2009 Burlington mayoral election

In March 2009, the city of Burlington, Vermont held a mayoral election. Vermont Progressive Party candidate Bob Kiss was elected, despite a 54% majority of voters expressing a preference for Democratic Party candidate Andy Montroll over Kiss. As a result of the surprise outcome of the election, Burlington voters narrowly voted to repeal IRV, reverting to their prior system of holding a runoff if no candidate receives over 40% of the vote.

Unlike Burlington's first IRV mayoral election in 2006, the mayoral race in 2009 was decided in three rounds. Bob Kiss won the election, receiving 28.8% of the vote in the first round, and receiving 48.0% in the final round (which made up 51.5% of the ballots which had not been exhausted), defeating final challenger Kurt Wright (who received more votes than Kiss in the earlier rounds, but only received 45.2% in the final round).

Results
The city of Burlington, Vermont held a mayoral election on March 3, 2009. This was the second mayoral election since the city's 2005 approval of instant-runoff voting (IRV). A candidate from the Vermont Progressive Party (Bob Kiss) had won the first election under the system in 2006. In 2009, he was running for reelection.

The official results of the 2009 election were as follows:

First round
In the first round, Dan Smith and Jason Simpson were eliminated, as well as the all of the write-in candidates. There were four ballots that did not have preferences listed, so they were placed in the "exhausted pile" to indicate that those ballots would play no active role in later rounds. Ballots for Smith, Simpson and the write-in candidates were transferred to the second preference on those ballots for the second round (or were moved into the "exhausted pile" in the second round).

Second round
In the second round, Simpson's, Smith's and the write-in candidates' ballots were transferred to Kiss, Wright, or Montroll (depending on the voter's greatest remaining preference). Montroll had the fewest first-remaining preferences, and thus was eliminated prior to the third round, with Montroll's ballots being distributed to Kiss and Wright according to the final remaining preference on ballots preferring Montroll.

Third round
In the third round, Montroll's ballots from the second round were distributed to Kiss and Wright. Since manytMontroll voters supported Kiss rather than Wright as their final remaining preference, Kiss pulled into the lead in the third round. Because 6.7% of voters didn't express a preference between Kiss and Wright (with their preferred candidate eliminated in prior rounds, and their ballots placed in the "exhausted pile"), Kiss prevailed over Wright with a plurality of 48.0%.

Analysis
Unlike in the city's first IRV mayoral election three years prior, however, Kiss was neither the plurality winner nor the Condorcet winner. This led to a controversy about the use of IRV in mayoral elections, culminating in a successful 2010 citizen's initiative repealing IRV's use by a vote of 52% to 48%. Ranked-choice voting would thus remain unused in Burlington until 2021, when voters again adopted IRV for all city council elections (but not mayoral ones) by a vote of 64% to 36%.

Pairwise results
This is the results of the Burlington, Vermont mayoral election of 2009 had they used a pairwise method such as the Copeland method: This leads to an overall preference ranking of:


 * 1) Montroll – defeats all candidates below, including Kiss (4,064 to 3,476)
 * 2) Kiss – defeats all candidates below, including Wright (4,313 to 4,061)
 * 3) Wright – defeats all candidates below, including Smith (3,971 to 3,793)
 * 4) Smith – defeats Simpson (5,570 to 721) and the write-in candidates

Montroll was therefore preferred over Kiss by 54% of voters, preferred over Wright by 56% of voters, over Smith by 60%, and over Simpson by 91% of voters.

Plurality (a.k.a. First Past the Post)
Since voters are only allowed to provide their top preference in the "first-past-the-post" (plurality) voting system, it s likely that Kurt Wright would have won this election had all voters naively voted for their top preference

Infographic


To the right is an infographic which attempts to clearly depict the pairwise results in a tidy SVG diagram. Well, actually, it's a scaled down PNG, so it's a little hard to read. If you click it. it'll expand.

Here is a link to the SVG version in a few different forms:


 * File link on this wiki: File:Burlington2009election-infosheet.svg
 * Static SVG link: https://static.miraheze.org/electowikiwiki/9/90/Burlington2009election-infosheet.svg
 * Note: ^This may or may not work in some browsers, but it works pretty well in Mozilla Firefox.
 * Static PNG link: https://static.miraheze.org/electowikiwiki/thumb/4/4f/Burlington2009election-infosheet.png/900px-Burlington2009election-infosheet.png

Raw data
Raw data: 2009 Burlington, Vermont Mayoral Election data Pairwise tallies for each of the candidates are available on the following subpages:
 * Schulze (Condorcet) results among Bob Kiss (P) voters
 * Schulze (Condorcet) results among Andy Montroll (D) voters
 * Schulze (Condorcet) results among Dan Smith (I) voters
 * Schulze (Condorcet) results among Kurt Wright (R) voters

Videos

 * Ranked Choice Ballots in Burlington &mdash; creator: Sygnol; date: August 12, 2019 "Data visualization of Burlington Vermont's controversial 2009 Mayoral election, comparing results from the best known Ranked Choice Voting tabulation systems: Instant Runoff, Condorcet and Borda (Abbreviated version of the original video)."

Offsite analysis

 * Brian Olson's analysis of the election