L.A. VoteFIRE has started!

A new group, Los Angeles Voters For Instant Runoff Elections (L.A. VoteFIRE), has become the CfER chapter for the City of Los Angeles and other communities in Los Angeles County that do not have their own chapters. Its mission is to persuade county supervisors and city council members to let residents vote on simple charter amendments that would improve future elections by making them Instant Runoff (IR) elections.  [IR is another term for ranked voting—editor.]

I am pleased to be working with CfER in the L.A. area to make elections fairer and give voters opportunities to more fully and freely express their preferences among candidates. In addition, L.A. voters frequently have to return to the polls to vote in separate runoff elections. It will feel great when voters can finally do all their voting at once.

L.A. County has the biggest municipal budget in the U.S. County elections officials provide equipment for millions of voters in national, state and local elections. The current voting equipment, InkaVote, is comprised of a 12-column-by-26-row ink dot ballot card and a book-like guide that holds the ballot in its "spine" and exposes for marking only one column of dots between guide "pages" at a time. It is poorly suited to the ranked voting required for IR elections.

L.A. VoteFIRE hopes county voters will soon have the opportunity to approve a charter amendment that would require instant runoff voting (IRV) for county-level elections by 2010, and thereby prod the county's elections officials to purchase equipment capable of running IR elections. Cities could then more easily choose to have IR elections, because suitable equipment would be available from the county.

I have started to meet with city and county staff, and have given presentations to civic groups and a community forum.  I am currently nurturing interest in IR elections in the cities of Los Angeles, Culver City, Pasadena and Glendale.

For more information, or to join the L.A. VoteFIRE email list, visit http://www.lavotefire.org.

To join CfER, or renew your membership, please visit