For a moment it seemed like City Hall, Los Angeles, would be on our side, the side of IRV.

On June 13, the Rules and Elections Committee had a meeting to consider various election reforms, and instant runoff voting was "the star of the show."  City Councilmember José Huizar had introduced a motion on IRV, which was seconded by Council President and Committee Chair Eric Garcetti (son of the famous prosecutor Gil).  The motion would have requested a report from city staff including an analysis of IRV and "recommendations for possible adoption of this election reform in the City of Los Angeles."  Very exciting stuff!

I even had a bit of a personal stake in the deal. I had helped activists identify City Councilmember José Huizar as potentially sympathetic to IRV, because he was elected as a trustee of my alma mater, Princeton University, in a three-way instant runoff election.  And I had bugged him about the issue at several alumni functions.  And once I brought IRV proponent Lynne Serpe, of the New America Foundation, to the grand opening party at Huizar's reelection campaign headquarters, where we chatted him up about IRV with smiles all around.  It felt great to learn that Huizar made the motion, citing New America Foundation statistics throughout.  And then at the committee meeting, he mentioned his university election as something that helped him learn to like IRV.

Of about 50 people in the audience at the Rules and Elections Committee meeting, about a dozen wore "IRV 4 LA" stickers that I brought along.

It was something of a letdown, though.  The committee did not vote on anything, but instead asked City Clerk Frank Martinez to report back in 6 months, on several proposals (all intended to improve elections and voter turnout) including the Huizar-Garcetti motion on IRV (remember, it was the "star" of the show), all together under one council file number. So the IRV motion has been delayed because it has been combined with other issues.

In general, an omnibus election reform is not a very efficient vehicle. (It reminds me of "Big Green", a multi-idea statewide environmental initiative that eventually went down to defeat.) The committee meeting started with (fairly long) presentations from several influential groups about a variety of election improvement ideas.  The groups were: the African American Voter Registration, Education and Participation Project; the Asian Pacific American Legal Center of Southern California; California Common Cause; the League of Women Voters of Los Angeles; the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials; the New America Foundation; and the William C. Velásquez Institute (formerly the Southwest Voter Research Institute).  Individual council members not on the committee came by and expressed support for IRV, and for some of the other proposals being discussed (including ideas about holding city elections at the same time as state elections, about the number and location of polling places, and about letting people called to jury duty work at the polls instead).

As a Los Angeles Times columnist put it, the committee meeting turned "into a three-hour-plus example of what happens when you put voter rights activists in front of a microphone - they literally can't stop talking."  This included a lot of support for IRV, but, alas, the main reason the committee did not vote on the Huizar-Garcetti motion seemed to be because the discussion went too long.  All but one of the three committee members left before the meeting was over. It is my sense that if the IRV motion had been considered separately, it would have passed the committee on a 2-1 vote.

In a separate development, I recently helped persuade the League of Women Voters of Los Angeles (LWVLA) to make IRV part of its educational program, so that the Los Angeles League can consider concurring with the Pasadena Area LWV's position, which explicitly favors advocating IRV.  I am slated to run the L.A. League's IRV committee, and will be looking to educators and activists for help in presenting the issue to the local League Units.

But what L.A.'s League of Women Voters thinks about IRV isn't really separate from making progress at City Hall.  One of the city's most prominent charter consultants says that in L.A. the League is like the Pope, with unrivalled influence over city decision-makers (on secular civic policy issues, rather than religious matters, of course). I look forward to my new role in the civic clergy.