voting as a statewide policy," he said.

The city of Wilmington has asked for a local bill seeking authority to do instant runoffs this session, though it is currently stuck in a committee, he noted.

Citing today's labor commissioner runoff, Luebke said that the traditional primary runoff method has its own risks, including extremely low turnout.

"It's really not a good idea to have so few people deciding these runoff races," he said.

You must be logged in to post a comment on this blog. If you already have an N&O online user account, click here to log in. Otherwise, click here to register (it's free!).

Re: Luebke will keep pushing instant runoffs

Submitted by Coop on June 25, 2008 - 9:47am.

Funny, the people of Cary gave Instant Run-Off voting a bigs thumbs-up and felt it was easy to understand:

http://www.newsobserver.com/news/wake/cary/story/738391.html

Plus Instant Run-Off Voting is being used all across the country with great results -- I think the good people of North Carolina are at least as intelligent as people in those states!

I also think it's a little silly to say IRV will "cost too much" when this primary runoff is costing the state as much as $5 million and attracted a less than 2% turn-out!

» login to post comments

Re: Luebke will keep pushing instant runoffs

Submitted by citizen27106 on June 25, 2008 - 8:22am.

Why does North Carolina have primary runoffs? Most states don't.
Kentucky repealed its provision to hold gubernatorial primary runoff elections in April 08.

North Carolina should repeal provisions to hold statewide runoffs. This would be simple and not require any additional funds or chaos at the polls.

How much would IRV cost us? At least $2.44 Million on voter education per election year:

If done for the cost of a first class stamp (.42 cents)for each voter, with 5,810,420 registered voters in North Carolina, that would be $2.44 million at least. This will have to be repeated each time, and many may ignore the mailer. If done for the low ball unrealistic amount of 8.5 cents per registered voter, that amounts to approximately $500.000 or half a million dollars. Just for the most meager voter education for a very foreign way of voting. And there are other costs.

Add on to that the cost for new voting machines, extra ballot pages (last primary would have required multiple pages in order to handle IRV) extra voting booths and staff to handle the lengthier voting process.

» login to post comments

Re: Luebke will keep pushing instant runoffs

Submitted by DustinIngalls on June 25, 2008 - 1:57am.

IRV ought to be implemented for primaries and municipal races. You could argue that a two-candidate runoff narrows choices and brings into play different considerations than in the original vote, but so few people vote in the current runoffs that that benefit doesn't really come into play.

» login to post comments

IRV is expensive and difficult to count accurately

Submitted by citizen27106 on June 24, 2008 - 9:46pm.

How much would it cost to educate the voters on IRV? If done for the cost of a first class stamp, with 5,810,420 registered voters, that would be $2.44 million at least. This will have to be repeated each time, and many may ignore the mailer.

San Francisco spent $1.87 per registered voter for education, and the second year the number of voters prepared to rank choices was less than the first.

Our voters had a huge ballot to contend with this May.

There were 9 statewide races (in both parties) with 3 or more candidates. All of them would have had to be run using IRV, not just Labor, since there was no way to know which would need it.

Some of the ballot would have contests to rank, some would not.
When Scotland used STV (a form of ranking contests) for the first time in May 2007, they combined two different ballot types. The result - 100,000 spoiled ballots.

Our voters can't even get straight ticket voting right, and now we want to make voting more complicated? Our state has the highest undervote rate for president in the country, and not one dime is spent on educating voters about that.

Two places have been able to find voting systems that can count IRV, and that is because they are using software that has not been federally tested.
San Francisco used uncertified software for 3 years and it was revealed that there was a flaw in the IRV algorithm.

» login to post comments