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After a public hearing and more than half-an-hour of debate, Cary Town Council members decided to re-evaluate the way Cary citizens choose their leaders.
At its Thursday meeting, the Town Council voted to change the voting system to a non-partisan plurality system.
Currently, Cary uses a non-partisan election and runoff to select its leaders.
That means if a candidate does not receive more than 50 percent of the vote, there could be a second, or runoff, election between the top two choices.
Under a non-partisan plurality system, runoff elections are eliminated and the person with the most votes wins.
The council will have a public hearing on the issue in April, but much of the debate Thursday night centered around whether the town should continue to use instant runoff voting (IRV) in future elections.
In IRV, voters choose a first, second and third candidate on a paper ballot.
If a single candidate does not receive more than 50 percent of the "first choice" votes, the top two candidates have an "instant runoff."
Election officials then add voters' second and third choices to see which candidate has the most votes.
The Town of Cary participated in a pilot program of IRV in 2007.
Staff members said having one election saved the town $28,000 over having one election and then a separate runoff election.
Multiple Cary citizens spoke in favor of and against IRV, but council members could not decide on whether to continue using the system for the upcoming 2009 elections.
"Until the board of elections has a way of counting those second and third ballots that feels as certain, as familiar and as accurate as counting those first ballots, then we do not need to participate," Councilwoman Gale Adcock said, adding that she had no problem with the idea of IRV. "They need to fix that."
Councilman Ervin Portman spoke out in favor of continuing the town's use of IRV.
Council members said they will continue to investigate the pros and cons of IRV, but decided Thursday to change the election method to a non-partisan plurality by a 6-1 margin, with Councilman Portman voting against the change.
The council will have to make a final decision on the 2009 election method by the end of April.
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Comments
By Joyce McCloy NC Coalition for Verified Voting on 03/16 12:37 AM
No matter how you slice it, Instant Runoff Voting Pilots cannot be conducted within existing election law. Let me outline that for readers: *The new guideliness do not address ยง 163-182.2(1) which requires the counting of votes where they are cast. *The SBOE has stated that IRV is one election, not several, so by law these votes should be counted where they are cast. This is a basic tenant of election integrity. *Moving votes before they are counted opens the election up to fraud. *Current guidelines still mandate secret votes that are not ever counted or made public in any way. *There is no overvote protection to alert voters if they make the mistake of ranking the same choice 2 or 3 times, (thereby negating their 2nd nd 3rd choices). The Help America Vote Act mandates either a) overvote protection/warnings from voting systems or b) voter education to alert to risk of overvoting. The NC Coalition for Verified Voting is dedicated to election transparency and protecting the individual vote. http://irvbad4nc.blogspot.com/2009/03/instant-runoff-voting-pilot-remains.html Also see www.ncvoter.net
By Chris T. on 03/15 11:14 PM
The League of Women Voters - a group that does support IRV - also supported paperless DRE touchscreen voting machines and opposed voter-verifiable paper trails even after paperless DREs caused such problems in Carteret County NC and other places. Such groups can be wrong. I suspect that if you look at where the League and other non-profits are getting their information from, and that some (not all) have corporate members that consist of voting machine and other IT companies that have a vested interest in pushing the lowest common denominator of technology for the highest price they can get. So if they can get respected groups to push their information, they can get impressionable individuals to buy into it.
By Dave T on 03/15 07:03 PM
IRV DOES compromise election integrity simply because you can't show, transparently, how the votes are totalled! Prehaps useful to note that everyone, including Common Cause and Brennan Center, make mistakes. Using computers to calculate IRV votes is plain ole Black Box voting - the very thing our current election laws set out to eliminate after the 2004 debacle.
By JB on 03/15 04:27 PM
IRV doesn't compromise election integrity Perhaps useful to note that Common Cause and Brennan Center -- the groups you rightly cite on verified voting laws -- both act to further instant runoff voting (Vermont Common Cause is pushing it hard this year for statewide offices, for example, and Brennan Center has plugged the at-large version of it in voting rights cases).
By Chris T. on 03/15 01:53 PM
Far from mindless. And if anyone is brainswashed, it's IRV supporters who claim that IRV does things that it does not. Or they have to apply some sort of weird IRV math that calls a plurality a majority. Who says I do what my party officials tell me to do? Hell - my own state Democratic party doesn't even have a policy on IRV or other election reforms - but we should. Yes - you should be able to vote for who you want. SO work for third party ballot access - not IRV. And you came off sounding quite elitist there - telling people who aren't smart enough to rank preferences to stay home. In North Carolina, do you know how many of out 100 counties have more than half their voting age adults are functionally illiterate? Do you not want them to be able to take part in the democratic process because they didn't have as many advantages as you (I am only guessing at this) seem to have? If they didn't go to the best schools, go to college, have broadband internet access, etc - do you not want them to be a part of our American democratic process? Because if you tell them to stay home if they can't rank choices - you are an elitist snob. What you should be working for is election methods that allow all citizens to participate in the democratic process - both in voting and in counting the votes and trusting the process. NC has some of the nation's best verified voting laws, so sayteh the Brennan Center and Common Cause. But in order to do IRV, some people seem hell bent on removing the very election integrity laws that got us to be #1. You really need to step out of whatever tent your little third party is pumping the nitrous oxide into and clear your head and take a look at the back end of the voting process - how the votes are counted. Because even if you 3rd party types ever get ballot access (and I hope you do), if you are successful with IRV you won't be able to trust the results of the vote.
By Bob W on 03/14 06:38 PM
Excuse me you little twit, but don't call me "bub". If you are so brainwashed that you can only do what the party officials tell you to do that's fine, but it's NOT America. In America, we should be able to vote for who we want, and most of us are smart enough to rank our preferences. If you're not, then we're all better off if you stay home.
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