Fighting Good Public Policy--(LaBonte Letter in Aspen Times)

Dear Editor:
As an engineer and volunteer election official in Massachusetts, I became interested in Aspen's new municipal election system, which combines approval voting and instant runoff voting to create a unique system.
Using the published election data files and software, I have been able to reproduce the mayor and City Council race results. I am not aware of anyone in Aspen who has tallied those races, but I highly recommend that Aspen city officials try it.
However, reproducing the tally results from “ballot strings” does not mean I have verified the election. To verify an election one must look at the ballots; no less than full transparency will do. But currently Aspen taxpayers are funding an expensive battle to fight election transparency. Aspen, of all places.

Election Activist Mike LaBonte Comments on Michigan's Public Access to Ballots

 Laws regarding freedom of access to voted ballots are often fuzzy at best, and seem downright restrictive at worst. Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox has written a very enlightened opinion responding to a question from Michigan Secretary of State Terri Lynn Land. Cox concludes:

"Voted ballots evidence the electors' preferences, and ultimately support the election or defeat of candidates and the approval or disapproval of ballot proposals in an election. They are the primary source for election results. Therefore, voted ballots are "writings" that record meaningful content and constitute "public records" for purposes of the FOIA."

He then goes on to address common misunderstandings of "secret ballot":

"Importantly, the question you pose does not raise "secrecy of the ballot" concerns because, as described above, a ballot is no longer traceable to the elector who voted it once the stub with its unique serial number is removed and the ballot is placed in the tabulator. Once placed in the tabulator, the voter's ballot and the selections recorded upon it become anonymous."

The opinion is thorough, well written, and a great read for those who wish to better understand the issues of election transparency, even for those outside of Michigan.

http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/150/MI_AG_7247-80970.pdf

http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/150/MI_AG_7247att-80971.pdf


This is yet another victory in the fight for election transparency. One state at a time people are realizing that the genius of the Australian ballot system lies in it's ability to simultaneously provide private voting and ballot transparency.

Election Integrity Activist LaBonte Supports Election Commission Review of Zimet Complaint

From: Mike LaBonte Date: Fri, Apr 30, 2010 at 2:40 PM  Subject: Regarding the Zimet complaint

To: Kathryn.Koch;  Ward Hauenstein  Robert Leatherman
Hello Election Commissioners,
I have read the recent letter to you from Millard Zimet at http://www.glassballotbox.org/storage/Zimet4.29Complaint.pdf.   As an outsider to Aspen I would like to point out that while the topic of ballot anonymity may be discussed relatively rarely, it is widely regarded as one of the founding principles of how we vote in modern times. Practices such as inspecting ballots for legal compliance and shuffling them are in general either codified or taken for granted, although some election officials may mistakenly depend too much on their optical scanners and ballot boxes to perform some degree of randomization. Adopting a strong protocol for maintaining ballot anonymity would not only be a good practice, indeed, Aspen voters like all other voters certainly must already expect that their ballots can not be traced back to them, not even by election workers. Otherwise who would vote?

Election Commission to Hear Zimet Complaint Alleging Unconstiutional Election

Millard Zimet updated his complaint on the alleged unconstitutional nature of the May election, because of the lack of voter anonymity.
The complaint will be heard by the Election Commission on May 5 at 3:30 p.m. in a City meeting room.

The complaint update details how he determined Mayor Mick Ireland’s likely voting data from cast vote records improperly collected in order of poll book entries, and then  publicly released by the city. (the ballots were not shuffled, nor were the ballot image files, before being scanned or released.)

Mayor Ireland declared Zimet’s complaint to be of “no substance,” and that the Commission has “nothing to act on.”
The meeting will surely be interesting. The legal advice will apparently be offered by the City Attorneys who helped design this system and did not require the randomizing of ballot records. Additionally they represent the elected officials.

His complaint update as of 4.29.10 is posted at:
http://www.glassballotbox.org/storage/Zimet4.29Complaint.pdf
The original and 1st update of the complaint are

How Aspen Violated Colorado Ranked Choice Voting Rules

[Mike LaBonte,  an election quality advocate from Massachusetts posted  the following summary of one portion of his work related to the Aspen election on the BlackBoxVoting.org website on January 7, and accepted the invitation to post it here as well.   --posted by M. Marks.]

Colorado state law has a section CRS 1-7-1003 allowing for ranked choice voting. It describes a form of instant runoff voting (IRV) for single seat elections, and a form of single transferable vote (STV) for multiple seat elections. It also has a clause allowing IRV for multiple seat elections with a condition:
 A local government may also conduct an election pursuant to this subsection (4) using the principles of instant runoff voting specified in subsection (3) of this section to ensure that each elector has equal voting power and that an elector's lower ranking of a candidate does not count against the candidate to whom the elector gave the highest rank.

 Put another way, in an election in which candidate A is a winner, it must not be possible to have a set of ballots with candidate A ranked #1 and various other lower ranked choices, which upon changing only the lower ranked choices can make candidate A lose. Imagine that you ranked candidate A number 1 and that was your only vote in an election that candidate A wins. Now imagine you had instead ranked candidate A number one and candidate B number 2, and now candidate A loses! It can happen if the 2nd rank vote for candidate B moves B ahead of A in an early round, and A is eliminated even though A would have picked up more votes in a later round. This is one form of non-monotonic behavior. To be fair, a regular series of regular non-instant runoffs potentially has the same effect.


The method chosen by Aspen for their City Council race appears to attempt to utilize that last clause in CRS 1-7-1003 above. They did not use STV, but rather a separate IRV race for each council seat.


It can be proven with the ballot data from the Aspen May 5, 2009 election that a change in the outcome of the City Council race was possible, due to non-monotonicity. In that election Derek Johnson won seat 1 and Torre won seat 2. Briefly, if every voter who ranked Torre number 1 had also ranked Jack Johnson number 2, with no other candidates ranked, Jack Johnson would have won seat 1 and Derek Johnson would have won seat 2. Torre's victory would have changed to a loss, and his supporters would have caused it by their 2nd place rankings for Jack Johnson.


Although there is a debate about Aspen's non-release of actual ballot images, much information from that election has been made public, to their credit. Everything needed to reproduce the counting has been provided, including the "ballot string" files (interpreted from the actual ballots that we can't see) and configuration files for using the ChoicePlus Pro software used in the actual election. I have attached a zip archive with 2 subfolders. Folder "may5_original_camb" reproduces the counting using the Aspen rules, just to prove my setup replicates the original results. Folder "torre1_jjohnson2_camb" uses ballots modified as described above, in which voters who ranked Torre number 1 hypothetically defeated him by also ranking Jack Johnson number 2. It didn't happen that way. But it could have, and that is what Colorado state law seems to prohibit.

The files supporting this work are at: http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/8/aspen_nonmono_irv-80803.zip