The Yes on Measure I: IRV For Berkeley campaign won a dramatic victory in Berkeley, California, capturing 72% of the vote in the March 2, 2004 election. From the start, we believed that 50.1% was not an adequate goal for our campaign. This is because implementation of IRV requires administrative approval at the County level, where the Registrar of Voters has been resistant to reform. By striving for and achieving such a resounding victory, we have paved the way for greater democracy throughout Alameda County.

Stalwart participants in the campaign

Our high profile campaign was made possible primarily through the efforts of four organizations and three City Councilors. Members of the League of Women Voters of Berkeley, Albany, and Emeryville, Californians for Electoral Reform, and the Green Party of Alameda County formed the core group that began meeting in early December to discuss the campaign. At the same time, the Center for Voting and Democracy came through with the seed money to hire a professional campaign manager. This gave the campaign the staff time to aggressively raise more money, to pay for professional design, and to create a plan for getting the message out to the entire city.

Additionally, a fifth group, the Wellstone Democratic Renewal Club, played an especially important role providing volunteer help in the final weeks of the campaign.

While having a Campaign Manager was useful, we could not have triumphed without the incredible energy of our volunteer Steering Committee and our extensive list of volunteer workers. Individuals who require specific mention include

• Councilmembers Dona Spring, Mim Hawley, and Kriss Worthington, who contributed endorsements and some combination of fundraising lists and time to the campaign.
• Nancy Bickel, President of the League of Women Voters, and John Selawsky, Green Party County Councillor and President of the Berkeley School Board, did terrific jobs as Campaign Spokespersons.
• Jack-of-all-trades and Campaign Co-Coordinator Dave Heller put in countless hours literally doing whatever needed to be done, professional and menial.
• Jim Lindsay announced he did not have time to be Volunteer Coordinator, had his arm twisted, and performed above the call of duty.
• Budd Dickinson kept a firm, economically conservative eye on the Treasury, putting in many more hours than he had planned because he had not believed we would be able to raise as much money as we did!

Others far too numerous to list contributed their time in large and small ways, and we are greatly to every single person who participated.

Messages

The successful San Francisco campaign of 2002 gave our campaign its first important message: runoffs are bad. In our graphics, on our website, and in our public statements we always emphasized that citywide December runoffs cost $300,000, while they have 28% lower turnout than November elections.

However, the peculiarities of Berkeley led us to also develop two other key messages. First, the activists in this campaign wanted a positive spin on IRV, not merely a negative spin on runoffs. As a result, our campaign slogan became "Cut Costs, Expand Democracy." The second half of that slogan allowed us to laud the advantages of having majority winners, having more people enter elections, and having positive issue-based campaigns because candidates need to appeal to each other's voters and therefore can't attack each other.

Second, at my urging, the campaign dared to use the "Ralph Nader would have gotten 5% AND Al Gore would have been President" argument. There are key reasons why this was the right argument for Berkeley in 2004, reasons that are not applicable to other cities or perhaps even to other years in Berkeley: (1) Berkeley has an overwhelming number of Democrats, many of whom consider themselves Progressives; (2) Greens outnumber Republicans in the city; and (3) the motivating force for voter turnout this election was the Democratic Primary, in which Berkeley voters would overwhelmingly be people thinking about how to defeat George W. Bush. I believe the campaign's success vindicates this controversial strategy. At the same time, I would not recommend repeating this in most places without very clear poll numbers showing that it would be effective.

Finally, it is important to mention that we refused to downplay the fact that we actually want to implement IRV. Resisting the temptation to say "this measure only permits IRV, it does not implement it," we made the conscious decision to sell IRV's advantages and ask people to come out in favor. We believe that when you say "well, this only allows us to consider IRV as one possibility," there is the appearance of a certain bait and switch that creates suspicion in the voter's mind. Since all the individuals and groups working on the campaign actually advocate IRV, not the further study of IRV, it made sense to us to say that forthrightly.

Money

The campaign plan made in mid-December, after the hire of the Campaign Manager, called for a low-ball budget of $11,900 and a high-end budget of $26,700, and suggested how the campaign could cope at each end. Happily, we raised over $21,000, allowing us to spend nearly $10,000 on print materials, to send a mailing to permanent absentee voters, and to pay for all our professional staffing needs. Of this, the Center for Voting and Democracy was at $7000 by far our largest contributor; however, all the organizations at the center of the campaign contributed both money and lists or events at which we could raise funds.

Field successes

The primary means we got the word out in this campaign was through Saturday morning precinct mobilizations, which were for seven consecutive weekends from January 17 to February 28. Averaging around 20 precinct walkers per week, we succeeded in hand delivering nearly 25,000 pieces door to door. With an additional Absentee mailing of 4818, this means that nearly 30,000 voters, a number larger than actually voted in this election, received materials from us.

In addition, the campaign ran a successful phone bank the last two weekends, dropped thousands of pieces at cafes and Laundromats, and had more than a dozen people posted at public transportation hubs and supermarkets in the last four days of the election. The worst thing you can say about our field plan is that due to the lateness in collecting the money we needed, we ordered our lawn signs too late. Of course, Dave Heller came through as always, personally posting 100 of the 150 signs we managed to put up throughout the city in the last four days of the campaign.

What's next?

Of course, IRV is not implemented by this measure, and it could still take several years to get it implemented, so electoral reform advocates have much to do.

In Alameda County we face a Registrar of Voters who has repeatedly expressed his opposition to implementing IRV. As a result, we need to exert substantial political pressure on the Registrar, to the point he understands that either he moves forward with the will of the people, or his job may be at stake. This is why achieving our 72% is such a fundamental achievement.

Immediately, we need a majority of the County Board of Supervisors (three members) who will bring the issue to the fore. Berkeley's representative, Keith Carson, is already signed on as an advocate of IRV. Two other cities in the County, Oakland and San Leandro, already allow for IRV elections in their charters, and the three cities together represent nearly half the population of the County. As a result, our immediate strategy needs to be to approach the other County Supervisors, and ask them to move forward.

Simultaneously, certification of the IRV voting equipment for San Francisco is going forward in March. Once San Francisco's equipment is certified, it will no longer be possible for election officials to stall on the grounds that there is no certified equipment able to handle IRV in the state.

If we are able to attain the support of three county supervisors, and to point to the certification of San Francisco's voting equipment as a model for moving forward with the equipment in Alameda County, we believe it will then be smooth sailing to actually implement IRV in Berkeley, perhaps even by the 2006 elections.