Does IRV weaken election integrity?
No. In fact, it can enhance election integrity. A couple of election integrity activists have made the erroneous assertion that IRV elections would be difficult to monitor for integrity. In fact, because ranked ballot optical scanners capture individual ballot records (rather than just running totals), they can add a higher level of security and fraud detection than paper-only elections. It is the redundancy of ballot records (both paper and computer), made possible by the new generation of optical scanners, that makes fraud so much more difficult to accomplish and easy to detect (the perpetrator needs to utilize two distinctly different strategies using different kinds of resources and overcoming different kinds of security measures to change BOTH records, to get away with it.
