We began with asking everyone to propose a concise, easy to understand explanation for IRV and Choice Voting. One good suggestion was to make the explanation personal, by proposing a scenario where the person you are talking to is running for president, and you are their opponent, and so is a mutual friend. This makes people personally involved, so they are more interested in how the election might play out. One good point to bring up is that we have not had a president that earned a majority of the popular vote since the first President Bush.
Next, Councilmember Mike Feinstein gave us a summary of Santa Monica's voting reform history, most of which has been outlined in the minutes for the previous meeting. He suggested that we might have the most success with trying to get IRV enacted for the next special election, whenever that may be, and promoting Choice Voting for when neighborhood organizations elect their boards. Mike said that a report would likely be presented to the Santa Monica city council in early 2005 on IRV for special elections, including consideration of the results of San Francisco's first IRV election and results of 2004 elections in Los Angeles with their new voting machinery.
Next we had an update on our contacts with local organizations regarding IRV and Choice Voting. Julie reported that she had exchanged e-mails with the Vice President of Associated Students and the Elections Committee Chair of the Associated Students at Santa Monica College. Both seemed interested in learning more about ranked voting. It was suggested that it would be good to get a faculty member involved since students are transient. Julie is working on it.
Amy and Julie reported that they had spoken with a UCLA professor who is on the Sierra Club national board. There is some controversy surrounding their upcoming elections this spring (see this article) and we think that they would benefit from using Choice Voting instead of the voting system that they currently use. They currently use approval voting which is very similar to the system that is used to elect Santa Monica's city council. Any Sierra Club members are encouraged to write to the board members and tell them about the tendency for plurality elections to result in disproportionate representation and the advantages of using Choice Voting when fair representation of all viewpoints is desired.
We then passed out copies of two pro-IRV bills that are currently before the state legislature, SCA14, and AB1039.
SCA14 is sponsored by Sen. Vasconcellos. We have called his office to find out what we can do right now to support the bill, and they have told us that they are soliciting letters of support from organizations, and they are requesting suggestions for how the bill might be improved. We discussed some of the main points of SCA14, which is a broad election reform bill that includes IRV for statewide elections. It also includes provisions for campaign finance reform and participation by Independents in primaries. Mike Feinstein pointed out that SCA14 proposed to move the primary election (currently conducted in March) to the 2nd week in September, and raised the concern that this would pose a strong disadvantage to challengers. Participants were encouraged to look over the bill and e-mail the group with their suggestions. Amy and Julie will compose a letter of support with recommended amendments in the next couple of weeks.
AB1039 allows non-charter cities in California to use IRV or Choice Voting if they so choose. We recommend that you send a letter to your state representative supporting this bill.
Two of the Democratic presidential primary candidates, Gov. Dean and Congressman Kucinich, have stated that they support Instant Runoff Voting (see Dean's statement here and Kucinich's statement here). We proposed to flyer Dean and Kucinich meetups that occurred in the days following the meeting to solicit members and to educate people about IRV.