Will IRV be confusing to St. Paul voters?
No, not if St. Paul voters are like voters in all the other cities that use IRV. The notion that St. Paul voters may not be smart enough to know how to rank candidates on the ballot is being promoted by opponents who do not want to see a change the way St. Paul votes. All exit polls conducted in the US jurisdictions using IRV for the first time show that with good voter education prior to the election voters overwhelmingly understood IRV: 87% in San Francisco (CA) 89% in Burlington (VT) 88% in Takoma Park (MD) 95% in Cary (NC) 86% in Hendersonville (NC) From the recount in the Coleman-Franken race, we saw that some voters do not properly follow ballot instructions, but this number of voters is very small – fewer than one one-hundredth of a percent of ballots were marked in error. The rate of spoilt ballots in an IRV election is no greater than in a traditional election. In fact in the recent 2009 Burlington IRV election, 99.95% of the ballots were valid. So concerns that IRV is “too ha
