Update on Court of Appeals Statewide IRV Election Fiasco

This November 2010 the election for North Carolina Appeals will be decided by a rarely used election method, instant runoff voting. See 13 candidates file for open NC appeals court job AP News August 31, 2010.

And we still don't know how it will be counted.

There's a huge opportunity for legal challenges with this contest, for many reasons, because IRV has to be centrally tallied, and because of issues with counting on touchscreen ballots v certified systems and no such thing as certified IRV software that can tally a statewide contest. (more on that once procedures are announced).

Additionally, if none of the 13 candidates win 50% of the votes in the first round of counting, voters will get to cool their heels for 10 days before the IRV votes will be tallied. That is because officials will have to canvass all votes first, including provisional ballots. That is important in order to honor all voters rights, but many won't understand the lack of "instant" results. Canvassing before going to the 2nd round wasn't done in the Cary pilot, but instead provisionals were supposedly added back in after the fact, That doesn't make sense since IRV isn't additive. Hendersonville never counted their IRV votes.

When this law was passed in 2006, apparently no one bothered to check and see if it is feasible. According to email from Don Wright with NC SBoE, NC has never had a statewide IRV election, and only a handful of states did earlier in the century, and abandoned it.

Here's the legal code for the use of IRV in this instance.

We still don't have tallying procedures, but are supposed to some time this week.

Absentee ballots will go out 45 days before the election instead of 60 because of problems getting ready for the IRV contest. 3 of the 13 judicial candidates had not responded to the NC SBoE's questionnaire when I spoke with General Counsel Don Wright yesterday. The voter guide is being held up by this.

Many journalists were under the impression that the State Board of Elections had set forth procedures for tallying the statewide IRV contest for Judge Wynn's vacated seat for Court of Appeals.

Well, the State hasn't announced final procedures, but based on a few phone calls, we expect them to be different from those stated at last State Board of Elections Meeting.

So, how will IRV be tallied? I spoke with a county election director today (Sept 9)who said they haven't been told yet.

According to an email reply from Don Wright, General Counsel for the NC State Board of Elections on Sept 7, 2010 a task force has been formed to propose policies, education and guidelines for administering the IRV election.

"Yes, the task force/focus group will suggest items as to policies, education and guidelines. There will be no decisions made by them. SBOE employees Karen Brinson, Rosemary Blizzard and Gerry Smith are on the focus group. Bob Joyce of the UNC School of Government is also on the task force. Counties on the task force/ focus group are Guilford, Forsyth , Henderson, Wake, Pitt, Mecklenburg and Transylvania."

Regarding voter education:

"There will be no SBE funds beyond the costs of the special voter guide that will have some IRV educational information in it."

Readers, please know that a single mailer and expense of $500,000 for 6.1 million registered voters is pitiful.

As soon as the State announces IRV administration procedures, we will provide an update with a lawyers guide to potentials for legal challenges. There's really no way to tally IRV without breaking a few laws.

Vetting this election bill out before letting it become law could have discovered the many problems with this idea. Instead, the cart was put before the horse, and here we are, 4 years after the fact figuring out how to make this happen while breaking as few laws as possible.