AFAIK, you can't rank choices on a lever machine, can you?Well now you have the Fair Vote Instant Runoff Voting lobby at work in your state, in your cities.
They want intant runoff, and when jurisdictions adopt instant runoff, they do NOT adopt hand counted paper ballots.
New York Green Challenger Enters District 22 Race
Wednesday, May 20th, 2009 As your Councilwoman, my proposals will save taxpayer dollars and increase efficiency – and not just for buildings,” continued Ms. Serpe. “Instant runoff voting for city-wide primaries will allow voters to rank the candidates in their order of preference, avoiding a negative, costly and inconvenient runoff election two weeks later and saving the City $15-$20 million.” There are some groups lobbying for IRV in NY for the state, and they are trying to get lawmakers to endorse it. Lawmakers tend to try to appease political groups, as we have seen in North Carolina.
IRV incentivizes more complex voting systems. In fact, Scotland switched from hand counted paper ballots to computerized voting machines for the first time when implementing STV in May, 2007.
Dr. Rebecca Mercuri warned about Scotland switching to a more complicated vote counting method and to computerized voting: "IRV and other proportional balloting methods have been proven to incentivize the introduction of electronic ballot tabulation in places where none previously was needed or has existed, and they further complicate what has become an increasingly closed process for the determination of election results."
Scottish officials followed the advice of "experts" and switched from hand counted paper ballots to computerized voting in May '07 to support STV, a form of Instant Runoff
Further, your elections will be decided by a voodoo sort of math and your election officials will serve as official witch doctors who tell you the outcome.
What type of voting machines would you like? Sequoia is offering some nice Insight scanners that unfortunately
due to software bugs cannot count IRV votes at the precinct.Voting Systems Batch Test Results� ReliabilitySequoia Insight (OS) -
(29 errors related to the machines)
MTBF = 10.3 hours
1.5 failures per 1,000 ballots cast
All machines expected to fail in an election
Sequoia Insight Plus (OS) -
(28 errors related to the machines)
MTBF = 10.7 hours
1.4 failures per 1,000 ballots cast
All machines expected to fail in an election
They also come with easy to stuff access:
I'm sure you'll be fine with central counting of votes, right?
You trust that no one will tamper with the ballots while en route or in storage?
This is like sending signed checks with amounts blank to be deposited- isn't any reason to worry.
Right?