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Under IRV, voters rank their top three candidates in order of preference. If no candidate gets a majority of votes, the one with the least support is eliminated and the No. 2 choices from his or her ballots are credited to the respective candidates and the totals recounted. The process is repeated until one candidate has more than 50 percent of the vote. IRV thus functions like a rapid series of runoff elections in which one candidate is eliminated each step of the way, but without the need for an actual -- and costly -- runoff election.
Supporters claim that IRV also eliminates "spoiler" candidates. The presumption is that in multiple-candidate races, like-minded constituencies, such as progressives, will divide their votes among like-minded candidates, allowing a candidate with less overall support but a solid plurality to prevail. The real political ramifications, however, are largely unproven in the United States. Although IRV has been used for years in Australia and parts of Europe, in this country it has been confined mostly to corporate and student elections.
UC Berkeley, Stanford, and Caltech are among about two dozen colleges nationwide that use IRV to some extent to elect student officers. Last year, Utah Republicans used it to choose congressional nominees at the party's state convention, and pro-IRV legislation is pending in about 20 other states. San Francisco is the nation's largest political entity to adopt the system.
Whether IRV would have given one of the progressive mayoral candidates a better shot at defeating front-runner Newsom this fall or whether political consultants might simply have come up with new strategies to blunt the system won't ever be known. Regardless, both supporters and detractors appear to accept the assumptions about IRV's ability to level the playing field. Against that backdrop, the snail's pace of its ill-fated deployment -- and the new Elections Commission's role in that -- was almost guaranteed to arouse political suspicions. "IRV is the canary in the mine shaft that points to a much deeper problem," says Hill of the Center for Voting and Democracy. "And that's that the Elections Commission is asleep at the wheel."
He and others began to agitate for the commission to gear up for IRV within days of the March 2002 vote. But as interviews, commission minutes, and internal documents reveal, the effort was tortured from the start. After keeping advocates at arm's length for weeks, the commission didn't start talking in earnest about IRV until May of last year. It wasn't until last September that the panel finally turned to Hill and Kleppner, both nationally recognized IRV experts, to help draw up an implementation plan.
By then it was too late for IRV to happen last November. Although disappointed, advocates -- including grass-roots volunteers from the Prop. A campaign, many of them affiliated with the Green Party and the city's Democratic clubs -- took it in stride. After all, Arntz, who by then had been named provisional director, sounded confident that instant runoff voting was on track for this November.
But Arntz, with the commission's tacit approval, had already made a crucial decision that would hugely affect IRV's chances of being put in place in time to meet the law's November 2003 deadline.
The elections chief wanted to upgrade more than 600 Optech Eagles, the photocopier-size optical scanners now used to count paper ballots at the city's precincts, to accommodate IRV. To do so, additional hardware needed to be installed to increase the machines' memory, and new software devised to make the Eagles compatible with the new voting system.
But representatives of Election Systems & Software, the city's voting machine vendor, concluded that it made more sense to buy new touch-screen voting machines than to retrofit all the Eagles. With a vested interest in seeing the transition to IRV go smoothly, ES&S offered to cut the city a deal if it converted to touch screens. Although the price tag could exceed $10 million, state funds had been set aside to help with the purchase, and city officials had expressed their intention to adopt the more technologically advanced touch-screen system, now in use by half a dozen California counties.
ES&S Regional Sales Vice President Joe Taggard declined to talk about the matter for the record. But sources familiar with the negotiations say the company argued that the cost of upgrading the Eagles would be money badly spent if the city later replaced them with touch screens. Yet Arntz stuck with the Eagles, concluding that on top of gearing up for IRV, a switch to touch screens would be too much, too soon, for his chronically understaffed department to absorb, these sources say.
Headquartered in the City Hall basement, the Elections Department has long been a stepchild of the municipal bureaucracy. It has only about a dozen full-time permanent employees. About a dozen others, while assigned full time to the department, actually are on long-term loan from other city departments. Thus, there is little job security and little continuity from one election cycle to the next. "It's a thankless situation," says an ex-staffer who asked not to be identified. "You never know from one year to the next, or one month to the next, whether they're going to yank you and put you someplace else, or whether you're going to be out of a job." As elections draw close, the department depends on roughly 200 seasonal employees and, at election time, an even larger number of volunteers.
