Aspen CO 2009: IRV mayoral & city council STV elections
Not exactly an inspiring success either for STV, or for accurate vote-counting
Rob Richie, the director of FairVote, a Washington DC based
IRV-advocacy group, traveled to Aspen to testify before the town council and urge Aspen to
switch to an "instant runoff" (IRV) election system.
Another IRV-advocate who did the same was Caleb Kleppner, one of the founders of TrueBallot Inc,
a company selling IRV vote-counting software.
Kleppner also was listed as a FairVote "senior advisor."
It worked. A Nov. 2007
referendum
decided on IRV by 72%. Unfortunately only 837 voters
participated in this referendum (16% turnout) so this was not as decisive a victory as it might
have seemed.
The first IRV elections duly occurred on 5 May 2009 (for mayor) and at the same time
the city council was elected using (rather
peculiar nonproportional)
STV rules. The reason for the peculiar nature of these STV rules was that the new
system was intended
to simulate Aspen's old runoff system, but "instantly."
(The ordinance [pdf].)
As usual, the IRV propagandists at "Fair"Vote immediately blared their trumpets
about how this election had
been a "great success," just like they had after the
Burlington 2009 mayoral election
disaster a few months before. As far as I've been able to tell,
the concept that an IRV election might not be a great success does not exist in
FairVote's universe, so they apparently pre-write their "it was a great success"
press releases before each IRV election so they can rapidly release them ASAP.
But unfortunately, Aspen's elections had some serious problems
conveniently left unmentioned by the IRV propagandists.
Mick Ireland was elected mayor with exactly 1273 votes as his official total.
Also elected with exactly 1273 votes was
city councillor Derek Johnson.
Also elected with exactly 1273 votes was
city councillor Torre.
(Incidentally, Torre is one of those nowadays-rare people who goes by only one name.)
Amazingly enough, in all three
cases 1273 happened to be exactly 50% plus 1 voters.
Coincidence?
These are still the "official" results as of 13 June says
http://www.aspenpitkin.com/pdfs/depts/38/Aspen%20Council%20Seat%201%20Round.htm
http://www.aspenpitkin.com/pdfs/depts/38/Aspen%20Council%20Seat%202%20Round.htm
This was lauded by FairVote chief executive Rob Richie as:
"On May 5, Aspen (CO) held its first instant runoff voting elections for mayor, with record turnout and not a single invalid ballot" [RR 9 May] featuring
"record-high turnout and zero overvotes in the mayor race.
Of the more than 11,000 ballots cast in the last two, hotly contested instant runoff elections
for mayor in Burlington (VT) and Aspen (CO), there was a grand total of one overvote –
meaning more than 99.99% valid ballots." [RR 12 May]
"Note that True Ballot found that some ballots judged invalid by the precinct-based
Diebold/Premier machines in fact were not invalid, providing a clear example of
ongoing problems with our voting equipment." [RR 12 May]
"Aspen (CO) became the latest city to implement instant runoff voting on Tuesday, May 5th.
It was a hotly contested election, with three challengers to an incumbent mayor and
seven challengers to two incumbent city councilors in at-large races.
IRV passed in flying colors." [RR 7 May]
"The mayoral race had 100% valid ballots. Everyone who chose to vote in the election cast a vote that counted."[RR 7 May]
"We have ongoing challenges with media awareness. Some press accounts talked about 186
spoiled ballots in the council race with two seats as if those voters lost their votes.
In fact, these were voters who received a new ballot at the polls and corrected their mistakes
after error notification."
Also notable were the fundraising figures. Challenger Marilyn Marks outspent Ireland,
breaking Aspen records with almost $40,000 in funds. Ireland mustered less than half of
Marks' total, with less than $18,000 raised. Despite this disparity in resources,
Ireland emerged victorious.
However, after this "coincidence" was pointed out to her, Aspen city clerk Kathryn Koch
felt differently.
She then wrote a press release, dated 28 May,
saying TrueBallot's results had been erroneous, and, e.g, Ireland really
should have gotten 28 more votes.
According to that press release, the problem was partly that the
election was counted by software from TrueBallot Inc.
(This same company's software had also been used to count the votes in
Burlington's
mayoral election.)
This software had been set to stop counting votes as soon as any candidate
acquired 50% plus one votes!
Evidently, in the real world, Aspen and/or TrueBallot Inc.
had been unable to
perceive that this might not be the best possible way to employ this software...
The other part of the problem was that some votes had been
counted erroneously, specifically 16
Ireland votes had been erroneously counted for his opponent Marilyn Marks.
As a result the Ireland-Marks margin, originally announced as 1273-1140,
was changed to 1301-1124.
Ireland still won, though.
Almost certainly one or
both of the other two 1273-vote "winning counts"
were also erroneous for the same reasons, but as of this
writing they have not been officially corrected.
Harvie Branscomb's analysis below agreed that Torre and D.Johnson
indeed won, but their true
totals were 1074 for Torre and 1234 for DJ. The reason the
TrueBallot software (apparently?) gave them both 1273 was it wrongly thought that
1273 was the official margin, since 1273 is 50% plus 1 of the 2544 ballots cast.
But actually, according to Branscomb, "2509 ballots were voted for either 1st or 2nd preference or
both in the city council contest, therefore according to the rules the initial threshold for
round one is 1255."
Apparently the TrueBallot software ignored the rules and ignored the totals, and then
because it had (apparently correctly) found Torre and DJ to be the winners, it gave them both
a pretend-number of 1273 votes, and declared them victorious.
This also had the enjoyable-sounding
side effect of causing them to be "majority winners" even though in fact,
with 1234 and 1074 votes they
both were sub-majority winners.
After the (actual) votes had been released by Aspen, they were analysed
by Harvie Branscomb (and also separately
by Marilyn Marks' nephew Douglas Marks, who found the same results). Branscomb's
analysis (pdf)
showed that the STV council
election exhibited non-monotonicity. Specifically:
If 71 Michael Behrendt voters had instead voted Jack Johnson top,
above Behrendt (leaving their ballots otherwise unaltered),
that would have made Behrendt win!
(In the actual election Behrendt did not win, winners were Derek Johnson and
Torre. Of course, the precise number "71" is not essential, this is merely the fewest such
voters needed to make Behrendt win in this insane-seeming manner.
Any value from 71 up to 78 works.)
Behrendt thus could have stated the following legitimate gripe:
"I would have won even with the handicap of shifting
75 of my voters to Jack Johnson.
So why the heck didn't I win without that handicap?"
Similarly his voters might be rather distressed to learn that by voting for Behrendt, they
caused him to lose, and really (if they hadn't been strategic idiots) they should have voted
Jack Johnson to make Behrendt win!
Marilyn Marks (who came in second to Mick Ireland in the Mayoral race) wrote this open
letter to
FairVote head Rob Richie, describing numerous real-world problems Aspen experienced trying to
run its elections using IRV.
The Aspen Times conducted a poll asking, in hindsight,
"Should the city of Aspen continue using instant runoff voting for City Council elections?"
The results on 6 June 2009 (exactly 1 month after the election) were
99 NO, 75 YES, and 15 UNDECIDED out of 189 total. Based on this,
it would appear that Aspen believes its earlier decision to adopt IRV was a mistake.
Marilyn Marks also conducted an online poll. Her results as of 6 June also indicated that
Aspen residents now were considerably less enthusiastic about IRV
in hindsight than they had been back in 2007:
Did you support Instant Runoff Voting when it was proposed in 2007?
YES 21, NO 33, OTHER 23.
Did you vote in the Aspen 2009 election (which used IRV)?
YES 53, NO 1, OTHER 23.
Do you believe that the results of the Council race would have changed if there had been a
traditional run off among Derek Johnson, Jack Johnson, Michael Behrendt, Torre, and Adam Frisch?
YES 49, NO 8, OTHER 20.
Would you prefer to continue to use the IRV system in future elections?
YES 23, NO 52, OTHER 18.