High cost of democracy:

Officials weigh

runoff expenses
By Scott Nicholson
nicholson@wataugademocrat.com

The high cost of low turnout is raising the debate about options for eliminating or altering runoff races, which historically get miniscule turnout.

Watauga County elections director Jane Hodges estimated Watauga County’s runoff race for the Democratic Party’s N.C. Commissioner of Labor candidate, in which all precinct polls were open, would cost about $40,000.

With a turnout of 263 voters, or 1.1 percent of eligible voters, the race cost the county about $150 per vote.

With the state labor commissioner’s salary set at $120,000, the race could have employed more than 33 labor commissioners for the year at the estimated statewide cost of between $4 million and $5 million for the runoff election.

The cost and public complaints have caught the attention of lawmakers, though little action is expected this session.

N.C. Rep. Cullie Tarleton (D-93) said he would be surprised to see anything happen in the short session “but there is lots of conversation in the hallways and around the tables that we need to fix that.” Tarleton said he wasn’t sure that “instant runoff” was the answer but there would be efforts he would support, as long as they made sense and were fair for the voters, candidates and taxpayers.

“I think it’s ridiculous to spend that kind of money with that kind of turnout,” he said. “If you’ve got five people in a race, and you get the most and over 20 percent, why not say ‘You’re it’? Or with four people and you get 25 percent of the vote.”

One group is advocating a ballot system that allows voters to choose potential runoff victors on the primary ballot, by ranking top choices in sequential order. Though the runoff system otherwise remains limited to the top two candidates if there is no clear-cut winner, the proposal would use the ranking system to determine people’s top choice instead of requiring a runoff vote.

Bob Hall, executive director for the voting-advocacy group Democracy North Carolina, issued a statement saying, “In case you’re counting, the runoff election [Tuesday] cost more than $50 per vote cast for election officials to administer — about $4 million to operate about 3,000 polling places and process the results of barely 75,000 votes cast. In some counties, the cost for the local board of elections easily exceeded $70 per vote.

“Local taxpayers foot the bill, not the state, which may be one reason why state lawmakers have been slow to address the problem of expensive, low-turnout runoffs for the partisan nominees for executive branch elections.”

Louisiana uses a form of instant-runoff voting for overseas or out-of-state military voters, according to Democracy North Carolina, and several large cities use it for municipal races, including San Francisco, Calif., and Minneapolis, Minn.

“It’s ludicrous to say that IRV costs more than the runoff system we use now,” Hall said.

“There’s got to be a better way than these embarrassing statewide runoff elections–either by filling some the Council of State positions by gubernatorial appointment, nominating others with a different threshold for victory, using IRV, or something else.”