Diebold Vs. Instant Runoff Voting

Runoffs won't be so instant
Software design for new election format won't be ready for three years
By Ian Hoffman, staff writer, Oakland Tribune
May 21, 2005

Delivering instant-runoff voting to Alameda County and its cities will cost just under $1million — less than half previous estimates — but is unlikely before the 2008 elections, according to Diebold, the county's voting-machine vendor.

Voters in Oakland, San Leandro and most emphatically in Berkeley asked for instant-runoff voting in local elections, and activists have demanded that election officials in Alameda County shift more forcefully to the new method.

But in a recent report to the county and clerks from those cities, Diebold said the core software in its voting and tabulating machines is on the verge of obsolescence and is being replaced with a new version.

For now, the firm said, Diebold programmers do not have a clear enough picture of what instant-runoff software would and would not do.

"What really stood out is they can't proceed until they know what instant runoff really looks like," said Elaine Ginnold, assistant registrar of voters for Alameda County. "We need a blueprint so they can go design a program."

Advocates of instant-runoff voting were heartened by Diebold's offer in the report to lease ballot-scanning machines to the cities if they chose to follow the course of Cambridge, Mass., which uses non-Diebold software to tabulate the votes.

"The fact that Diebold has indicated a willingness to do this is a step forward for IRV activists," said Kenneth Mostern, an elections consultant who led the drive to get IRV on the Berkeley ballot.

"This is really the first official word we've heard from them, and it is reasonable," said Chris Jerdonek, California representative of FairVote, an elections-reform project of the Center for Voting and Democracy.

Instant-runoff voting allows voters to rank their favorite candidates, so if their first choice loses, they could have a say inelecting their second or third choices.

Unlike standard elections in which the candidate with a simple plurality, or the most votes, wins, a candidate must get a majority to win an instant-runoff election.

If the top vote-getter in a race for a single political post gets less than 51 percent of the vote, the election is decided by second- and third-ranked choices. The computer takes the votes for the lowest vote-getters and awards those ballots to the next-ranked candidate.

IRV activists still do not understand why programming the computer to reshuffle those votes would take so long.

The problem, says Diebold, lies in the details. How should ballots be designed for the likely combination of local instant-runoff elections and national plurality elections? What should the computers' internal audit logs look like?

When touch-screen electronic voting machines are equipped with paper-trail printers, so voters can verify their ballot selections, should the voter's preferences be listed in order or numbered? How will instant-runoff voting be handled for handicapped voters who use an audio ballot?

Ideally, state and federal officials will answer those questions rather than have Diebold design answers and find government going a different way, the report said.

It's not, said Alameda County's Ginnold. She and the three city clerks are drawing up those rules solely for their jurisdictions, to be approved by their governing bodies and the Legislature.

"Rather than setting a template for all time and all places, we'd be setting it up for just the three cities," she said.

Local election officials in California and elsewhere have been slow to embrace instant-runoff voting because of its potential complexity and new demands on both voters and pollworkers. But Ginnold sees the new method as inevitable, at least in her county.

Last week, Keith Carson, president of the Board of Supervisors, cited his support for instant-runoff voting in calling for a hearing on whether the county will buy $5 million in new voting equipment from Diebold.

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