Instant runoff voting shocker-Thigpen loses 100,000 vote lead, is 6,700 behind

Ten miles away on the dark side of Hillsborough, Sheriff Jock Shaw, half-uncle of Tommy Roy Foster and president of Madmax Enterprises, has been up for hours, plotting the final stages of a corporate takeover. It’s not another shopping mall he’s after, not this time. It’s not another school board either. Been there, done that. No, this time Jock Shaw is making his biggest power play yet. He's taking control of the state supreme court. The election is Tuesday.

There were 13 on the ballot - not 18.

The state party was urged by the SEC and the State Conventions several times to study IRV and come up with some policy recommendations for handling it. I know - I wrote several resolutions to that effect. We were promised an electoral reform committee by Jerry Meek in June 2008 after two competing IRV resolutions (one for and one against) were tabled. When there was no committee, we submitted yet another resolution to the July 2009 SEC meeting and then again to the February 2010 SEC meeting and were promised a committee each time. Then two IRV resolutions got sent up through the precincts, counties, congressional districts and up to the State Convention. Only one made it - my anti-IRV resolution, but that got tabled at the Fayetteville Convention. Of course, I already knew that we'd be looking at Statewide IRV during this convention, so the cowardly action of those who tabled this resolution just sealed the fate of Judge Thigpen. Once again the State and county Parties were flying blind and had no plan for dealing with this.

Ironically, we were forced to rank the resolutions that were passed at that convention, and I asked to witness the tabulation, but of course no one received notice when the tabulation was actually done. The rankings were done, but they haven't been reported yet. So exactly how was this ranking supposed to make the resolution process more democratic and make the GA more responsive to us?

The way to have handled IRV is to have all the county parties tell voters that no matter who you voted for in first place, make sure that you cast a 2nd and 3rd count - especially if you weren't going to vote for Thigpen first.

Thigpen lost by 6700 votes statewide - or around 2.4 votes per precinct. How do we even know that the 2nd and 3rd place votes were even tabulated and counted correctly?

I've studied IRV elections around the country, and based on how they have been done elsewhere, with so many other candidates and such a large margin in the first round, Thigpen should have won. Indeed - in IRV races all around the country - 1st round winners win the Instant Runoff between 95% to 98% of the time (depending on whether it's a top-two IRV or gradual elimination IRV), only "flipping" the results in rare cases - and none with such large margins. Contrast that with traditional runoffs, where the second place finisher "flips" 33% of the time. Here in NC, 100% of the races that went to IRV "flipped" the 2nd place finisher from the first round - suggesting to me that something wasn't done right.

But how would we ever know? The IRV tabulation was pretty much done in a last-minute, jury-rigged manner that was not supposed to be transparent and observable. In Wake County, they didn't let anyone know how the votes would be counted and how many teams would be used until the day the counting was to start. They had 9 teams of counters, with tables 20 feet long put at right angles to the observers who had no seats to sit on while watching the week-long process. These positions were set up that way so that no one could watch them - because it was the observers who caught the errors in the 2007 Cary IRV count.

We have no way of knowing how badly the count went in the DRE counties - because the tabulation was done in an algorithm written by an SBOE staffer and run on MS Excel spreadsheets - in apparent violation of NC and Federal election laws. But much like the Bush administration claimed that waterboarding wasn't torture because a lawyer wrote them a note saying it wasn't torture, the SBOE found a lawyer to write them a note saying that state and federal laws don't require certified election systems.

So please don't go reading too much into the results of this election - it wasn't meant to be a transparent or verifiable election. We just need to work to strengthen the election laws so that the SBOE can't turn over the election to an algorithm written by a sick employee to be run on MS Excel in counties that may be staffed by election workers who are less than fully trained on MS Excel with computers that no one knows how well they are set up. And we need to dump IRV.

I think that is something both Dems and Republicans can agree on.