Is This The Election That Ends IRV in San Francisco?

The election results are in and the winners are…..well we don’t know yet. We may not know for several weeks as mail ballots are counted and the tedious so-called Instant Runoff Voting process begins. But we do know this – there are many close elections, but due to the fact we’re not having a runoff, and we’re using IRV, some weird things are happening.
In District 10, we have a situation where the top vote getter on election day got 1200 or so votes and may be on the way to the Board of Supervisors, out of only 10,000 votes cast. (Hey wait, wasn’t IRV supposed to increase turnout?). That’s rather scary – when you consider that others had to get many more votes than that to also serve. We’ll do the IRV counts going through the many, many loser candidates who got a handful of votes, and of course this all assumes people voted “1 2 3” (which they didn’t), and in the end, God knows what the result will be. After a campaign that had a mob of candidates making 1 minute statements into a microphone, the voters really don’t know who or what they’re ending up with.
In District 8, we had higher turnout and a spirited contest between several well-funded campaigns. However, we also had some of the most negative and deceptive campaigning mailers produced (hey wait, wasn’t IRV supposed to make this more “positive?”) and we won’t have a traditional runoff where candidates running such shamelessly negative campaigns would have been held accountable – and we’d have a clear choice and better debates.
And so on. The endless mess in District 6, which featured some of the nastiest campaigning, the shady “independent expenditures” and a distinct lack of disclosure on the part of certain candidates has led to a situation where any candidate elected in the IRV debacle is not going to have a clear mandate, or again, be held accountable to their statements.
Traditional runoff campaigns would provide voters a chance to make their choices clearly and force candidates to be more accountable for their general election campaigns. Also, voters would have had more time to focus on the local elections, free of the distractions of eMeg and Uncle Jerry and the endless list of stupid ballot measures that clutter the ballot in November. Plus, after a Giants season like this, voters would be more likely to pay attention than they could when having Giants Fever in October.
The promises of IRV have not materialized. They have not saved money. They have not rigged the elections for progressives. They have not made the campaigns “more positive.” They have not resulted in more cooperation amongst the candidates. The second and third place endorsements are wankery for political hacks. And more money was spent on elections locally than ever before.
Time to hit the reset button, and take this out-of-town sponsored lab experiment and dump it in the recycle bin of history, kids.