At the close of filing today, 13 candidates had signed up to replace Judge Jim Wynn on the NC Court of Appeals. That means North Carolina will host the nation’s first statewide election using the Instant Runoff Voting method in decades. Voters can select up to three candidates in order of their preference, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd. Your 2nd and 3rd choices are backups and only count if your 1st choice loses. That’s the core message to voters. The counting works this way: In the first round of counting, only the 1st choices are tallied. If a candidate gets a majority of 1st choices, the election is over – but that’s unlikely with 13 candidates. In a second round of counting, the two candidates with the most 1st choices go into a “virtual” runoff with all of their votes. The ballots of voters who selected other candidates as their 1st choice are then reviewed and their vote goes to whichever runoff candidate they ranked highest. (Some voters may not have picked either, similar to not showing up in a separate runoff.) Here’s how it might work in practice. Say the top two vote getters in the first round, Alpha and Beta, received 23% and 19% of all the first choices. So 42% of the voters have their 1st choice in the runoff; their backup choices are not reviewed. The other 58% of the ballots will be reviewed to see if Alpha or Beta is ranked, and which is ranked higher, as a 2nd or 3rd choice, and that’s where their vote goes. Candidate Alpha may pick up another 12% of the voters and Beta may get another 14%. So Alpha wins with 35% of the votes cast (23% + 12%) over Beta’s 33% (19% + 14%). Neither candidate gets an absolute majority, but Alpha gets a majority of those expressing a preference between the top two vote getters, Alpha and Beta. There will be plenty of naysayers trashing IRV and it is especially challenging with a low-profile judicial election with 13 candidates, but remember this: the General Assembly adopted the IRV method for this kind of election only after 8 candidates ran in 2004 to fill a late vacancy on the NC Supreme Court, and the winner got only 23% of the votes.
1-888-OUR-VOTE|info@democracy-nc.org
Count me in as a naysayer.
I spoke to one lawmaker who has done alot of work with election law and she asked me when did this pass into law! She didn’t even remember it.
No wonder some lawmakers don’t remember, this was not in a law by itself, but mixed in with a omnibus type election law, mixed in with alot of other stuff.
Had this been in a bill by itself, would it have passed?
If lawmakers had heard both sides of IRV, would this have passed?
If the State BoE had told lawmakers that there is no such thing as voting machines in the US to count a statewide IRV contest, would they have passed this?
Yes, I’m a naysayer, and I’m director of the NC Coalition for Verified Voting.