Section 10 Correspondence
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SECTION 10 CORRESPONDENCE SECTION 10: CORRESPONDENCE Yvonne Galletta Subject: FW: Expansion of my September 22nd comments to the Santa Clara Charter Review Committee Attachments: Portland-Mayorai-Sample-Ballot.pdf Portland-Mayora !-Sample-Ballot. .. ---- - Original Message----- From: Steve Chessin (mailto:steve.chessin®gmail .com] On Behalf Of Steve Chessin Sent: Friday, September 23, 2011 9:43 PM To: Manager Cc: Cl erk Subject: Expansion of my September 22nd comments to t he Santa Clara Charter Review Committee To the members of the Charter Review Committee and supporting City Staff: I would like to expand on the comments I made at the September 22nd Charter Review Committee (CRC) meeting. I made four points, which I expand on here. 1. The minutes of the September 1st meeting contain this sentenc~ under item 7, \•/here it is reporting on my presentation to the CRC: "He referred to a book, 'To Keep Or Change First Past The Post? The Politics of Electoral Reform ' as a good reference . " That is not the book I referred to . In fact, I am not familiar with that book, and had not heard of it until I read its title in the minutes . I do not know if it will be useful to you or not . The books I did refer to are these: Amy , Doug; "Behind the Ballot Box: A Citizen's Guide t o Voting Systems"; Praeger Publishing; Westport, Connecticut; 2 000. It is available at http: //\·Mw. mtholyoke. edu/acad/polit/damy/OrderDesk/behind_ the_ballot_box . htm Reynolds, Andrew, and Reilly, Ben; "The International IDEA Handbook of Electoral System Design"; International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assis tance; Sweden; 1997. An updated version of this book is available free online at http://www.idea.int/publications/esd/index.cfm I respectfully request that you correct the minutes. 2. The presentation by the Registrar of Voters' office indicated that they could not handle an election using either cumulative voting or the Choice Voting form of proportional representation. (I note that they did not comment on either the Open List or Closed List forms of proportional representation that I presented to you. ) During my September 1 st presentation I described how the Registrar's office could perform a partial tally of cumulati ve voting ballots, with the f inal totals calculated by the City Clerk. I do not know if they discussed this option with their vendor, but I presume not, as I kno w of no technical nor legal barrier to the procedure I described. In any event, Santa Clara is not required to use the Registrar of Voters; it can contract \•lith an outside vendor. I gave the exampl e of Portland, Maine, which i s using instant runoff voting (IRV, the single-winner cousin of Choice Voting) for the first time to elect their Mayor this November. (I've attached a sample ballot.) As their equipment cannot tally these ballots, the y h ave contracted with 1 TrueBallot to do so. TrueBallot is charging them $20,000. Portland is about half the size of Santa Clara, so scaling up the equivalent cost would be $40,000 . This is half of the amount the Registrar apparently charges Santa Clara for tallying your ballots. The Registrar's presentation also referred to the Secretary of State's guidelines on instant runoff voting (IRV), and quoted from the County Counsel's Impartial Analysis of Measure F, the November 1998 charter amendment that enabled Santa Clara County to use IRV. First, the Secretary of State's guidelines are just that: guidelines, not regulations. As a charter city, Santa Clara has plenary authority to follow or not follow those guidelines . Second, the complete quote from the Impartial Analysis is this: "The current Poll Star voting system used in the County cannot accommodate IRV since it is unable to distinguish between voter first and second choices." I believe Mr. Chantri omitted the \•lords "Poll Star", letting the listener infer that the reference was to the existing optical scan system. The Poll Star system was a punch card system which would have been hard-pressed to support IRV . The· current optical scan system is similar to that used by San Francisco and Alameda County; in fact, it is written into the contract with Sequoia that, should Santa Clara County decide to use IRV, Sequoia (or any successor, such as Dominion) has to provide any needed software upgrades for free . Of course, the Sequoia system \'lould limit the number of rankings to three. The TrueBallot system, as the attached sample ballot shows , does not. That the Registrar of Voters is, or claims to be, unable to accommodate proportional representation or cumulative voting should not be an obstacle to Santa Clara ' s use of those systems. 3. Perhaps because the assumption was made that you would only be considering the current numbered seat system versus a district system, you were originally allocated a woefully inadequate number of meetings to fulfill the charge given you by the City Council. By way of comparison, the Charter Review Committee of the City of Albany, California, is also considering a change to their electoral system. The Albany CRC is a permanent committee; they meet as necessary to consider items referred to them by the City Council, or generated internally. Thus, when they do convene, they are already familiar with the Brown Act and the other legal constraints on appointed committee members, as \•Jell as familiar with city staff and each other . That means they do not need to spend valuable meeting time on those topics when they reconvene to consider a new topic. The Albany CRC is using Doug Amy's book (see (1) above) to guide their consideration of electoral systems . They are devoting two 90-minute meetings to consider and choose criteria for evaluating electoral systems, two more meetings .to consider electoral systems themselves and evaluate them against the chosen criteria, and a fifth meeting to decide which system to recommend to the City Council. Of course, should. they need more time, they are free to grant themselves such. It is also a smaller committee (only five members), so deliberations won't take as long as they will with a sixteen-member committee. In addition, four of the five are already familiar with alternatives to plurality elections, having received a presentation on them in 2009. (Two of the four attended a s imilar presentation in 2008 .) I am glad you are extending your meeting time to two hours. I hope you schedule the additional meetings you will need for full discussion of the alternatives before you. Santa Clara deserves no less. 4. On September 1st I gave you a half-hour version of my standard one-hour talk on proportional representation and cumulative voting . Of necessity I had to cut important material related to the reasons why one would v1ant to consider a change to a proportional or semi-proportional system. I am pleased to inform you that the one-hour talk I gave to the Citizens' Advisory Committee (CAC) on August 22nd was recorded. A DVD of that talk has been made, which I distributed at the September 22nd meeting . It is also available for streaming from http://blip.tv/stevechessin/pr-and-cv-for-santa-clara-5576943 (If you did not receive a DVD at the September 22nd meeting, please let me know and I will be happy to provide you with one . ) 2 If you did not attend that talk, I strongly. urge you to view the DVD. It will help you be more knowledgeable about the systems you are considering. It will also help you fulfill the CRC's desire, expressed at your first meeting, that each member be presented with the same information, as four CRC members did attend that CAC meeting, including two who are not CAC members. Sincerely, - - Steve Chessin President, Californians for Electoral Reform www.cfer.org steve.chessin®cfer.org 1426 Lloyd Way, Mountain View, CA 94040 (408) -276-3222 (w), (650) - 962-8412 (h) 3 I l A I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I . Official Ballot I I General Municipal Election V:4-l t t . I I Portland, Maine \_[U\tJ..u...v ~.\(v.c I I NovemberS 201 1 ciTYcLERK I I ' I 1 A. To vote, complete the oval(s) 0 next to your choice(s), like this: . I 1 I B. Rank Candidates for Mayor in order of choice, see special instructions below. C. To vote for a write-in candidate, write the person's name in the write-in space and fill in an oval next to the name. I I D. If you make a mistake, do not erase; ask for a new ballot. I I For Mayor No more than one oval per column. No more than one oval per candidate. I I FourYearTerm A~0·~ ~ '<"~-!i:'~0 ~-~~~ ~0-~~~ ~0-~~~ ~0-~~~ ~-~~0 ~0-~~~ ~0-~~0 (J~-.fi:'~·~-.Ji:>~ (J (J~·.fi:Jro·~·.fi:Jro~ (J (J..fi:'<()· (J if:'<() I I (Rank candidates in order of choice) '!<..CJ · ~CJ ~CJ ~CJ ~CJ ~CJ ~CJ ~CJ ~CJ ~ ;s ~ ~ ~ .;s I I ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ I I ~~~~~~~JthCharles E. 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 . I I ~':e~~~~~o~~ichael F. 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 Special ln_structions: ~ank Candidates 1 Brvant, Peter G.