Sep 09 2005
New Election Methods in CU?
Attorney General Lisa Madigan has issued an opinion that suggests that Home Rule municipalities (Champaign, Urbana, and Rantoul in Champaign County) may adopt, by referendum, instant runoff (IRV) and cumulative voting within their communities. The opinion relies on the Illinois Constitution and finds a distinction (correctly I believe) between the “form of government” and the “manner of selection” of officers.
Instant runoff voting is a favorite of political reformers, including many local green party members. In fact, local Green Party activist and U of I law student, Jennifer Walling, actually put together and submitted legal arguments that made their way to the Attorney General. It can be anticipated that many of our local reformers will be looking for the opportunity to put either or both of these issues on the ballot for Champaign and Urbana.
IRV is not just about election reform. It can also be a cost savings for election officials and it also makes it more practical for military, overseas, and other absentee voters to participate in the municipal elections. It will be interesting to see how this plays out locally in the twin cities. It’s an effort I would support.
How is this impacted by the County recommendations effort for voting machines? Do any of the potential electronic voting systems support IRV, or even potential “future changes”?
I serve on the Champaign County Election Equipment Advisory Board that recommended electronic voting hardware to the County Board. I tried very hard to get Free Software voting machines—machines where we would have the freedom to run, inspect, share, and modify the software for any reason at any time. Mark Shelden supported my effort wholeheartedly, including broaching the topic with vendors at our most recent Election Equipment Advisory Board meeting.
Some time ago, I wrote an article about why we need Free Software voting machines.
I would still love to see the software for these machines licensed to us under a Free Software license. I specifically recommended licensing software to Champaign County under the terms of the GNU General Public License because I thought that license served business interests as well as user’s interests very well—distributed changes would have to be supplied in source code form, not just as binaries, which means that other users of the same system could improve their machines using the code we wrote or had written for us. Collectively, this would be the basis for an ongoing series of improvements needed to make the machines suit our needs (such as ensuring that IRV or some Condorcet voting scheme was implemented).
Our Board was told that the proprietor would be receptive to our requests, and we had language in the points of negotiation that tried to grant us the flexibility we needed. But short of licensing the software under a particular known-Free Software license, I can only say that time will tell whether we can effectively accomplish this.
If you have any questions about the matter, please don’t hesitate to write me.