Instant runoffs not on county's horizon
Diebold says voting software won't be ready until at least 2008

By Ian Hoffman, The Daily Review   21 May 2005

Delivering instant-runoff voting to Alameda County and its cities will cost just under $1 million ? less than half previous estimates ? but is unlikely before the 2008 elections, according to Diebold, the county's voting-machine vendor.

Voters in Oakland, San Leandro and most strongly in Berkeley asked for instant-runoff voting in local elections, and activists recently demanded that election officials in Alameda County shift more forcefully to the new method.

But in a recent report to the county and clerks from those cities, Diebold said the core software in its voting and tabulating machines is on the verge of obsolescence and is being replaced with a new version.

For now, the firm said, Diebold programmers don't have a clear enough picture of what instant-runoff software would and would not do.

"What really stood out is they can't proceed until they know what instant runoff really looks like," said Elaine Ginnold, assistant registrar of voters for Alameda County. "We need a blueprint so they can go design a program."

Advocates of instant-runoff voting were heartened by Diebold's offer in the report to lease ballot-scanning machines to the cities if they chose to follow the course of Cambridge, Mass., which uses non-Diebold software to tabulate votes.

"The fact that Diebold has indicated a willingness to do this is a step forward for IRV activists," said Kenneth   Mostern, an elections consultant who led the drive to get IRV on the Berkeley ballot.

"This is really the first official word we've heard from them, and it is reasonable," said Chris Jerdonek, California representative of FairVote, an elections-reform project of the Center for Voting and Democracy.

Instant-runoff voting allows voters to rank their favorite candidates so that even if their first choice loses, they may have a say in electing their second or third choices.

Unlike standard elections today, in which the candidate with simple plurality, or the most votes, wins, a candidate must get a majority to win an instant-runoff election.

If the top vote-getter in a race for a single