SENATE ELECTIONS, REAPPORTIONMENT &
CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENTS COMMITTEE
Informational
Hearing
Instant
Runoff and Ranked Choice Elections:
Will
They Lead to a Better Democracy?
Senator Debra Bowen, Chair
SENATOR DEBRA BOWEN, CHAIR:
We will begin
our hearing this morning. I’m Senator
Debra Bowen, chair of the Senate Elections, Reapportionment & Constitutional
Amendments Committee. And you should see
the other guy. I believe that Senator
Battin will be joining us, and perhaps a couple of other people.
But we are going to have a discussion
today and learn more about the status, history, impediments, and ramifications
of alternative voting systems including, instant runoff voting and ranked
choice voting, which we will call IRV and RCV.
I think we’re going to need ____________ listening to this hearing
________ for which I apologize.
These are elections….
(Audience interrupts, not being able
to hear)
So we’re going to have a discussion
today about the status, history, impediments and ramifications of alternative
voting systems such as, instant runoff voting and ranked choice voting which
are systems that are slowly but surely gaining popularity in
I wanted to hold this hearing in
And as I’m sure most people in this
audience knows, San Francisco has already held a ranked choice election in
November of 2004, and will hold another two weeks from today. State law does not allow
Both Assemblywoman Loni Hancock and I
have authored bills to give general law cities, counties, and special districts,
the ability to choose an IRV or a ranked choice system. But those measures haven’t quite made it into
law yet.
I’m looking forward to a discussion
today. And if there are people who are
not on the agenda who would like to address the committee, we would love to
hear from you at the end. There will be
a public comment period. And we don’t
have to record who you are under the Patriot Act, but it helps us to know if
you’d like to speak just so that we can anticipate how many people we’ll
have. And if you would let the sergeants
know, they’ll have a signup sheet.
And let me call up the first panel
and then I’ll turn proceedings over to Assemblywoman Hancock. Our first panel is Hector Preciado, Theis
Finley, Goro Mitchell. Those are our
first three panelists.
And I want to welcome Assemblywoman
Hancock who has really been a leader on this issue. I’m very glad you could be with us.
ASSEMBLYMEMBER LONI HANCOCK: Thank you so much, Senator
Bowen. I want to really thank Senator
Bowen for having this hearing. I know
that there is great interest in the Bay Area in IRV. And, in fact, I think I carried a bill my
first year in the Legislature, and then we really realized it was premature in
a lot of ways because we were waiting to see what happened in San Francisco,
and what some of the ramifications were.
So this will be a very interesting hearing for me and I’m really looking
forward to listening and learning from what you all present.
And Senator Bowen has consistently,
in our last session and before, raised a lot of the interesting and complex
issues about how we make our democracy better and more transparent; how we deal
with the initiative process and other things.
So, it’s wonderful to have you here and working for assembly districts,
Senator Bowen. And hopefully we’ll learn
a lot today from everyone here.
SENATOR BOWEN: Alright. Good.
I think we may continue. Let me
start with Mr. Preciado.
HECTOR PRECIADO: Good morning, and thank you for
allowing to come in and offer some testimony.
The Greenlining Institute, we’re a multi-ethnic public policy and
advocacy institute. Obviously with the
name itself, we advocate on behalf of low-income and minority communities
throughout the state and the nation depending on the issue, this being one of
them.
I’d like to begin by reading a
prepared statement I have. And I’ll
indulge to any questions, or be part of the panel discussion here with the
other distinguished guests.
Greenlining believes that a just and
democratic society requires an informed and educated citizenry participating
fully and equally in the democratic process.
Yet for millions of ethnic minorities in the
Minorities must contend with many
factors that dilute their voting strength and weaken their participation in the
democratic process. These factors
include, a modern day poll tax where political access is determined by the
frequency and size of campaign contributions to elected officials and
candidates; an initiative process that responds to a largely white electorate
and that is unfavorable to minorities and low-income communities that lack
wealth and income comparable to whites; a redistricting process that produces
safe gerrymandered partisan seats that nullifies minority voter impact and
results in uncompetitive elections, thereby making elected officials unresponsive
to constituent demands; a non-representative judiciary that is increasingly
hostile to civil rights and equal opportunity provisions in the law and in public
policy; an overburdened and under-funded voting systems that threaten the
ability of more minorities to exercise a franchise of voting and making certain
that every vote counts.
Minority communities are
disassociated from politics and from the political choices that determine
needed public investment in their communities such as, schools, healthcare,
transportation, housing, etc. A result
of this disassociation is a distrust of government and its ability to
effectively respond to the needs.
To make government more responsive to
minority communities the Greenlining Institute is executing a minority voter
outreach and education campaign designed to invigorate minority community
interest and activity in the following terms:
Campaign finance reform, initiative reform, redistricting reform,
judicial independence, and more importantly why we’re here today, election
reform.
Alternative voting systems like,
instant runoff voting and rank choice voting, will lead to a better democracy
because the advantages of these systems will increase minority participation
and representation in California politics.
These advantages include: majority rule, elimination of spoilers, wider
range of voter choice, a cheaper second ballot (meaning no second runoff
election), less negative campaigning, and more political participation.
On the issue of ranked choice
voting: Ranked choice voting provides
the fairest representation for minority groups.
Electoral scholars believe choice voting to be the most effective in
maximizing voter choice, government responsiveness, party representation, and
ensuring against wasted votes. Choice
voting has been used in
In choice voting a voter ranks
candidates in order of preference and the votes are then tabulated in a series
of rounds. If a candidate in the first
round meets the threshold for election, then that candidate’s remaining votes
are redistributed to the other candidates based on voter’s second choices. This process continues until all the seats
are filled.
Choice voting is the most effective
proportional representation system because it is used to elect candidates
rather than parties, which makes officials more directly accountable to the
voters. This system is also more
effective in protecting against splitting of the minority vote than other
candidate based semi-proportional systems such as limited and cumulative
voting.
The last thing, I want to end by
saying that while districting has become a hot button issue in
Thank you.
SENATOR BOWEN: Thank you. Mr. Finley.
THEIS FINLEY: Madam Chair, Assemblymember, I’m the
policy advocate with California Common Cause.
I apologize if some of my remarks will reiterate what Hector has
said. He raised some good points, and
unfortunately, those are the good points, but I think I can add a little bit.
On behalf of our 40,000
I have a study that came from
In addition, an interesting finding
was that more voters felt that this gave them an opportunity to vote for a
candidate that they really liked, as opposed to just a candidate who satisfied. And I think that is really the key finding in
this study.
In addition, I agree it would save
time and money by reducing the need for additional elections and also voter
fatigue. For example in
And as I eluded to, IRV presents much
promise to traditionally low voting communities, minority communities,
immigrant communities by bolstering the candidacies of candidates from those
communities, and this would hopefully in turn increase turnout in those
communities.
So essentially for all those reasons
California Common Cause and Common Cause nationally, supports IRV and RCV
voting.
Thank you.
SENATOR BOWEN: Thank you.
ASSEMBLYMEMBER HANCOCK: Senator Bowen, can I ask a quick
question?
SENATOR BOWEN: Absolutely.
ASSEMBLYMEMBER HANCOCK: Could you give the statistics on
turnout rate in
MR. FINLEY: We’re on the bottom fifteen nationally. I have it in the census but I don’t have the
actual percentage. _____ bottom fifteen
in terms of out of states.
SENATOR BOWEN: So there’s a new report just out by
the Election Assistance Commission at the federal level that gives….I spent
some time with it on the plane on Sunday night.
It has all of our turnout rates, the rate of provisional ballots. I was actually surprised to see that
ASSEMBLYMEMBER HANCOCK: I would be very interested in looking
at that. Because here we are, we’re 45th
in funding for education and we’re down at the bottom in some other
things. I had no idea that our voter
turnout was also down toward the bottom.
So I’d be very interested in seeing more of those statistics.
MR. FINLEY: I’ll be happy to send you a report. It might be that Senator Bowen has a
different report that has different figures.
ASSEMBLYMEMBER HANCOCK: _________
SENATOR BOWEN: Well, the Elections Assistance
Commission just did the first ever national survey of voting statistics,
although they caution that some jurisdictions completely failed to report—some
states—and others reported, for example, that with electronic voting equipment
that they had a zero error rate. So it’s
not clear that the statistics are entirely reliable, but it is the first time
that we have had a national picture of who votes, in what percentage, number of
registered, so it’s the beginning to understand better __________.
MR. FINLEY: Right.
And more importantly, no matter where we rank, it’s always good to
increase voter participation regardless of what it is.
SENATOR BOWEN: I think that’s probably the most
salient point. It’s just that we have
more room for improvements ________ expected.
MR. FINLEY: Thank you.
SENATOR BOWEN: Okay.
Mr. Mitchell.
GORO MITCHELL: Good morning, Chair Bowen and
Assemblymember Hancock. My name is Goro
Mitchell. I’m the executive director of
the Community Development Institute in your sister city of
And I’m really here to talk about
what our situation is in
The vision of the founder of CDI is
actually the architect of the incorporation movement in
And the problem is, that in
And I’m not here speaking on behalf
of the Latino community. This is just an
example of the flaws that are inherent to these at-large election systems in
this kind of unique environment in the context of
So, I’m really here in support of
choice voting and IRV. That is a great
mechanism, a method to promote full democracy in
SENATOR BOWEN: What do you think would happen
differently in
MR. MITCHELL: Well, clearly if you had a Latino
candidate or a Green Party candidate that had 15, 20 percent of the election,
__________ representation on the city council.
And we looked at choice voting as well as cumulative voting, as well as
options for
So we strongly encourage you to
articulate our views to other senators and other folks in the Senate, that we,
in
SENATOR BOWEN: And do you have districts, or do your
council members run at-large?
MR. MITCHELL: This is at-large. It’s an at-large system.
SENATOR BOWEN: So theoretically, you should be able
to, even without ranked choice voting, you should be able to have the benefit
of what some people are calling a multi-member district along with the downside
of that which is, that everyone has to spend the campaign money to campaign all
voters.
MR. MITCHELL: It’s really not clear whether we can
actually _______ in going through the voting in
SENATOR BOWEN: Welcome, Senator Battin. Question?
SENATOR JIM BATTIN: Thank you. I’m sorry.
I just flew in, and I missed most of your testimony. But what I did catch, I just want to ask a
question about. You said that you had
the Hispanic population in
MR. MITCHELL: It’s 58 to 60 percent.
SENATOR BATTIN: Okay.
Sixty percent. And you don’t have
any Hispanics on the council?
MR. MITCHELL: We do. We have one that we elected in 2002.
SENATOR BATTIN: And you elect them at large? You don’t have wards or districts?
MR. MITCHELL: No________at-large.
SENATOR BATTIN: So why? Is it because you have too many Hispanic
candidates that are running and they dilute the vote, and you think people are
voting based on ethnicity?
MR. MITCHELL: Well, one of the biggest variables
is, and probably most important variable is, documentation and having the legal
right to vote. The age of the Latino
population is about 25 percent under eighteen.
So that diminishes the voting strength.
And also, of course….
SENATOR BATTIN: Well, those are two separate
things. The representation of, I mean,
you representing the people that represent everybody, but you’re elected by the
people who have the legal right to vote.
Which means that they’re in the country legally and that they’re of
age. So that’s the universe that we can
only talk about. We can’t talk about
anything else.
MR. MITCHELL: Really, there’s only been one case in
the last four elections, city council elections, where _____________.
SENATOR BATTIN: I’m sorry, say it again. There was?
MR. MITCHELL: So there’s only been one case where
you had three Latinos running for office where you can have Latinos diluting
Latino ________.
SENATOR BATTIN: Really?
MR. MITCHELL: So the other ones have been one
Latino running and then you have special cases.
We elected ________ in 2004, where we had an open seat that was vacant,
so it was a special election.
SENATOR BATTIN: So let me just ask another couple of
questions. Not knowing the city, do the
incumbents serve for a long time?
MR. MITCHELL: No.
SENATOR BATTIN: So there’s a lot of turnover on the
city council. I don’t see a lot of
turnover, but normal turnover; ever few elections somebody will decide they’re
not going to run anymore.
MR. MITCHELL: Anecdotally ____________
SENATOR BATTIN: So you have usually then, what, one
or two seats open that are non-incumbent running for reelection?
MR. MITCHELL: Yes.
SENATOR BATTIN: You have one or two.
MR. MITCHELL: In our last election we had three.
SENATOR BATTIN: That were open seats?
MR. MITCHELL: Right.
SENATOR BATTIN: You didn’t have any incumbents
running for reelection and there were three open seats. And of that, there were no Latinos that were
elected?
MR. MITCHELL: There were actually two.
SENATOR BATTIN: Two that were elected, or two that
were open?
MR. MITCHELL: There were two open seats _________.
SENATOR BATTIN: Okay.
I’m just trying to, I mean, there’s a lot of different nuances and
there’s a lot of different scenarios that have….the elections have
outcomes. Sometimes there’s just incumbents
that aren’t going anywhere. There’s
sometimes that you have an apathetic voter base. I’m just trying to get a handle on…
MR. MITCHELL: (off mike)_____________ But the choice voting remains a lot easier
for groups, Pacific Islanders, Latinos, and other folks to actually achieve
office in the city council _________. So
that’s really my ________. ___________
related to incumbency and open seats and such, but this clearly will make it a
lot easier. A 16-year gap is too long
not to have a large ethnic group represented in the community. And so we want to make it easier so that we
have all these different groups represented in our city. Because we are founded on the principles of
justice and equity.
SENATOR BOWEN: Ms. Hancock.
ASSEMBLYMEMBER HANCOCK: How would it make it easier? I have to say, it’s hard for me to track that
statement. Could you just walk me
through a candidacy?
MR. MITCHELL: So for example, say you have this
issue of plumping. So if all Latinos, I
mean, vote for one candidate, say under cumulative voting, or choice voting,
then you’re guaranteed, even if you were 15 or 20 percent of the electorate, to
have someone there. If folks all vote
for the same candidate…
ASSEMBLYMEMBER HANCOCK: If they bullet vote.
MR. MITCHELL: Right.
ASSEMBLYMEMBER HANCOCK: Because then they
don’t end up getting the cumulative number of votes, do they? They get one vote but they’re just not giving
their other votes to other candidates, they’re second or…
MR. MITCHELL So are you talking about under choice
voting? So the second and third…and so I
don’t understand the question. Can you
repeat it?
ASSEMBLYMEMBER HANCOCK: I’m trying to understand how it
particularly helps minority sites.
Because I can’t track it through the ranked choice voting. And if you only bullet your vote, why that
helps you and guarantees you a seat.
MR. MITCHELL: The threshold of participation is
what you’re talking about. Go ahead,
sir.
MR. FINLEY: Well, I think one way is if you have more then
one candidate from whatever group and those two candidates split the vote of
that community. Then through the ranked
choice voting once one of those candidates is eliminated, then the votes that
that candidate had might go to the other candidate from that same group.
SENATOR BATTIN: You make the assumption that people
vote and blocks that way.
MR. FINLEY: Of course. I mean, that’s an assumption that we’re all
making.
SENATOR BATTIN: Number two, one of the questions I
asked was, how many in this particular case, how many Latino candidates have
you had and I think the answer was, you said, a couple. So I don’t know how that theory helps. I don’t know how
MR. FINLEY: Right. If this system encourages more Latino
candidates, for example, then that would address that issue.
SENATOR BOWEN: (off mike) Well, I think actually you
really helped me understand it. It’s the
splitting. Let’s use a simpler example
that only has two variables—gender—men and women. And we often have a situation in a primary
when you have, let’s say, two women and one man. And you’ll have some number of people who,
for whatever reason, vote for one of the women, but then their second choice is
the other. You’ll have others who don’t
do that. But you’re saying that that
marginal candidate, their first choice drops out, that then basically they’re
still in the mix _________ and that’s the essence of what we’re talking about.
MR. FINLEY: And I think Senator Battin is
correct. If there’s no split of the
electorate, then this would not have as much of an impact.
MR. PRECIADO: And if I may add one thing too, and I
think this issue applicable throughout the state, not just the city of East
Palo Alto, in the interest of IRV and ranked choice voting, the fact that, and
you brought up a good point Senator Battin, that not everybody, you don’t vote
necessarily in blocks, even in minority communities. You see the Latinos, in every election, you
see the way that they vote. They vote
Republican; they vote Democrat; they vote African; they vote all across the board. You can’t just lump us into one. But I think the important thing is, is that
under this system there are certain things that allow for other candidates to
reach out to certain communities that they wouldn’t ordinarily reach out to,
and I think that’s some of the benefits for the Latino community. That regardless of whether you have one
Latino running for office, or two, or three at the very most, unfortunately for
other factors, is what ends up being the case, you still have candidates that
are reaching out to other communities because they potentially get those second
choice votes. And because you do that,
they’re exposing themselves to communities that ordinarily they wouldn’t even
campaign to because they would dismiss it as “this is not my base, this is not
my voting base and I’m not going to reach out to them.” Whereas, under this system they’re encouraged
to do so whether or not ______________ substitute candidate but it gives us
that hope, that promise that you potentially have this kind of thing happening. _____________ potentially, the minority
community for people of color to _____________ not just in the city of
SENATOR BATTIN: So instead of talking about groups,
let’s talk about an issue. So what I’m
hearing is, is that if someone had a unique take on an issue that was just kind
of a curiously odd, unique issue, and that’s what they’re all about, and enough
people said, “Oh yeah, I don’t think he should be on the council, but that’s
kind of an interesting idea and someone checked and it’s number two,” that
person will end up on the council. Even
though that wouldn’t be the issue that people would want representing, and that
person didn’t have anything else to offer, it’s just on this one unique
issue. You would have people running for
second place.
MR. FINLEY: If people give you their second place
vote, as a voter you have to know that that’s your second choice and then
that’s how the system works, and that could be who ends up going to city
council.
SENATOR BATTIN: I mean that’s right. I mean, so what you’re going to have is
tactics. You’re going to have people
say, “Mark me down for number two. I
want to be two.” Or, “I’ll run with you
on the block, you be number one, I’ll be number two…..You be number one, I’ll
be number two….You be number one, I’ll be number two,” I don’t know which one of you guys are going
to be elected to the council, but I do know that if I’m number two on all three
of those slates, I’m going to be elected to council. I don’t know if that’s giving you
representation—that’s just giving you a tactic.
MR. MITCHELL: I mean, even in an at-large system
there may be a candidate, there’s three people running, I mean, three seats
open. There may be a candidate that you
don’t feel as strongly about, okay, and you still vote for that person because
there’s three seats that need to be filled.
And I mean, so it’s really kind of the same idea. That _________ at-large system, you’re going
to vote for your top three. And it’s
almost like ranking. So it’s really kind
of the same difference, in my opinion.
SENATOR BATTIN: Then why are you advocating, if it’s
the same difference?
MR. MITCHELL: Because in this system there’s more of a
chance that the second place person, if they have a small constituency, will
give in….
SENATOR BATTIN: See, that’s where I’ve got to be
convinced. I just don’t…
MR. MITCHELL: Well, it’s not 50 percent plus one.
SENATOR BATTIN: I don’t get the math. I mean, I get the math. I’m elected.
I have run many campaigns, and run many campaigns, and I know the
business of campaigning, and I know how you do it. And so I take that and I apply it to
this. I take real world and I apply it
to the theory that we’re talking about and the result I get does not match
yours.
SENATOR BOWEN: I’ll tell you what, we’re going to
have the director of elections from the city and county of San Francisco next,
so I think that’s probably the place to go to ask for, how does this really
work, because it’s actually been done there.
So, that’s probably the best place to get that answer.
So, any other questions of this
panel? Alright. Great.
Thank you very much.
Let me ask John Arntz and Elaine
Ginnold. John Arntz, the only election
official in
JOHN ARNTZ: Thank you very much. Sure.
I didn’t prepare anything for the meeting today, so I really welcome
questions from the _______. We had
ranked choice voting last November, as Senator Bowen indicated, and overall it
went very well. It wasn’t easy. Every step of the way was a challenge. There were a lot of things that we thought we
planned for well enough, but we realized that…
AUDIENCE INTERRUPTION REGARDING SOUND
MR. ARNTZ: So in the end, it did run very well
for us in
SENATOR BOWEN: How was the decision made to use
ranked choice voting in
MR. ARNTZ: The voters adopted a charter
amendment in 2002 to mandate that our most local offices would be conducted
using the ranked choice method. So it
was adopted into our charter. It became
law. And I think what was different with
San Francisco then the cities here in Alameda County and even Santa Clara
County, is that there was a date specific when the ranked choice voting must
take place, which was by November 2003.
However, our vendor was unable to develop a ranked choice system and get
it certified in time for the November 2003 election, so that’s why the first
ranked choice contest took place in 2004.
SENATOR BOWEN: Did you have to purchase new voting
equipment in order to use ranked choice voting?
MR. ARNTZ: No.
We had our existing equipment modified.
The precinct tabulators that we sent out to the polling places were
modified to include what’s called “firmware,” which is sort of like the
thinking chip on the system. And also,
the central count machines, the software, was modified so that they could
process the ranked choice ballots. Even
though it sounds very simple, one thing, it was very expensive to do that. And I think one point that I would like to
make is, that the ranked choice approach needs to be uniform, I think, as it
goes into different jurisdictions otherwise the costs will remain high with
each implementation.
Now, we just sent a letter of intent
to award a contract to Sequoia after an RFP process, so now Sequoia is going to
develop a ranked choice approach for our local elections. So now you have two vendors that will have
had developed something for
SENATOR BOWEN: So you’re suggesting that, for
example, the Secretary of State developed protocols, if you’re going to do
ranked choice voting these are the system requirements. That way, any vendor’s system will be useable
for any jurisdiction.
MR. ARNTZ: That would be
ideal. And also, it would be helpful for
the counties. Because I think when it
comes to implementation of ranked choice voting, the counties, they don’t know
exactly what they’re being faced with. It’s
something new.
And you see today just in the few
people you have before you, there’s a lot of ideas about this. And the registrars are being faced with these
ideas, and they have their own pressures to run elections, and it creates
uncertainty. So the more uniform
approach there is, I think the more smoothly the implementation will be,
wherever you want it to be. But also, it
makes the life of the registrars a lot simpler, because they have something
that they can follow. Right now, I felt
this way, I felt that I was out on a limb for a couple of years trying to make
this happen.
SENATOR BOWEN: What kind of steps did you take
towards both voter education and poll worker training, as well as work with
your own employees who are going to be responsible for the system? I mean, I can remember when we went from dump
terminals to PCs in my assembly office and the transition, ___________ how good
the new system is, the transition is always painful.
MR. ARNTZ: Yeah.
And really, I think you hit the main point. I mean, almost the hardest transition was
with our staff, because everything starts with our staff. We had to actually educate them with ranked
choice voting, and not just where they understood it, but they could explain
it, where they could then implement it throughout the city. And that was a challenge because they have
run elections for many years in a certain way and here was something that was
very different. And I think we saw it
with the earlier speakers, is that ranked choice voting is very difficult to
explain. It’s easy to show. I think it’s something that you can show
visually. We tried to explain that it’s
very difficult, and that’s one thing we realized. And so, we had to actually think of a lot of
different ways to explain it to our staff so they could understand it, and then
explain it, and then implement it. And
when it came to outreach and poll workers, the ranked choice voting largely
became our focus. We want to have
outreach to voters regarding registration, absentee voting, and things like
that. And the poll workers, they have to
deal with provisional voting, setting up the polling place, closing the polling
places. But we spent a lot of time in
educating the poll workers and the voters just about ranked choice voting. So, it became our focus. The ranked choice voting in a lot of ways was
the central point for the department for almost two years.
SENATOR BOWEN: Were you able to draw on the
experiences of other countries that have used ranked choice voting, or is that
just so distant that it wasn’t useful?
MR. ARNTZ: Not really.
UNIDENTIFIED: (Inaudible)
MR. ARNTZ: Yeah, exactly. And people think differently about elections
there. I mean,
SENATOR BOWEN: We won’t ask you to explain that.
MR. ARNTZ: Well, take my word for it. So you just said look within California where
there’s differences about elections, and you think about trying to take things
from other countries and implement it into San Francisco or California, I don’t
think it applies that easily. And I
really think that if you want to implement ranked choice voting, you have to
look at the jurisdiction in which it intends to be implemented and consider the
circumstances, and consider what it would take to make it successful.
SENATOR BOWEN: How many different languages do you
produce ballots in, in
MR. ARNTZ: Three.
SENATOR BOWEN: Three. So did you do the education for ranked choice
voting in all of those languages?
MR. ARNTZ: We did. And we really tried to focus on the minority
language communities too, to make sure that they understand the formatting of
the ballot—how to mark the ballot when they received it. And really, a lot of the concern was from the
minority language community to that, that ranked choice voting would
disenfranchise people because they were unfamiliar, perhaps, with voting. They didn’t want to seem like they didn’t
know how to vote, and so we really tried to focus on those groups.
SENATOR BOWEN: You know, I had an interesting
conversation with the woman who is head of the Elections Assistance Commission
in Washington, D.C. last week and she told me that in jurisdictions when they
switch to touch screen voting, that the jurisdictions demographically that were
poorer and had the most minority members, have the greatest success rate with
the ballots because people actually spent the time when they set up training
sessions and community forums to learn the equipment. And in the communities that were much higher
wealth, everyone’s attitude was, “Oh, it’s just another gadget. I don’t need to learn how to do it. I know how to do everything
electronically.” And as a result, the
error rate was much greater, which is actually the opposite of what I would
have thought.
But I’m curious about where you went
at the community level and how you did outreach so the people would feel
comfortable with it, because it’s a big shift in the first time you do it.
MR. ARNTZ: Yeah, it is. And we went as far as standing on street corners and
handing out information in places in town to make sure that people had an idea
that ranked choice voting was going to come their way. We advertised in Spanish and Chinese
newspapers. We had paid advertisements
on public radio and television stations that were in Chinese and Spanish and
English. We had citywide mailings that
we sent out. We met with community
groups. We included ourselves in their
meetings as much as possible. The city
actually provided grants to community groups that work with individuals in
certain communities so that these groups would include the ranked choice
message when they went out and did their own outreach.
And really, outreach is absolutely
critical. Without it, the ranked choice
wouldn’t have been successful. And the
one thing I have learned about the outreach for the ranked choice voting, is
that the outreach is critical just for elections generally. And often, I think what happens with
elections is, is that the outreach is the last thing that entities want to fund
because they think it’s not essential.
And really, if you’re trying to increase voting awareness, if you want
to increase turnout, the first thing you should look at is how successful the
department’s outreach program is and how well it’s funded. And I think that if you were to use ranked
choice voting or go to touch screen or whatever, the success of the department,
and the success of voting, will come down to the success of its outreach and
the funding that’s provided it.
SENATOR BOWEN: Questions?
ASSEMBLYMEMBER HANCOCK:
I do have one
question, Senator Bowen.
MR. ARNTZ: You can do it city by city. I mean, I think so. I think it’s best on a countywide basis. I really do.
And even if all the cities….see, this was just pure speculation on my
part because I don’t have other cities in my county. But I think that you can have various cities
within a county running the ranked choice method and not the entire county
running the ranked choice method. But I
think the county has to set up the program.
I think the county has to be able to be that central voice and the
touchstone for information and for procedures.
And I think it would make it difficult for the county if it didn’t do it
that way, because what’s going to happen is, the various cities are going to
create their own approaches to it in some way.
And maybe they’ll have the same laws, but the procedures will be
different in some way. And issues are
going to come up.
And whenever there’s a challenge to
elections, what’s attacked are the procedures for that election. And so let’s say you have a close race in a
ranked choice city, what’s going to be attacked, are the procedures. And if you have all these different
procedures in all these different cities, it’s not going to seem uniform, and
it’s not going to seem like people really had a handle on the situation. So, Senator Bowen mentioned about the state
creating the protocols and guidelines, definitely for the counties, but I think
the counties should create protocols and guidelines for the cities as much as
possible.
ASSEMBLYMEMBER HANCOCK:
So then
cities could opt in, maybe, at different times.
MR. ARNTZ: Right. And that creates a big challenge for the
counties though, because, I mean, they’re not set up for that. And I can see a county saying, “Well, if one
or two cities are going to have ranked choice voting, let them develop it, and
then I’ll help where I can.” But in the
long run, I don’t ______being successful ______ makes a county’s job more
difficult.
SENATOR BOWEN: Well, some of that is just a function
of the way….and this varies so much from state to state. Actually, in some other states in the country
the elections are not run at the county level, they’re run at the township
level. So, I think
But I think we in
ASSEMBLYMEMBER HANCOCK: In
SENATOR BOWEN: So we have a complete mixed bag. It’s as though we historically threw into
this Santa Claus’s bag all of the various ways that we did elections, and we
are just beginning, with how the America Votes Act, to sort it out and set some
kind of national standards; look at accuracies; look at provisional voting; and
try to make the system work in a more ordered manner. So this is one piece of it. And I’m sure that we would have some city
personnel, city elections officials, who would object to having counties
provide their software for them.
Although, they perhaps would not object if it were paid for. So, I’d be curious to ask the League of
Cities what their view on that would be __________ interesting response.
How are you
doing the voting in this upcoming election where you have a mix of traditional
and instant runoff? Do you have anything
on your local ballot?
MR. ARNTZ:
Yeah. We have three local
offices, and then we have local and state measures. So we don’t have the mix yet. So the ballots that the voters will have will
be all ranked choice for contests of any of the measures. So you don’t have like, let’s say, a
community college board raise where you would mark a bit differently than you
would our rank choice cards. So we
haven’t really crossed that bridge yet.
SENATOR BOWEN: In ’04 you had mixed vote, right? You had state and then you had some
traditional…
MR. ARNTZ: Right, well….
SENATOR BOWEN: Assembly, for example, would not have
been in this.
MR. ARNTZ:
I’m sorry. Yeah, that’s right. Yeah.
SENATOR BOWEN: And you didn’t find that voters had
difficulty with the mix, or if they did, they didn’t tell you?
MR. ARNTZ:
Well, we really, like I said, focused on the ranked choice portion
of our elections, so we had the poll workers actually put the rank choice card
on top. Because in
SENATOR BOWEN: Is this an ___________ ?
MR. ARNTZ:
Yeah, right. So we had the
poll workers actually hand the cards out with the ranked choice card on top and
tell the voters “Here’s a ranked choice card.”
Then in the ST envelope we put the ranked choice card on top with their
brightly colored inserts saying “Here’s a ranked choice card.” And so, we really try to draw off the fact
that a different style, a different formatted card, is being presented to them.
SENATOR BOWEN: Did you have any trouble in the polling
places with having people get the order confused, or people have to actually
move from one ballot to another? I never
voted in a system where I had more than one.
MR. ARNTZ: No.
We’re kind of used to it. In
every election we have multiple cards.
And I really was concerned about having spoiled the ballots on election
day, and I ordered extra ranked choice cards for that reason. Because, I thought voters are not going to
understand how to mark this card and they’re going to spoil a lot so I shipped
a bunch more off to the polling places.
But it really didn’t take place.
I think that we focus so much on
every step of the way, it wasn’t like we just sent out something in the mail
and said, “Well, that’s it. I’ve done
outreach for ranked choice voting.”
I mean, every step of the process
right down to the poll worker on election day, we’re trying to tell the voters
about ranked choice voting, how to mark the cards, and how it was
different. So we didn’t really….I didn’t
really experience a lot of voters having frustration on not marking the ranked
choice or other cards correctly.
SENATOR BOWEN: Okay.
Any other questions?
Alright. Thank you very much for
joining us.
Our next panel
is Kriss Worthington, who is the Vice Mayor of the city of
Thank you for
joining us.
KRISS
In terms of
instant runoff voting, I see it as simply an incremental improvement in the
election technology. And partly in
response to some of the questions from Senator Dunn, it is not a panacea. Instant runoff voting will in no way
guarantee that we have racial diversity, or economic diversity, or gender
diversity. It will not stop the governor
from vetoing all the wonderful bills that the Legislature passes, and it won’t
solve our budget crisis. But what
instant runoff voting will do, is open a door of possibility. It will reduce government waste of enormous
amounts of money on the local level.
The question is not are we going to
have runoffs, because we have runoffs.
In fact, four out of nine members of our city council were elected
through runoffs at great expense to the city of
Now, I usually
win my elections by about a 2-1 margin, and I’m very happy about that. But instant runoff voting in
Our city
council, when they first heard about it, voted it down. But now that the city council knows a lot
more about it and has studied it for years, we have a unanimous vote of our
city council that we want instant runoff voting, and we want it in the next
election.
So once people grapple with this,
they actually can change their opinions when they see, first of all, how
popular it is to the voters, and second of all, how practical it is in
affecting, for instance, allowing the people who run the election to not have
to work from September to November at break neck pace. And then, when they’re like, just to breathe
a sigh of relief, like “Okay, I can get back to my normal life and not be
frantic,” having a runoff election means those same people have to go a whole
other month at break neck pace doing a runoff election, which is enormously
stressful on the staff people. So there
are practical benefits financially, practical benefits to our staff people,
there are practical benefits in terms of, in a way, instant runoff voting is a
form of campaign finance reform in that the cost for my one month runoff was
nearly the same amount of money as the cost of my entire election. Because you’re down to the crunch and people
are like “Okay, well, I’m one of the top two so I’m going to spend every penny
I can.” So I had to go out and raise,
practically, the same amount of money for my runoff as I did for my original
election. And that, of course,
reinforces the power of money, and how important it is to get money, when if we
had instant runoff voting we could get the results earlier and you wouldn’t
have to be indebted to so many more people giving so much money to your
campaign.
Another impact, I’ve actually lived
in cities that use this form of government in the
And, you know, we have so many things
nowadays are instant. You know, all
kinds of fast food and everything. Not
that I’m advocating people should eat fast food, because I know the Legislature
has done good bills on healthy diets.
But people are used to getting their news instantly. And we could have much closer to instant election
results if we had instant runoff voting, where you get your results within
hours or days, rather than having to wait a month or more. So not only do we save money, but we also get
the information much faster.
My one final point has to do with, it
is assumed that cities who are charter cities, you know that,
And the County Councils Office of
Alameda County has not yet determined that the staff of
Thank you.
SENATOR BOWEN: Thank you. Questions?
Alright. Thank you very much.
MR. WORTHINGTON: Thank you.
SENATOR BOWEN: Let’s move onto Steve Chessin, David
Holtzman, and Christopher Jerdonek.
CHRISTOPHER JERDONEK: My name is Chris Jerdonek, and I’m
representing FairVote—The Center for Voting & Democracy today. And FairVote is a national nonpartisan,
nonprofit organization. They’re based in
I first want to thank all of you for
hosting this hearing. I think it’s
probably the first of its kind in
I wanted to just to talk to you about
the events that led up to where we’re at now in
Just to kind of give you some
background: For starters,
And just as a an aside, there are
about 40 universities in the United States that do use a ranked choice voting
system—either instant runoff voting or choice voting. And this is for students. So they’re kind of ahead of the curve in
democracy, I’d say, in the
But after UC Davis adopted choice
voting for their student government elections, the interest in student
government there increased a lot, and we saw a wider variety of students
getting represented at their student senate.
So last year, the city council in
And during that process we did a lot
of research on elections in
Then, at the end of this process with
the taskforce, the nine people, they nearly unanimously decided to recommend choice
voting. There were eight people
supporting, and one abstaining.
So then at this point in
And incidentally, the registrar in
Yolo County, even though Yolo County is a general law county, she is willing to
run a choice voting election for Davis, and they’re in the process of getting
new voting equipment now.
SENATOR BOWEN: That would be Freddy Oakley?
MR. JERDONEK: Yeah, that’s right. Freddy.
And we have about 2,000 people that have indicated their support for
choice voting in
And that’s about it. I do want to add one thing. Just my organization, FairVote, we’re
conducting an observation of the
Thank you.
SENATOR BOWEN: That’s in November, this upcoming
election?
MR. JERDONEK: Yeah, that’s right.
SENATOR BOWEN: Good.
Thank you. David, Steven.
DAVID HOLTZMAN: The handout is some of the slides that
I used in a longer presentation that I give to municipal and civic groups in
There’s two slides on a page. It’s like a PowerPoint presentation, so you
can envision having these projected on a screen.
The first slide on the first page is
titled “Instant Runoff Elections for a Better California Democracy.” And I’m calling it “better democracy,”
because the way I look at it, is that instant runoff elections are like paved
roads compared to the dirt roads we use now for our elections. And paved roads, as you know, are an
improvement, although they might take an initial investment to make that
improvement.
There’s a short biography of me below. And I want to, at this point, thank the
committee for having the hearing here in
I want to skip and do something out
of order to make sure I get to it. On
the bottom of page-3 is the slide which talks about the practical effects of
instant runoff elections. At the bottom
of that slide in brackets, there’s a notation that instant runoffs can save
time and money by eliminating separate runoff election days and lessening
demands on voters, activists, donors, government and the economy.
Now I used to work for the state and
there was something called the Senate Office of Research. I hope it hasn’t budget cut out of existence,
because I’d like to ask you to ask the Senate Office of Research, who always
did excellent work, to do an economic impact analysis of having extra election
days. I find that the argument that
resonates most with ________
Now, if you’ll flip back to the first
page, there’s a, it looks like a circle with two __________. That circle represents all the votes in an
election. And the lower piece has one
more vote than the other piece.
And this is a slide I used to
illustrate the principle of majority rules.
There’s no way that you can put together a coalition of one
candidate. There’s only one candidate or
coalition from the top _______ can _____________ has the majority. And the majority rule is based on the
principle of one person/one vote, and the idea that you need an unbeatable
amount of votes to win. And this
_______________ elections enable in a single winner election. And I have a slide on the back page that
illustrates _________ for multi-winner elections.
Really what I’d like to do right now
is address the biggest most common argument against instant runoff elections
for single winners that I’ve faced, even from people that support having
them. And it comes from the fact that
some people look at that slide and they don’t see just those votes, they see it
as money. They see that in the past
where they’ve been able to win primaries ___________ particularly, Republican
_________, Democratic __________ nonpartisan issue. They’ve been able to essentially win
elections on the cheek—slip by with a small plurality, get the nomination and
get the seat. And they’re afraid that,
from a campaign consultant’s perspective say, to win in an instant runoff
election, is to broaden your outreach to a majority. The plurality rule possibility to them
represents sort of affirmative action, and economically affirmative action,
because sometimes the big money candidate will cancel themselves out and
they’ll split the vote with similar messages and you can slip by. It’s a rare situation, but it’s been used and
has worked for certain economically disadvantages, candidates, women, and
minorities. They capitalize on this
situation.
But to answer this criticism, which
I’m sure you’ll hear, first of all, understand that it’s a crap shoot. You really don’t know if the situation is
going to happen to you. You may have
candidates just like you trying to do the same thing—splitting a vote. Also, now the candidates are getting more
money than they ever used to and learning to play the odds better, I don’t
think this way of winning elections is going to be available as easily for much
longer.
A second point, is that the internet
and grassroots __________ are to some extent leveling the playing field that we
have now. Public financing might be
doing the same thing as well.
And thirdly, is simply this idea that
a plurality should win __________ minority hijacked an election that does a
disservice to the electorate as a whole, or to the party if it’s a partisan
primary. Now it might make sense,
actually, to keep the system as it is for partisan primaries because you might
want a small activist group within your party to do the work for you and get
their candidate nominated because you know that they’ll still have the energy
to carry forth the party’s agenda once they’ve been elected. But again, I think it does a disservice to
the rest of the party, even in that situation, to let people win with just a
minority.
And I’ll leave it at that. If you have any questions on that point…
SENATOR BOWEN: Let me explore that for one moment with you
because when you talked about the big money candidates and what could happen, I
was actually reminded of an election in Los Angeles County in 1992, in which
Dick Floyd and Dave Elder had been redistrict….they were both sitting Assembly
members and they had been districted into the same district. And they spent an entire election basically
with their guns pointed at each other, and when the vote was counted, a young
African American woman named Juanita MacDonald had won the election,
undoubtedly with far less money than either candidate spent alone, not to
mention what they spent together.
And I guess my question is, was that
a bad result or a good result? You don’t
know the people, so I’m not asking you to pass judgment. But the voters clearly decided that they had
a preference other than one of the “mainstream” candidates. And I think some of the concerns that I hear
from people about this method of voting, is that it could actually make it more
difficult for a candidate who is not viewed as a mainstream candidate, to be
successful. And I’m sure Steve Chessin
can address that too.
I just heard you suggest that,
perhaps, that you would not use this system in a primary. That was a primary contest.
MR. HOLTZMAN: That was a primary contest. I think in general though, it’s more fair to
the entire electorate to require a majority support. They require the majority to support the
winning candidate even if it does mean that a campaign will be a little bit
more expensive. But what I also said, is
that there are other ways of reaching voters now and not just the expensive
television ads.
Dick Floyd, he was the assemblyman
who used to wear a cowboy hat a lot.
___________ cowboy party, I think I got invited to once.
UNIDENTIFIED: No.
You’re thinking of Peter Freschetta.
SENATOR BOWEN: Card clubs. Anyway ____________.
MR. HOLTZMAN: Any way, I don’t know if that was a
bad result because I don’t ___________ would have been.
SENATOR BOWEN: But I think what you’re seeing is one
of those results where, and I think the situation in East Palo Alto probably is
like this too, you have a large field of candidates and it’s very difficult to
tell how things will split, so you can get odd or unexpected results with, I
think, the point was made, that the more candidates there are, the smaller the
percentage of the vote you actually need in order to be successful in a winner
take all election.
MR. HOLTZMAN: And in some runoff elections sort
that out, add more fairness and predictability to the process. Perhaps the ultimate winner won’t be
predicted by the polls, but unexpected votes ___________ candidates _______
election results sensitive to small _____________particular candidate.
Are there any other questions on that
point?
Alright, let me quickly then run
through the rest of the presentation.
The top slide on page-2, I’m sure you all know the basics of instant
runoff elections. ________________ it’s
only one election.
The bottom slide points out what it
is to do a ranking. And for your benefit
and in speaking to future audiences, I found that the metaphor of needing a
back up menu choice in case the restaurant is out of your first choice, works
well for thinking about banking candidates.
And perhaps the restaurants of your second choice or third choice, what
else would you like to have for your meal?
The top of page-3, the slide about
principles and values, this is really probably the most important slide in the
presentation. The two principle reasons
for having instant runoff elections are, that they’re more fair in the current
system ______ most votes win when measured by the principles behind majority
rules which are, one person/one vote and take an unbeatable amount of votes to
win. And also, compared with the limited
vote for one nominee, instant runoff elections allow more full and free
expression by the voters when they vote.
And to pick up on Senator Battin’s concern earlier, this means that if
somebody is really most concerned with a sort of off the wall seeming but
emerging issue that represents some form of innovation, you want to give people
the opportunity to show support for that issue, even though I don’t think it
would necessarily mean that a candidate who stands for just that one issue will
end up having the day, but it will let the voters express their support for
that issue. And perhaps like what
happens when you have initiatives that almost pass but don’t pass, you’ll have
the Legislature see that ______________ issue and adopt some elements of the
platform or issue into law, because voters have had the chance to make that
statement publicly, and that’s an important effect of rank voting.
I think I’m going to skip then to the
last page. This slide I use to motivate
the __________ multi-winner elections.
It shows a pizza cut into several pieces. On the right you see one that’s cut into
almost four exact pieces but three of the pieces are a little bigger than the
last piece. Visualize a gain where
you’re going to get one of the three biggest pieces easily to win. Well, all you need is a piece of pizza that’s
a little bigger than a quarter of the pie, because we know three pieces of the
pie that are bigger than that. I think
it’s easiest to see when you put the pizza into quarters, but the same thing
applies for the circle on the left—when you’re electing two winners all you
need is a piece of the pie the vote that’s greater than one-third of the vote
to be assured to be one of the winners in a two winner election. And if you’re going to keep having separate
city primary elections, like we do in
Now, in
The city of
SENATOR BOWEN: But this changes as the
MR. HOLTZMAN: It was a punch card jurisdiction but
we now have a dot card, which is the same size equivalent. No better really in terms of voter user
interface.
SENATOR BOWEN: It’s an interim step toward something
else because…
MR. HOLTZMAN: And it’s the something else I’d like
to ask the state Legislature to provide some funds for, so that the county pave
the roads that we now have, pave the dirt roads that we now have as our
democracy.
The
I’ll take any questions if you have
them now.
SENATOR BOWEN: Good.
Questions? Mr. Chessin.
STEVE CHESSIN: Thank you very much. I’m Steve Chessin, president of Californians
for Electoral Reform. We’re a
nonpartisan statewide membership organization that promotes the implementation
of election methods such as, instant runoff voting, and forms of proportional
representation. We’ve been advocating
full representation since 1993. Our
membership spans the political spectrum.
We have Republicans and Democrats, Greens and Libertarians.
I want to thank Senator Bowen,
Senator Battin, and Assemblywoman Hancock, for being here and for organizing
this hearing.
And before I go on with my remarks, I
wanted to address the Juanita McDonald issue that you brought up. She probably was well liked because after
all, she did have the most votes, so in instant runoff voting she was not the
most first choice votes, and given how the other two candidates were attacking
each other, it’s highly unlikely that supporters of each of those candidates
would have listed her as their second choice as opposed to the one that was
__________ first choice. As a matter of
fact, we find that….we’ve done a study on some other elections where they’ve
used this system since the 1920s, and 95 percent of the time the person who got
the most first choice votes ends up winning anyway. About five percent of the time it’s the
person who came in second among first choice votes, where the first choice
finisher did not have the majority _______________ counting. In five percent of the cases, it’s the person
who came in second among the first choice winners __________ to win. And I think it was just one case out 400
where it was actually a third place finisher among first choices that ends up
with winning results. So the experience
of instant runoff voting pretty much parallels _____________ the first place
finisher usually wins.
We have activists in Californians
Electoral Reform working on instant runoff voting and choice voting from
SENATOR BATTIN: Oh, joy. What city?
MR. CHESSIN: I’m not sure about that.
As the first panel mentioned, instant
runoff elections will lead to a better democracy because they ensure majority
rule when they replace plurality elections, and they reduce the cost of
campaigning when they replace two-round runoffs.
Choice voting elections will also
lead to a better democracy, because they not only guarantee majority rule, but
also fair representation for the electoral minority in direct proportion to how
people vote. With more viewpoints
represented at the decision-making table, better decisions can be made.
And just as instant runoff voting
eliminates the spoiler effect in a winner take all situation, choice voting, a
proportional system, reduces the power of gerrymandering, making the question
of who draws the district lines much less important.
So I want to speak briefly about the
various efforts to convert to instant runoff voting and choice voting.
Beginning in 1998, after a year of
study,
As you heard earlier on this panel
from Chris Jerdonek, the governance taskforce in
And then just last month down south
in
There have been other efforts,
however, that have not been so successful.
In 2002, the mayor of Monte Sereno wanted to consider choice voting for
their city council, and the mayor of
Also in 2002, a citizens task force
in
As a matter of fact, a surprising
amount of resistance has come from registrars who perceive incorrectly, we
believe, that using these systems will make the job of election administration
unnecessarily burdensome. While there is
a learning curve in implementing these systems, the
SENATOR BOWEN: My recollection, that the Secretary
of State at that time was from
MR. CHESSIN: That is correct. That probably did. We now have a different secretary of
state. And this brings us to an
interesting Catch-22.
Many registrars are reluctant to
implement IRV without guidelines from the Secretary of State’s office. The Secretary of State would prefer to see
the Legislature take some action in this area before we have new
regulations. And the Legislature seems
to want to see more local use of instant runoff voting before passing
legislation. So breaking this deadlock
has been a challenge for us. We are
trying to convince registrars that they can proceed with implementing IRV and
choice voting for their client cities without waiting for state guidelines, but
not all have been receptive to our arguments.
We hope that the trails blazed by those willing registrars will encourage
their colleagues to follow. But state
legislation would certainly help in this matter.
Thank you very much and I’ll take any
questions the panel has.
SENATOR BOWEN: Senator Battin, did you have a
question?
SENATOR BATTIN: I’ve heard two reasons why people
think this is a good idea. One of them
concerns me, and the other one, I just would like to know what the source
is. And the second one is, you keep
saying this will cause a less likelihood of having negative campaigning. And where do you get that? Where does that come from other than your own
personal beliefs that that would be the case?
MR. CHESSIN: Well, we had that experience in
SENATOR BATTIN: Yeah, but that happens now. In city councils that are in the system that
we use currently they run a slate. It’s
going on in my area right now where two or three candidates are running
together—“Vote for me and her.” I mean,
that’s your city council team. They’re
doing that now.
MR. CHESSIN: Is this at-large or district?
SENATOR BATTIN: It’s at-large.
MR. CHESSIN: Right. Negative campaigning is less effective in at-large elections in general because…
SENATOR BATTIN: It doesn’t seem to be changing the outcome….what’s going on now. I’m saying, they’re running as a slate, and they’re negative campaigning.
MR. CHESSIN: You are saying negative campaigning ___________slates.
SENATOR BATTIN: No. I mean not between the two people that are running as a slate.
MR. CHESSIN: No, no. I’m saying one slate and another slate.
SENATOR BATTIN: Or they’re not all running in different slates, but they’re doing….it’s just anecdotal. I don’t understand how you can make that assertion that this will happen.
MR. CHESSIN: Well, let’s take instant runoff voting…
SENATOR BATTIN: And let me just, frankly, I don’t necessarily know what’s wrong with it either.
MR. CHESSIN: Negative campaigning?
SENATOR BATTIN: Yeah. You have to give people the ability to make their own minds up. If they don’t like it, they’re not going to vote for you. If they do like it, or if it does affect it, they’re going to vote accordingly. And it’s not the government’s in any way, shape, or form job to say what you can and cannot say during campaign. So I mean, if it happens, it happens. But to me, it’s not a selling point that this will diminish it, because I don’t believe that it will happen.
MR. CHESSIN: Well, as I’ve said, the experience has been that it does reduce negative campaigning. I mean, it’s not because any law mandates the reduction of negative campaigning, it’s just that the effect….let me explain this.
SENATOR BATTIN: Give me some examples.
MR. CHESSIN: In a one-on-one….in an election for a
single seat. Let’s take your traditional
two-winner runoff election, which
SENATOR BATTIN: What’s going to happen is that people are going start….the people that are perceived as not the frontrunner, they’re going to start attacking the person that is perceived as the frontrunner. That happens today, and it will happen under that system. And sometimes, that weakens the frontrunner to the point where he or she loses and somebody else prevails.
MR. CHESSIN: Well let me continue the example: ________ race, it’s not likely that anyone is going to get a majority, so two people are going to end up in a head to head race in a runoff. And in those one out of one races _______ increase because now if I throw mud at you, I might not convince someone to vote for me, but I might at least convince them to stay at home and sit out this election. And if I can reduce your turnout, people who would vote for you, that helps me. It doesn’t necessarily help me in the first race, unless like you said, I’m way behind which in case it’s ___________ perceived as such and I probably won’t make the runoff anyway. But if I am in the runoff and I start throwing mud at you, that will help me ________because if I throw mud at you, you have to respond. You have to throw mud at me. And you see…
SENATOR BATTIN: No, I don’t. I’m going to respond how I strategically feel will best affect the outcome of the election.
MR. CHESSIN: This is true.
SENATOR BATTIN: And, if you and I end up in a runoff, all those other people out there, it’s not a blank slate. They’re not all going to forget who we were. They’re all going to carry their impressions about who we are into the runoff. They’re going to think, “Well, you know, he was a jerk. That guy is a jerk. ________ campaign. I’m not going to vote for him.” Or, “Jeez, did you hear about how bad this other guy is? He doesn’t buy Girl Scout cookies. I’m not going to vote for him.” People are affected by it differently. And I just don’t believe that you’re going to change it.
MR. CHESSIN: Well, you also have a different electorate in a runoff election.
SENATOR BATTIN: You have a different electorate everywhere you go.
MR. CHESSIN: (inaudible)
SENATOR BATTIN: No.
But I do, and it should be pointed out.
You have different people; that’s the beauty of our country. It’s not lost on me that
MR. CHESSIN: I just want to make two points here. One is that
SENATOR BATTIN: I represent
MR. CHESSIN: Okay. So you do know.
And the second
point, we are not looking for legislation to require that these systems be
used. We are looking for legislation
that would allow cities, that do want to use these systems, the ability to use
these systems to make it easier for them and give the counties that serve them
to implement these systems so they can experiment with these systems. Well we’re just basically asking that the
option be open for that. We’re not
mandating that _______________.
Seventy-two percent of the people in Berkeley, and 72 percent of the
people in
SENATOR BATTIN: Well, the state’s in the way. I mean, it’s not like the state took a proactive position to be in the way, it’s the way it’s always been, and now you people want to come in and change it.
The second thing
that concerns me is something I’ve heard everybody say, which is, “Well, this
is easier and cheaper to do, so therefore we should do it.” Honestly it would be easier and cheaper if I
decided who was going to be the city council in
MR. CHESSIN: I think people should buy it because it leads to better democracy.
SENATOR BATTIN: Well, that’s a point that we can argue on. But the other ones, I’m bothered by. But consistently everybody has said that.
MR. CHESSIN: Well, it is true, that if you go from two-round runoff to instant runoff _____________.
SENATOR BATTIN: Well, I don’t know about that either. You just don’t know. I mean, you can’t make that statement.
MR. CHESSIN: Candidates raise and spend as much money as they can to try to avoid runoff.
SENATOR BATTIN: Right. And McCain-Feingold was going to take the money out of politics too, wasn’t it? But we had the most expensive elections that we’ve ever had in the history of our country under McCain-Feingold. And that’s what it’s going to do…
MR. CHESSIN: (inaudible)
SENATOR BATTIN: But what’s going to happen instead of holding back saying, “Well, if I make the runoff I’ve got to go re-raise all this money, you’re going to have everybody go completely all out. So you’re going to see elections actually increase, and even those elections that might have been put to bed when somebody got 50 percent plus one and there is no runoff, well, now, you’re going to see people who would at one point might hold back because they know they’re going to win, everybody is going to go all out. You’re going to see a lot more money in the front end, because you can only go to a donor so many times.
SENATOR BOWEN: Do we know what happened in
MR. CHESSIN: Yeah. That part of…
SENATOR BOWEN: That’s not your part.
MR. CHESSIN: Yeah.
SENATOR BOWEN: Well, we’ll find that out. I think it will be interesting to know. I mean, it does strike me that if you have to appeal to more voters across the board, you will spend more money in the primary because…
MR. CHESSIN: _________ how much money ___________
SENATOR BOWEN: But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. And raising money…
MR. CHESSIN: I don’t think it’s going to be twice as much.
SENATOR BOWEN: I think this whole discussion highlights another problem, which is the way that we finance campaigns. It’s ridiculous, but that’s not the subject of this hearing.
MR. CHESSIN: (inaudible)
MR. HOLTZMAN: Senator Battin, if I can address your
concerns. First of all, briefly, the
Campaign for Better Elections is not really a Republican free zone. There are republicans in my group. And Steve Soberhoff, who you probably know
from the Southland, is a developer who ran for major of
SENATOR BATTIN: And I saw that our recently departed finance director, former Congressman Tom Campbell, is also in supporter of this charter. Okay.
MR. HOLTZMAN: It’s bipartisan. But as far negative campaigning goes, let me tell you. When I worked with the group that’s upstairs I was a scientist doing statistical analysis, so I’m a “show me the data” kind of person. And I’ll tell you that what Steve’s talking about in terms of negative campaigning makes sense as a model, or a mechanism, but I haven’t seen the data to support it, and it’s not an argument that I use when I do my work with my group in Los Angeles County because I don’t know whether or not it’s true that negative campaigning will be reduced. Still, it’s a nice wish, perhaps.
SENATOR BATTIN: The only way negative campaigning will ever be reduced is when people stop being influenced by it. The moment that happens, sunshine and flowers will break out upon the political world, and that’s what will happen. I’m telling you, as long as it works, it will be used.
MR. CHESSIN: I’m with you on that. I don’t see it not working. Unfortunately, _____________ and I just wanted to reassure you that it’s not an argument that’s necessary and it’s not an argument that I use when I advocate for these improved systems.
And also with regards to funding, the easier and cheaper point. People do say it will be easier and cheaper. And in the long run, if you had a system where you have fewer election days, it would save the government money.
SENATOR BATTIN: __________ government money _______.
MR. CHESSIN: And this goes to my request that I made up front in my presentation. That one or both of you, please ask the Senate Office of Research for an economic analysis to settle this point.
SENATOR BATTIN: I don’t even know why you even need to, because it has to.
MR. CHESSIN: Not just the fiscal analysis, but the economic analysis. The waste of time for voters, activists being diverted from other causes, donors to give more or less money, and just the economic impact of having an election day that people have to go through. If you could add that to the analysis, I certainly appreciate it, because it’s a big question. And like I say, it’s the argument, even though it’s not one of the two principled arguments I make, the two principled arguments, instant runoffs are more fair and they allow more full and free expression, but the idea for Angelinos, that they could be spared an extra election day and that maybe at some point all the elections will be once a year in November in an even numbered year, that appeals to people more than the principles. I should just let you know that. People don’t want to have to go through too many elections.
SENATOR BATTIN: Well, I understand that.
SENATOR BOWEN: (off mike) But in the 53rd Assembly district the parts _________ the city of Los Angeles which is ____________ represent, people have voted for mayor and city council, and gone to a mayoral and city council runoff. Then they had a special election to fill the seat vacated by Mike Gordon’s passing. And they are going to the polls again in November, and then next year they go into their regular elections cycle. The demands on the volunteers who work polls on the cities and county have done just extraordinary. And not to mention trying to get people engaged with that many elections. It’s really…
SENATOR BATTIN: Isn’t it the reason that a lot of cities got off their November track was encouragement from the state wanting to save money years ago? I mean, if Palm Springs is going to vote for city council and Desert Hot Springs is going to vote for city council in November and then special elections are, I’m going to say, 40 cities around the state are doing that, that are off track on an odd number year, bringing them all back would cost the state more money, because it would become the state’s burden instead of the local government.
SENATOR BOWEN: (Where I’ve seen the argument about that, it’s been very much concern at the local level about the impact on the local politics of having either a gubernatorial and presidential election at the same time. So it hasn’t been about the funding __________ for example, will we lose the essential character ________________ and will we have a big drop off where people aren’t paying attention to the city council or school board races if we vote on the fifth card that people get, and will they just be sick of it as ___________ judiciary races and ___________________ . And I think the concern, at least in come of the localities is really about whether people will pay less attention. Other people probably think it’s a good idea ____________. I’m sure that it won’t shock you to hear that were also partisan overtones sometimes to the question about whether consolidated elections are better or not __________.
MR. HOLTZMAN: And I should tell you, Senator Battin,
cities in
SENATOR BATTIN: They’re rebuffed by the county?
MR. HOLTZMAN: By the county, because the county’s election equipment is inadequate and now the county has a policy.
SENATOR BATTIN: Because I live in the city of
MR. HOLTZMAN: I understand the unfunded mandate concern
SENATOR BATTIN: But I would rather have this discussion be on is it better democracy, because that’s the argument. And you’re going to make the argument argument there. You just get me all riled up when you say it’s going to be cheaper, people are going to be nicer. They’re not. And it won’t. They’re going to do….candidates are going to do what it takes to win. That means they’re going to spend more money, if they can raise more money, and they’re going to use negative campaigning if it is effective. If it doesn’t work, they’re not going to use it. If you pay a price for it, they’re not going to use it. You know, McCain-Feingold did not take money out of politics. It drove it underground. Prop 34 did the same thing.
SENATOR BOWEN: I’m not sure __________ independent expenditures just mean the money is…
SENATOR BATTIN: Right.
So, I mean, okay, we’re going to limit the amounts of money? All they do in
SENATOR BOWEN: Let me go back to the comment that that raises another discussion on how campaigns are funded.
________ with this panel?
SENATOR BATTIN: Sure.
SENATOR BOWEN: Okay. Let’s do that. I think we have a good idea about some of the benefits of this. We didn’t get to hear from Elaine Ginnold who’s the Registrar of Voters. She’s here now. And I want to thank you very much for taking time today ____________________
ELAINE GINNOLD: Well, I want to apologize for being late. I had a command performance I had to go to.
SENATOR BOWEN: You’re here. That’s great.
MS. GINNOLD: Okay, my name is Elaine Ginnold. I’m the acting Registrar of Voters in
And one of the obstacles to conducting those kinds of elections in the county during a consolidate election is, that there are currently no state guidelines or state election laws to either certify election equipment, or to conduct IRV elections as part of a consolidated election in the county either for the city who wants to do that, or for county offices. And right now, it’s unclear what authority the county has to do that to conduct those IRV elections for a city. If a city wants to conduct an IRV election on its own, it would have write its own rules and have them certified by the Secretary of State like San Francisco did in the November 2004 election, but it’s not desirable for every city to do this because it would lead to different forms of IRV elections in each city and throughout the state. That would be a problem.
It would be a
problem for vendors because all of these different ways of vote counting have
to be certified and their equipment has to be certified. And for election officials to do this, for
example to conduct IRV elections for three separate cities in our county, where
three different rules would be pretty much impossible in a consolidated
election. It would be totally chaotic. So since June, in Alameda County we have
gotten together an instant runoff voting task force and the membership in that
are League of Women Voters members, city clerks, elected officials from the
three cities, IRV activists and experts like the three you heard from, and
interested citizens. There’s quite a lot
of interest in
The task force explored three options for the elections. And one is, that these charter cities that want to do IRV, can write their own legislation; put it into an ordinance; find their own vendor; and go and do their own elections. That’s one option.
The other option would be to conduct a parallel election with the county during the consolidated election. Now the reason that the cities want to do their IRV elections during a consolidated election is that the costs are much, much lower during a consolidated election. First, there’s a standalone election, when they have to pay for everything. In a consolidated election, they’re sharing the ballot with all the other jurisdictions that are on the ballot.
Now the third option is, that the county conducts an IRV election as part of its consolidated election, which is the desirable thing for the cities to do.
Our task force developed a draft…
SENATOR BOWEN: What’s the difference between the first and the third? I’m not…
MS. GINNOLD: Okay, the first one, a charter city can do basically whatever it wants.
SENATOR BOWEN: So it’s consolidated but the city does certification?
MS. GINNOLD: No. The first option is that the charter cities….this is one of the ones that we proposed. The charter cities all get together. They find their election date. They write their legislation for IRV, and they have a standalone election just those three cities. That’s one option. But that isn’t really acceptable to them. They like the consolidated election because of the high turnout that you have in November, and also because of the much lower costs. And by lower costs I mean, standalone election costs between three and four dollars per registered voter. A consolidated election is between fifty cents and a dollar per registered voter for the jurisdiction, so that’s significant for them. And it’s a real argument for doing it during a consolidated election.
So as I was saying, the task force developed a draft roadmap that lays out the rules for IRV elections for cities and counties who want to do that. I have it here for you to look at.
What we did in that roadmap is to narrowly craft it so that it applies to charter cities who want to do this and for counties who will agree to do this for them. But what I need as an election official, is I need a guideline. I don’t need three separate guidelines, I need one guideline, and that needs to come from the state, in my perspective.
There are legal issues surrounding this. And our county council has written a draft legal analysis and that’s being reviewed right now.
Looking at these three different options to see what legally the county can do, because as you know, the county is an agent of the state. And our guidelines in the election office for doing these elections is the state elections code. We don’t take city charters and say, “Okay, they want us to do it this way now. We’ll do it that way.” We cannot do that, especially in a consolidated election because of all the other jurisdictions that are also on that ballot.
So my recommendation is to support the creation of state guidelines. We’re not even sure if this has to be in state law. But there needs to be some uniform guideline that the vendors can follow, that the county elections officials can follow, for the cities that want to do this in their counties whether it’s in a consolidated election or a standalone with the county helping. And we need to have these laws or guidelines that set forth the rules for conducting the elections.
And the other recommendation I would have, is to work now with the Secretary of State’s office to develop such a statewide standard. I wrote a letter to the Secretary of State back in September and got a response. In the letter I asked if the Secretary of State would be interested in forming a study group or a task force to look all of the issues surrounding instant runoff voting and the guidelines that are needed. And the response I got back was that, yes, they’re considering that, and they’re considering establishing a task force or a committee to study instant runoff voting, and he would be making his decision about that soon.
That’s all I have to say. I’m not arguing for this from a philosophical basis, but it’s more from a practical standpoint of an election official who is willing to conduct one of these elections, but really has no guidelines to do it except the ones that we created.
SENATOR BOWEN: Thank you. Questions? (inaudible) people who would like to testify _____________ Nancy Bickel.
NANCY BICKEL: Yes. I am Nancy Bickel. I’m currently the chair of the Alameda County Council of the seven Leagues of Women Voters in Alameda County, but I’m here….the statement is a joint statement with the State League. Since you are a state body, it has to be the State League.
So, the League of Women Voters of California strongly supports instant runoff voting as a way to increase voter participation in elections and to save governments the cost of holding runoff elections. We believe it will contribute to strengthening our democracy. Since turnout for conventional runoff elections is usually much lower than turnout for general elections, winners of runoff elections may be elected by a much smaller number of voters than if they had been elected at a general election. This is all very familiar to you, I know. So we feel that IRV will enable more voters to help select their elected officials. This will help citizens to see that their participation matters and therefore will encourage more citizens to vote. Encouraging the broadest possible participation in our democracy is a key mission of the League of Women Voters.
The League in
Local study of IRV
makes support for IRV particularly strong in
League members
from throughout the county serve on Acting Registrar of Voters Elaine Ginnold’s
IRV Committee, which as she has just reported, has drafted an IRV roadmap, or
model, ordinance. Our participation here
is just one part of our effort to implement instant runoff voting at the local
level as soon as possible.
Instant runoff voting has also been an important part of the Oakland League’s efforts over the past five years to elect, rather than appoint, candidates to interim vacancies on the city council and the office of mayor, and to expand the number of voters participating in these important special elections. Working with a multi-ethnic coalition of community groups to achieve electoral reform, members have demonstrated the IRV system in senior centers, political clubs and local churches. This public education outreach effort provides a good model for future voter education on instant runoff voting.
The League wants
IRV to become a realistic option for elections in the three
The Secretary of State’s office needs criteria for evaluating proposed IRV election equipment and computer programs, as you heard from Ms. Ginnold just now, so that there is some uniformity and people know if they’re doing it right. When state standards and criteria are developed, vendors will be able to design and market appropriate equipment. Local governments will be able to consider IRV as a practical option. Citizens and local governments will, we believe, adopt….many will adopt IRV as a reform that saves money, and even more important, expands democracy.
SENATOR BOWEN: Thank you very much. Dave Kadlecek will be next and then Michelle Gabriel.
DAVE KADLECEK: My name is Dave Kadlecek. And I didn’t put down an organization because I was trying to figure out which of two hats to put down _________ depending on what other people, the invited speakers said in testimony, one of which was going to be based on what Councilmember Kernighan said and since she hasn’t spoken yet I’ll just say what I was going to say about Oakland and talk about the other stuff.
I have been active
in campaigning to get the city of
So that was the
information I wanted to provide you about
The other hat I was going to wear is as one of the multiple parties that are participating in Californians for Electoral Reform. I’m an activist in the Peace and Freedom Party. Peace and Freedom and the other smaller parties like, the Greens and the Libertarians, are active along with Democrats and Republicans and Californians for Electoral Reform.
To a certain extent, the Electoral reform for instant runoff voting and for proportional representation has been seen as an issue of smaller parties to try and get what they couldn’t get through the current election systems. And I realized that this hearing is primarily about how to deal with nonpartisan elections for local governments—cities, counties, school boards, special districts, etc. However, changing how things are done there will have an impact on how things may be done in the future for partisan selection, so this somewhat relevant.
What
I wanted to say is that it’s not true that Peace and Freedom Party, the Green
Party, Libertarians, American Independent Party, etc., would automatically get
huge numbers of votes and representation as a result of simply using instant
runoff voting or abusing proportional representation. What we tend to believe is that we’ll get
more votes because people now don’t vote for us who actually agree with what we
have to say. And that’s true of Peace
and Freedom, it’s true of the Greens, it’s true of the Libertarians, and I
think you’ll find that there actually are even some members of the Assembly and
the state Senate who would maybe rather be Peace and Freedom, or Green, or
Libertarian, in their points of view but stay in Democratic or Republican
parties because they figure that that’s the only way they can win
elections. But in any case if smaller
parties get the same percentage of votes, same level of support that they do
now at elections, this won’t change the results, that we’ll still have only
Democrats and Republicans elected. If
the parties do better as we believe that we would, then we would have some
elected members of parties besides Democrats and Republicans in the Legislature
and in Congress from
Thank you.
SENATOR BOWEN: Thank you very much for coming. Coming up after Alan, we’ll have Michelle Gabriel and then Courtney Wong, followed by Sennet Williams.
ALAN DECHERT: I’m Alan Dechert. I’m president of the Open Voting Consortium. And since some of you may not know who we
are, this is the
On our website we, in our demo ballot, we have an example of ranked choice voting.
First of all, I want to say that Open Voting Consortium has no position on voting methods. We are committed to supporting whatever methods are in use. We strongly agree that we need standards. And we strongly feel that open source software is highly conducive to standards. It’s hard to have file formats. It’s hard to have programming standards. When those standards are secret, or when the software itself is secret, you can have standards where everything is open.
And I might add, that if you use Fire Fox on our sample on the web, the ranked choice works perfectly. The way we have it designed, each candidate that you select, that becomes the ranking in terms of the order that you make your selection. There are bugs in Internet Explorer, Microsoft’s product, that we weren’t able to make that work correctly under that. So we highly recommend…..and Fire Fox as you know, is open source, free software.
SENATOR BOWEN: You have a couple of Fire Fox people up here. We’ll test it both ways.
MR. DECHERT: Thank you very much.
SENATOR BOWEN: Michelle Gabriel. Welcome.
MICHELLE GABRIEL: Thank you. Good afternoon. My name is Michelle Gabriel. I’m a citizen of
And I feel that there are three cities in Alameda County that have democratically voted by a large majority that they want instant runoff voting, and that our government should be supporting us by trying to put this in place as soon as possible.
And so what we
should be looking at is, what are the obstacles to try to implement this? And what I’m hearing here is, one of the
major obstacles is that there aren’t any state standards, and that’s one of the
things that’s preventing IRV. And to me
as a citizen, that doesn’t make any sense.
Because, what we’re looking at is that
I think that for any major change that’s going be recommended in anything in general, you need to have early adopters who go through the whole experience, learn things, and then make recommendations. And if we wait years for the state to come up with standards that were written by people that haven’t actually done any of the work or experienced any of the problems, we’ll be here five years from now with the same discussion about what are we doing; and how are we doing it; and why? This isn’t something that has an easy standard to do. Obviously there’s a lot of different variations to it.
And I really feel
that given the strong support that’s been shown in
Now right now all of the counties are in this incredible position of having to upgrade all of their voting systems in order to meet the HAVA requirements in January, and also to meet the APAC standards. And so many counties have RFPs out and are buying new systems.
Now this is an opportunity to seize the time to have IRV. When you have HAVA funds to pay for it. Not years from now when you say, “Okay, now we have standards and now let’s see, our supplier is saying it’s going to cost
$3 million. Where are we going to get that money?” You have the money right now. You have the suppliers right now who already
have it. Yet we have the RFP for
As was said
earlier, when
And I would urge our
elected officials on all levels to help the citizens get what they want in
Thank you.
SENATOR BOWEN: Courtney Wong.
VIVIEN WONG: Hi, I’m Vivien Wong. I’m with Asian Americans for Civil Rights and
Equality, a statewide project of Center for Asian American Advocacy, Asian Law
Caucus, and
I just wanted to come today and let you know, to testify in support of ranked choice voting systems because of our belief that they will increase electoral participation for the Asian Pacific American community.
One positive
benefit of the ranked choice voting system is that it does allow for maximum
participation of voters in being able to decide on the winner of an
election. A study of
Another positive benefit is that we feel that ranked choice voting will increase fair representation for our communities because often it does allow people to rank multiple candidates that they choose from their community. It also promotes more cross racial collaborations where even though a community may want to vote for a particular candidate, voters individually have choices to vote for candidates of other ethnic communities, or other different types of communities, and so it does increase the potential for cross racial collaborations.
We’ve actually
already seen some benefits that have come out of ranked choice voting in other
jurisdictions that have implemented it.
For example, in
What we found in
There are
concerns, I think, about the need to continually provide outreach and education
for voters, including information in different languages to reach voters that
may not be aware of this system. But we
do feel that implementation has shown that ranked choice voting is very popular
with voters. And with the proper
education, outreach can be very beneficial.
For example, a poll of
So because of these positive benefits and our belief that it will increase participation and representation for Asian Americans, we are strongly supportive of this system.
Thank you.
SENATOR BOWEN: Thank you very much. I really want to thank _________ for his _____ analogy. I think, I never heard a more eloquent way of explaining to people of how it works. Anybody who has ever flown on plane and asked for a Pepsi ________ Coke, knows what it means to make second choice.
Let’s see, Sennet Williams.
SENNET WILLIAMS: Thank you. So I wanted to address voter trends a little
more than has been addressed already.
One thing is that while ranked choice voting has been used for many
years in
SENATOR BOWEN:
MR. WILLIAMS:
SENATOR BOWEN: Just think of the car guys.
MR. WILLIAMS: Okay, so this is why our local cities are passing it. It’s passing everywhere, that it’s becoming an issue nationwide. Several newspapers a week are endorsing IRV, if you pay attention. And there’s no organized opposition. And see if you look at individual cities, what the effect is, if they can get a ten percent higher turnout by modernizing their election systems, that means that the local politicians running for state office and the city in general, will have more influence in statewide elections. So the more cities that pass IRV by the next election, is if they have consolidated elections with the state and local elections, then they’re going to have a lot more influence in the state. And that’s why the momentum is building really fast for cities to pass IRV nationwide.
I’m glad that Pat Kernighan is here because she, like if you pay attention to what happened in her last race, you can see what happens to candidates who support IRV or don’t support it, okay. She was already the frontrunner and came out that she supported IRV, and within a couple of weeks had joined saying that they supported it too. And Pat Kernighan still won. And hopefully we’re going to get some progress for Oakland IRV this year.
And there’s
another analogy that I think you could use if you look at the game of
baseball. You could imagine what it was
like if the batter only got one chance to hit the ball. That’s what the current election system is
like, and that’s why a lot of people don’t vote. Because, if you look back at Pat Kernighan’s
race, two-thirds of the voters, their vote didn’t count. More than two-thirds. And the same thing happened in
And, if you want to find out for yourself, I brought a couple hot off the press IRV t-shirts that you can wear at public appearances and see how many voters would like to have their second choice counted, and how many voters don’t. And you’ll find out for yourself that there’s no opposition and lots of support. And so I hope that you can help move the state forward as quickly as possible.
I have a couple of
t-shirts here in honor of the senators and congressmen here. But anybody who wants one can contact me
because we have more on the way. And
there’s also some pretty well written documents about IRV by Jesse Jackson,
Jr., and the coverage of the recent
Thank you. Also, I can answer any questions about this too because I’ve been actually working on the issue a long time. And if you want more discussion about how it helps minority voters, for example.
SENATOR BOWEN: Great. Thanks. I’d actually like to have a copy of Jesse Jackson’s ____________.
And Pat Kernighan is here. Thank you very much. __________ welcome you.
PAT KERNIGHAN: Thank you. I am Pat Kernighan, the recently elected
District 2 city council member from
In the year 2000,
There is still some disagreement among city council members whether they would like to implement instant runoff voting. But one of the excuses always is, do we have the equipment; is it physically possible; how does it work? They really want to understand the mechanics of it before they go forward with it.
So I am here to encourage everybody—the state, the county, and everybody else, to make it practically possible to have instant runoff voting and have it very understandable to the public and to policymakers how it works so it eliminates the uncertainty or fear of what it does.
Though I
understand some discussion has already taken place about the recent special
election in District 2 in
So, I encourage state policymakers to do what it takes to make instant runoff voting a possibility in general law cities throughout the state.
And I’m here to answer any questions you might have.
SENATOR BOWEN: Thank you.
Senator Battin, question? I’m
looking forward to seeing ________________ a better handle on what the concerns
are ________
Thanks for joining us.
We have a couple of people who want to testify. I’ve got Jon, and then Rob Dickinson, Jerry Berkman, Cat Woods __________________.
JON BARRILLEAUX: I want to thank you guys for holding the
hearing to educate the public and political officials on this subject. My name is Jon Barrilleaux. I’m a citizen of
Public and elected officials have been working for years to get common sense election reform like IRV in the county and in the cities here.
Major cities in
So, the time for excuses, it’s over. I mean, people don’t want to wait another three years for yet another RFP and yet another election system upgrade to get ranked choice voting in these cities and in this county. Even if it’s not immediately used. Because for whatever reason, we need to wait for state rules and regulations and all this stuff, although there seems to be some serious debate as to whether that’s necessary. So even if it’s not immediately used, having the ability to do ranked choice voting will remove a major inconvenient excuse for not having it. At least we’ll be ready. It will be one less impediment to deal with.
Thank you.
SENATOR BOWEN: Thank you. Mr. Dickinson.
ROB DICKINSON: Senator Bowen, thank you for having this
hearing. My name is Rob Dickinson. I chair a group in
I think the answer is unequivocally, yes. And what I’d like to do is go over a little bit of some of the research that’s been done on San Francisco’s recent election.
This research was
done both by
I’m pleased to see in the audience that Professor De Leon, who sponsored much of this research, is here as well, so he may be able to answer questions that I can’t.
But the key thing
that the research shows, and this was research done multiple different analysis
of over 5,000 voters, is that
And in the Chinese American Voter Education Committee’s survey, of those expressing an opinion, a full 71 percent said they liked instant runoff voting. And among absentee voters, seven times as many people preferred the new system as the old, which is an overwhelming statistic.
And then to the point of, is it better for democracy? I think we know a couple of things about voters in terms of what turns them off from the political process. If they feel like they have to vote for the lesser of evils, if they don’t feel like they can vote for their preferred candidate because they think that candidate doesn’t stand the best chance of winning, that makes people somewhat cynical about the whole system. I think the whole idea of democracy is, you should get to vote for the person or candidate that you think both best represents your views and would best serve the public. And if you don’t feel that you can do that, I don’t think that’s really good for building democracy.
One of the things about this survey found is that a huge number of voters, 46 percent versus 3 percent, felt that they were much more likely to be able to vote sincerely because of instant runoff voting. I think it’s things like that that lets people want to participate, and will participate, and voter participation will rise.
____________ heard
the negative campaigning argument before we discussed that. It’s not clear exactly what the answer is,
but I know the New York Times did do a story on
The other thing is, do people’s votes count? So if you prefer a candidate who is not the frontrunner and you vote for them and they lose, your vote may not count in the sense that if, say, your candidate is one of the minority candidates your vote didn’t help towards electing a winner. If you had a ranked system, you could still vote for the candidate you prefer but then if that candidate doesn’t have a chance or doesn’t do well, it can transfer to the next viable candidate. So as a result, your vote is more likely to actually be effective and voters felt that. _________ voters felt their vote was less likely wasted with IRV than the old system—21 percent versus 7 percent of people who had an opinion.
And then probably one
of the more telling statistics is what happened to people who came in with a
preconceived notion about the system before the
The other thing before I close is, I’d like to….one of the things that maybe was confusing in the earlier testimony is the discussion between elections for single winner versus city councils. I think civil rights advocates have long known that at-large elections disenfranchise minority voters. If the largest block of voters vote together for the whole slate of candidates, as Mr. Battin was referring to earlier, that whole slate can win even if a significant part of the population prefers other candidates. So 51 percent or 60 percent can control the whole representation, and I personally don’t think that’s right or fair. We want the majority to rule, but we also want the minority to be represented.
And I’ll close
with a quote from my registrar in
Thank you.
SENATOR BOWEN: Thank you. Jerry Berkman; Cat Woods; and then Jim Soper.
JERRY BERKMAN: Hi.
I’m Jerry Berkman, a citizen in
SENATOR BOWEN: We’re actually here to discuss the concept of ______ and my bill allowed cities and counties. I had trouble moving that, so you could imagine how I would have ______________.
MR. BERKMAN: Well, okay. Well, after they get used to it, I hope it would expand to statewide offices and Assembly and state Senate and House and Senate.
SENATOR BOWEN: Thank you. Cat Woods.
CAT WOODS: Hello. My name is Cat Woods. I am representative to the Green Party of California Coordinating Committee, and also a member of the Green Party’s Electoral Reform Working Group.
Like Senator Battin, I get very frustrated of that and irrelevant arguments regarding this topic. The central issue is democracy—how do you improve democracy? And what democracy is about is, how do you best represent voter preferences?
This question has been studied exhaustively for hundreds of years. _________ was studying it and coming up with voting methods back in the late 1700s. And also, it’s used all the time in marketing research. When corporations who want to find out what consumers are doing, they use the best methods of representing voter preferences. They don’t use plurality. They use one of the rank choice methods. Because by objective democratic standards, a ranked choice methods is better than plurality voting. Plurality voting is the worst method by objective standards.
There are fairness criteria, five fairness criteria, that are used to evaluate democracy. One interesting side light is that, it’s already been proven that you can’t satisfy all five of them simultaneously. However, those same fairness criteria are used to say which ones do a better job.
A voting method that is more susceptible to what we call gaming is not as good as one that is very susceptible. Plurality voting is the most susceptible to gaming. Gaming is when you vote for something other than you really believe in order to try and effect the outcome. So, what we call lesser evilism is just a rampant form of gaming in our society. Allowing people to vote what they really believe, which would be to put their first choice first and their lesser evils ranked afterwards, would allow us to really represent the voters preferences more accurately.
And I campaigned last year for an independent candidate quite a few places in the country and what I found out is the arguments given to me here in the Bay Area were, “You know, we have to vote for the lesser evil, so we can’t vote for what we really believe.” And I found the exact same arguments when I went to red states. You know, they were voting for the lesser evil. This lesser evilism has really kind of taken away our democracy. And I think that reducing that, will objectively improve our democracy.
And I really want to thank Senator Bowen for putting forward her
SB 596, and point out that that bill simply allows us to have the option. I think that the state disallowing objectively better versions of democracy is absolutely absurd. You know, we’re not allowed to do it because the state says so. I think it’s the duty of the government as a provider of a democracy, to allow those options, allow the locals to decide, “Okay, actually it is important to us to represent our voter preferences better.”
Thank you.
SENATOR BOWEN: Thank you. Jim Soper.
JIM SOPER: Good afternoon. My name is Jim Soper. I’m a voter here in
What
I wanted to address was this democracy issue.
I’ve lived in
One, I believe that they have more confidence in their system and that the votes are being counted as they cast them. But they also have more choice. They’ll have five or six parties so that they can go out and vote for somebody, not just against the lesser of two evils. And I think that’s important. The people will want to go out and vote for something.
I think we need to have more parties in this state and in this country. And I see IRV as one way of encouraging that. Because when people don’t have to throw their vote away by supporting a Libertarian party or American Independent Party, they’re going to feel better about it and then they can come in with a second choice there to put in their second choice. And it also helped the minority parties by giving them more visibility, because the voters will have second and third choices to think about, not just their first choice that maybe a habit to choose somebody. Now, who am I going to take for second, so they’re going to think more about the issues, and I think that’s good for everybody.
I’m
going back in my memory here back in the cobwebs, but I think there was a real
world case where John Lindsey ran for mayor as an independent in the seventies
in
And
long-term thinking here, I would hope that
Thank you very much.
SENATOR BOWEN: Thank you. Thank you to everyone who participated, who came to talk about ranked choice and instant runoff voting and for really ____________ pros and cons. We will post _____ website and we’ll continue to look for feedback and positive ways to make democracy fairer. And I think one of the really great things about this hearing is that _______ people who really want to make democracy work. How can we not be inspired by that?
Senator.
SENATOR BATTIN: You know, if you aren’t voting, if you feel
that you don’t have the choice and you’re voting for somebody you don’t want
to, that’s shame on you for doing that.
You should be voting for the candidate that you want and supporting the
candidate that you want. And I find it
ironic that we’re sitting in the
Now, I served with Audi and I know her and her mistake was, on her re-election she decided she was going to try to become clever in playing with the partisan games and went independent and thought about becoming a democrat. She should have just stayed where she was and she very well weathered the storm that she had the first time. But I mean, that’s the best example in the world, is the fact that we’re sitting here in a building named after the losing candidate for state Assembly who was defeated by a Green Party member. So it can happen.
SENATOR BOWEN: That’s why we held the hearing here.
SENATOR BATTIN: Some irony there. It can happen. And I appreciate the topic. As you probably all well know, I don’t agree
with the position on it, but I do certainly have an interest in it or I
wouldn’t have gotten up at
Thank you.
SENATOR BOWEN: Thank you. We are adjourned.
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