On questioning the integrity of the voting process
Commenter “stan” has this to say:
The gaslighting on elections has gotten ridiculous. Reality:
1. Democrats have a long, sordid history of election fraud.
2. Every other major democracy in the world requires voter ID.
3. There is zero evidence to support the Democrats’ racist assertion that blacks are too stupid to get a voter ID. Zero.
4. Even if there were people of certain demographics who didn’t have an ID, the remedy — eliminating the most basic election integrity measure — is nonsensical. The obvious remedy is simply to make an effort to reach out to that community to help them get IDs. Democrats have used artillery to kill mosquitos who don’t exist.
5. The dishonesty and lack of good faith demonstrated by Democrats on voter ID extends to every other voting change they have jammed through — voting by mail is the worst. We now mail ballots to addresses that don’t have buildings, to people who don’t exist or have died or moved, and count the votes that are mailed back without the slightest effort to ensure the ballots are honestly cast. This is madness.The current setup is blatantly fraudulent. To ridicule those who point out this obvious reality is gaslighting or worse. There’s simply no good faith way that anyone can defend this. We need to condemn those who do. Turn over the rock. Expose the cockroaches. And fumigate.
Democrats must pretend that the voting process they designed is sacred and wonderful, and that criticizing it is tantamount to heresy. Of course, when they’re not in charge, criticizing the voting process is perfectly fine and even laudable.
A trip back in time:
Just a reminder:
In January 2017, after Trump's win, House Democrats objected to certifying the election results in 9 states.
Alabama
Florida
Georgia
Michigan
Mississippi
North Carolina
South Carolina
Wisconsin
WyomingAbout 70 House Democrats boycotted Trump’s inauguration.
— Matt Wolking (@MattWolking) September 19, 2022
And remember all those “Question Authority” bumper stickers that Democrats used to sport? No more, now that they have become the authority.
We need to follow the Gallic model, with voting on one day, in person, with proper photographic ID (and scrutineers), on paper ballots (with only some exceptions for absentee voting), resulting in provisional tallies mere hours after the polls have closed. Is it not true that so-called “progressive” Americans normally prefer the French manner of doing things?
Got an ad on Facebook today, claiming it’s “National Voter Registration Day” and telling me to click through to register to vote in Georgia — where I do not live, and haven’t been recently.
The Democrats support these particular voting abominations for one reason and one reason only: they can manipulate and increase the vote for their candidate through these means.
I have long argued that the only way to ensure the integrity and validity of the vote is to require the voter to show an ID, vote in person, on a paper, hand counted, ballot. Absentee ballots are only allowed for those in the military stationed abroad.
And don’t get me started on ranked choice.
I don’t recall as many “Question Authority” as much as “Selected not elected”. I also recall the Women’s March occupying the Senate Office building during the Kavanaugh hearing.
Agree with Stan. In my local of Harris County, TX; Judge “Lockdown” Lena Hildago has just created a new covid alert system. Her previous one was laughable, but this one is just worse. Instead of measuring covid cases requiring hospitalization (as previous, without regard to actual severity), she’s just counting total new cases. In 2020, she used the lockdowns as an excuse to allow 24hr early voting (something not supported by any local or state law, but emergency you see) and of course mail in balloting. She also hired a non-elected election administrator to run elections despite elections being under the countywide elected District Clerk. Since the election administrator role was created, Harris County has failed to meet Texas law for timely submittal of result, which never happened in the past. The remedy is indeed worse than the problem.
The promiscuous use of postal balloting is a scandal. About 10% of the population has an abiding problem which makes it a challenge to vote in person. For the rest, they’re just doing it for convenience. If they were actually concerned with queues at peak hours, this problem could have been addressed by moving voting times to the weekend and opening more polling places. New York had one precinct for every 1,000 residents when I was involved in local politics. Witless Georgia has one for every 6,000 residents.
Another scandal is the failure to maintain current registers. The number of reported registrants in New York makes no sense unless they are failing to clean off relict entries. At one time, if you skipped four general elections in a row, your name was removed from the register. They’re not doing that. People in rental housing commonly move every other year, so segments of the metropolis where rental housing is the mode have nonsense registers.
Note, the government can properly format information it already has for board of elections employees to check newly received forms and check the whole stock of registrants. The department of corrections can set up a database of people incarcerated, on probation, or on parole; the Secretary of State can set up a database of death certificates issued and another of civil commitment orders and adult guardianships; the department of taxation and finance can set up a database of the names and addresses of people who have filed state income tax returns. And, of course, the DMV has databases of licensed drivers and registered vehicles. The whole roll should be given a going over every year. People taken off are then sent a postcard notifying them.
And don’t get me started on ranked choice.
Ranked choice is a salutary innovation that should be adopted. You need to get it right, though.
(1) There has to be a drop dead date beyond which ballots arriving in the mail are locked away and not counted. When the results are certified, the locked receptacles containing them can be opened and the ballots therein returned to sender. The optimal drop dead date might be the day of in person voting or the day before.
(2) You should use a straightforward jungle primary or have straightforward party primaries followed by a straightforward general election. Alaska for some reason adopted a multi-stage jungle primary. The utility of ‘ranked choice’ is that you don’t need to conduct runoff elections. What they did was to have an initial ballot and then a runoff both using ranked-choice. Not necessary and the result puzzled people.
I don’t think tabulating with old school analogue machines is out of bounds.
Another thing we might do is simplify the electoral calendar. Move the ballot propositions, recalls, judicial contests, and offices adjacent to the court system to May. Have a stereotyped quadrennnial cycle – federal, general local offices, general state offices, specialized offices. Reduce the number of elected offices.
There is no reconciliation possible with those who justify their lying, deceitful and lawless actions. As long as there are no serious, personal consequences, they are committed to their criminality. A criminality that actually does threaten the foundations of our republic. Biden simply reversed the truth, as people have since Cain.
The reality of our situation starts with accepting things as they actually are, not continuing to pretend that things are as we wish.
The irony is writ large. Democrats accuse we on the right of the things they alone do. While many Republicans are still pretending to themselves that the Democrats can be reached, if we just try harder and smarter.
Ideological fanatics cannot be reached, by definition fanaticism is beyond reason because reason is an anathema to the fanatic.
Geoffrey Britain (7:07 pm) says, and correctly so, that “Ideological fanatics cannot be reached, by definition fanaticism is beyond reason because reason is an anathema to the fanatic.”
. . . or, as someone out there [can’t pin down who right now] has already observed (and paraphrased here by me), we cannot reason someone out of a stubbornly-held position that they had not arrived at via reason to begin with.
And yet, over 40% of the voters think all is just dandy…
Ranked choice voting is a bad idea. I like being about to simply vote for the least bad candidate and not have to worry about all the tricks of strategic voting. If you want to send Lisa Murkowski or Angus King to Washington as an “independent” that’s your vote and your choice. You shouldn’t also get a chance to send your second choice Democrat there.
One good thing about voting on election day, is not having the counting go on for days and weeks, which happens when vote counters examine the second, third, and fourth votes and add them up by a process the proles don’t really understand. Having run-offs is not a problem. It gives voters a chance to be really sure of what they want (or more likely, don’t want).
Ranked choice voting is a bad idea. I like being about to simply vote for the least bad candidate and not have to worry about all the tricks of strategic voting. If you want to send Lisa Murkowski or Angus King to Washington as an “independent” that’s your vote and your choice. You shouldn’t also get a chance to send your second choice Democrat there.
1. There’s no playing the angles involved. You just rank-order the candidates according to your preference. (Imagine a primary ballot in 2016 marked Cruz, Trump, Kasich, and Rubio in that order). One of the features of ranked-choice voting in a multiparty contest is that you can forego playing the angles.
2. Canada used to have a certain practice in political conventions nominating candidates. All the participating candidates would compete on the first ballot. On the 2d ballot, candidates failing to achieve a certain threshold were eliminated, and you voted among the remainder. On the 3d ballot, the trailing candidate was eliminated, and you voted among the remainder. You had successive rounds of balloting until some person won a majority of the votes cast. There are some short-cuts you can implement, but that’s the basic practice. What a ranked-choice ballot functions as is a set of instructions as to how your ballot is cast in each contingency. The multiple rounds of tabulation are like the multiple rounds of balloting at a political convention.
3. Again, one utility is that it processes the preferences of trailing candidates in multiparty contests and in contests where multiple candidates have an allegiance to a given party, avoiding certain perverse outcomes. First-past-the-post in these circumstances makes more likely you’ll have a candidate espousing a minority viewpoint elected on a plurality vote. It also promotes playing the angles, as people abandon their preferred candidate for one who ‘can win’.
Ranked Choice voting: I don’t have a ranking, there is only one candidate that I will vote for, there is no second, or third or whatever, choice for me.
If you don’t want to have electoral integrity questioned, don’t have a voting system that gives rise to questions about the integrity of elections.
The compromises in the election processes – junk-mail voting, hasty changes in election rules, and irregular activity in counting the votes; perpetrated by judges, governors and other unauthorized parties in haste in a crisis-not-to-waste – tainted the election as much as bad police procedure taints courtroom evidence that leads to its exclusion … and the government, as opposed to its individual operatives, does not qualify for the presumption of innocence.
The compromises are all the evidence that is needed, that this election can’t be trusted and should have been sent to the House per the Constitution to vote in a President, not merely certify a compromised election. Of course, that would have led to Trump winning a second term, and they couldn’t validate 75 million deplorable people like that.
And it is reinforced by the courts ducking their duty to adjudicate the process on technicalities.
It is the job of government to prove that this election was on the up-and-up. And “because we say so” is not sufficient.
One good thing about voting on election day, is not having the counting go on for days and weeks, which happens when vote counters examine the second, third, and fourth votes and add them up by a process the proles don’t really understand.
1. The source of the problem we currently have is the practice of allowing ballots to enter the tabulation stream after the polls close. If we get postal ballots in the mail by 15 September, subject them to signature verification by bipartisan teams as they arrive, put them in organized lock boxes, put ballots arriving after the day before the election in a lock box for later return to sender, and tabulate the verified ballots the afternoon of election day, much of the delay you’re referring to will be avoided because all the ballots will go through the first round of tabulation before the polls close (in re the postal ballots) or within an hour or two of closure (at the in person polling stations).
2. Many contests will not require multiple rounds of tabulation because (a) the candidate is running unopposed or (b) two candidates are competing for one office, making for a first-past-the-post contest, or (c) one candidate wins a majority of the 1st preference votes cast.
3. You can reduce the number of rounds of tabulation by introducing certain shortcuts.
a. See, for example, the Minneapolis Mayoral contest in 2013. Minnesota has weak screens for designating a candidate for the ballot, so you had 38 candidates from which to choose. However, only seven received more than 2% of the 1st preference votes and these seven accounted for 90% of the first preference votes. Excluding any candidate who fails to meet a 2% threshold would save a great deal of effort. Seven or fewer rounds of tabulation would be required for these 38 candidates.
b. See the 1991 Louisiana governor’s race, a jungle primary that did not use ranked-choice (it used a runoff between the top two). Now imagine those were 1st preference votes. The third placing candidate received 26.5%, the fourth received 5.3%. The 5th through the 12th placing received in sum 2.6% of the vote. Even if you transferred all of their votes to the 4th placing candidate, he would not approach the total of the 3d place candidate. In an expedited ranked-choice tabulation, you eliminate the 4th through the 12th candidate after the 1st round of tabulation, leaving just 3 candidates after the second round is complete. In the 3d round, you eliminate the trailing candidate and redistribute his ballots. Twelve candidates require just three rounds of tabulation.
4. Note that if you have small precincts, you can expect perhaps 250 people to cast ballots at a given precinct in a typical general election, perhaps 350 if the president is being chosen. If you’re tabulating ballots in four competitive contests, you have to run about 1,000 ballots through your analog tabulating machine. That can be done in less than a half hour. You e-mail your results to a contact person at central HQ, who combines totals with the tabulation of postal ballots at HQ. These are then collated by the commissioners of elections and their aides. You can complete several rounds of tabulation by the end of the next day.
Ranked Choice voting: I don’t have a ranking, there is only one candidate that I will vote for, there is no second, or third or whatever, choice for me.
Then mark that candidate as your 1st choice and forget about the rest. (The term used for that is ‘bullet voting’ if I’m not mistaken).
Whats the problem ranked choice is supposed to solve it seems its getting q sane candidate eric adams prevailed so did boudin the first time
Why did the baker carter commission flag in mail voting because its insecure
Im sure its a wonderful place after all the clintons the obamas and the gates but you know a little equity would do them good
Gosh Neo, thanks for the plug.
Jestor nails it re: no presumption in favor of the government. This should be the standard, even in the absence of historical evidence of election issues. In our current crisis, however, the evidence of serious issues mounts ever higher. And that makes putting the burden on the government even more pressing.
The size and power of government is such that the rewards for cheating are enormous. With that kind of temptation, we should expect corruption in the process. It’s too easy to cheat. No one gets caught. Those caught get a hand slap at most. Make the costs exceed the benefits. Make it as hard as possible to cheat and give life sentences to cheaters who are caught.
Whats the problem ranked choice is supposed to solve it seems its getting q sane candidate eric adams prevailed so did boudin the first time
You mean bad candidates don’t win first-past-the-post contests?
Honestly they do things for a reason and its never good for animal vegetable adults or small children lockdowns shutting down our energy exploration shipping every spare bullet we have to ukraine why does the totality of what they push not sink in
If the democrat party is for “ranked choice voting”, it is a virtual certainty that they believe it serves to advance their agenda.
Does that not hold true for anything they support?
Is this as big as it looks?
https://twitter.com/NYCitizensAudit/status/1559890678716547073
New York’s Voter Matrix: An Alternate Structure Within Voter Rolls
Hundreds of Thousands of Cloned Voter Records
One expert said he saw this occur in the Middle East. He said the purpose was to “control elections. I never expected to see it in America.”
The Matrix found within New York’s voter rolls closes the loop started with ballot trafficking, as seen in the movie “2,000 Mules.” For trafficked ballots to have any effect, they must be counted. To prevent an overcount, the vote count must match the voter count. To do that, phantom registrations are needed.
We know from 2,000 Mules that fake ballots were counted in the 2020 General Election. We know from research conducted by NYCA that large numbers of phantom voters are present in the voter rolls. The only piece missing from this puzzle is a way to clandestinely access the phantom voter records.
The Voter Matrix can solve that problem. It creates a hidden structure within the ID numbers. That structure can be accessed by an external app that understands the Matrix. It uses the repositioned numbers to determine which can be safely interacted with (phantoms) and which cannot (legitimate records). This is what NYCA has found. Anyone with access to the voter rolls can see it.
Ranked Choice Voting is a threat to the tightly controlled party organizations.
In the Democratic Party local offices are controlled by the teacher’s unions, which themselves are almost totally controlled by what used to be called Greens.
In the GOP the pro-life faction has control from the precinct committee level all the way up. This single issue focus has prevented the GOP from addressing almost anything with specific solutions.
In both cases the result are primaries that exclude anyone not in bed with the dominant group. The main areas open to debate are school choice and abortion as a reaction to the single issue focus of the other side. However, specific proposed solutions are not part of the debate, Having just the issues is far more effective in rallying the base.
The result is a manifestation of tribalism that stresses loyalty to your side as the only issue. The campaigns don’t want support for solutions, they want anger and simplicity.
Looking at the Alaska case, if the Democrat had not been pro-choice, her other positions would fit easily in a Republican campaign. Saying that the Republicans got more first choice votes misses that point, as well as the point that the non-Palin Republican actually came from a Democrat family dynasty with a history of winning Alaskian elections as Democrats.
The Texas races are a perfect example. I get all the Beto stuff and it is almost totally abortion. The Republican stuff is almost all school choice, but with no specific proposals, just ridicule of the schools (totally true) aimed at engaging parents with anger.
If the democrat party is for “ranked choice voting”, it is a virtual certainty that they believe it serves to advance their agenda.
They may. Now, look at the alternatives and walk through the process of each. It doesn’t benefit Democrats in any peculiar way. It benefits third parties to a degree. The degree to which it does will be limited simply because there isn’t a social or cultural basis for third parties in general (though there is in particular states and localities). Making use of jungle primaries with ranked-choice benefits permanent minorities, as they can direct their 2d and 3d choices to the other party’s least unpalatable candidates. Note, the distribution of support between the two major parties is such that Republicans are more likely to be in a permanent minority. New York City is a case in point.
Ranked Choice Voting is a threat to the tightly controlled party organizations.
Not a whole lot. The use of jungle primaries arguably is. The thing is, jungle primaries are most utile where you have a dominant party. However, in situations like that, factional squabbles within a party tend to be more intense.
There is no way to avoid “gaming” a ranked choice vote. In fact, I suspect that is why so many progressives want it – they believe that they are smarter than everyone else so it will benefit them. (Many of them are clever, but very few of them are wise, I say.) An election that turns on whether voters listed the winning candidate 2nd or 3rd on their ballots is of questionable legitimacy. A “majority” made up of a combination of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place votes really isn’t a majority at all. If it is that important that the winner get a majority, have a run-off like Georgia.
That said, I could see the merits of using ranked choice in a party primary, maybe. There, the purpose is to find the candidate that is at least minimally acceptable to the the largest portion of the party. (Art Deco – You do realize that Trump wouldn’t have had a snowball’s chance in hades of of winning the 2016 Republican nomination had ranked choice voting been in place.)
To neo’s point – I think there is something missing from leftists. Behaving the way they behave now while “forgetting” about the last three times a Republican has won the presidency destroys their creditibility and the credibility of the institutions that we all need (and that progressives especially need to achieve their objectives.)
Maybe they’ve grown so used to the media acting as the propaganda arm of the Democratic party that they are beginning to believe their own BS. How can any minimally informed person not understand that Stacey Abrahms looks like a fool when she criticizes Trump for denying election results?
Thinking it through further- I can see a conservative case for ranked choice in general elections. A candidate who is merely minimally acceptable to the broadest swath of the electorate is not as likely to have a strong mandate than a straight up winner.
But – due to the sucess of the progressive movement over the last century or so, the milktoast “minimally acceptable” candidate is going to exercise a great deal of power, mandate or no. Maybe that’s another reason that the left likes ranked choice. They don’t seem to care much about mandates, just power.
Nothing good comes from this
https://summit.news/2022/09/20/video-biden-proclaims-theres-a-through-line-of-hate-in-american-history/
I would have liked to have had more choices in elections. So would a lot of people. That was what Perot was about, having an alternative to Bush and Clinton, both of whom many would call “globalists” today.
But in practice, ranked choice voting keeps the dominant party (or those closely aligned with them) in power. My assessment is that it was adopted in Alaska and Maine to allow the Democrats or “moderate” independents (Murkowski, King) to lock out more conservative Republicans.
The case may be a little stronger in New York, where there has been something of a multi-party system for decades. But allowing candidates to run on multiple party lines has already encouraged that. It seems like a workable system and it doesn’t look to me like ranked choice voting would improve things there.
Maybe allowing candidates to run on multiple party lines would be a better alternative for allowing different voices to be heard than moving to ranked choice voting.
There is no way to avoid “gaming” a ranked choice vote.
There is no gaming outside your imagination.
An election that turns on whether voters listed the winning candidate 2nd or 3rd on their ballots is of questionable legitimacy.
The same rules apply to all the candidates. Any winning candidate and any losing runner up will have a mix of 1st, 2d, &c. preference votes except in the case where a candidate’s 1st preference votes account for a majority of the ballots cast. How is that less legitimate than a candidate elected with a plurality vote (not commanding a majority)?
(Art Deco – You do realize that Trump wouldn’t have had a snowball’s chance in hades of of winning the 2016 Republican nomination had ranked choice voting been in place.)
I don’t ‘realize’ that because it’s false. Trump won 45% of the popular ballots cast in Republican primaries and caucuses. Candidates most palatable to the Capitol Hill nexus and K Street won all of 26% of the ballots. Of the balance, 25% went to Ted Cruz, just shy of 3% went to Dr. Carson, and the remainder went to a miscellany of others. AM McConnell’s loathing of Ted Cruz is on a par with his loathing of Donald Trump, because Cruz has policy goals and McConnell’s just a bag man. So, your scenario is that the GOPe vote lines up behind John Kasich and then he collects 85% of the Cruz and Carson ballots. Mike LaFontaine offers a comment (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VX3W6xMYiV0)
But in practice, ranked choice voting keeps the dominant party (or those closely aligned with them) in power.
You need to show your work when you make remarks like this.
My assessment is that it was adopted in Alaska and Maine to allow the Democrats or “moderate” independents (Murkowski, King) to lock out more conservative Republicans.
Whatever they thought they were doing, it doesn’t do that unless (1) you routinely have > 2 competitive candidates for an office and (2) your ‘more conservative’ candidate cannot garner enough 2d and 3d preference votes to win a majority of the tally. In that set of circumstances, if you’d ever had victorious ‘more conservative’ candidates, it would have been because they won a plurality in a three or four candidate race. I’m not seeing why you think it advisable to structure your electoral system so you have that sort of outcome.
Ranked choice voting encourages shill or sham candidates. The Democrat who ran against Angus King won only about 10% of the vote. His purpose was to give people who didn’t want to vote for King a chance to vote for King and give Democrats an opportunity to feel like they were loyal to the party while they were in effect voting for the independent (who was actually a Democrat). It doesn’t look like ranked choice voting promotes greater honesty in government, but it’s become something like a religion for some people, a panacea that will fix everything that is wrong with the electoral system. Not for nothing does it come from the state that gave us the Prohibitionist movement.
Bruce Poliquin (R) won the popular vote in Maine’s second congressional district, but because the voters for two independent candidates gave their second place votes to the Jared Golden (D), he won the election. It’s possible that in a straightforward race, Golden would have won anyway, voters having decided not to waste their votes on candidates who couldn’t win, but yes, Poliquin — having won a plurality of first choice votes — should have been elected. I’m not seeing why you think it advisable to restructure your electoral system so that you have a different sort of outcome.
Ranked choice voting encourages shill or sham candidates. The Democrat who ran against Angus King won only about 10% of the vote. His purpose was to give people who didn’t want to vote for King a chance to vote for King and give Democrats an opportunity to feel like they were loyal to the party while they were in effect voting for the independent (who was actually a Democrat)
You keep producing these non sequiturs. You mean he runs, some people prefer him and put King down as their second choice. Why is that less legitimate than some other scenario?
It doesn’t look like ranked choice voting promotes greater honesty in government,
Another non sequitur. If anyone ever studied the question, they have a limited data set in this country. That aside, the effect of the electoral system on the frequency of embezzlement in public agencies would certainly be intermediated between other factors and not the first question you’d ask about the electoral system or public corruption.
but it’s become something like a religion for some people, a panacea that will fix everything that is wrong with the electoral system. Not for nothing does it come from the state that gave us the Prohibitionist movement.
You want to tell me who said it would ‘fix everything that is wrong’? The projection in this statement is tiresome. I’ve had a few occasions to argue the question in fora like this. Just a few, because it’s not a prevalent topic of discussion. I will say the only dogmatic responses I’ve encountered come from one direction, and it’s not from partisan Democrats.
Poliquin — having won a plurality of first choice votes — should have been elected.
Why? He did not win a majority. Most of the electorate was against him. The outcome strongly suggests that in a head-to-head contest, he would have lost.
all its about destroying this country, like the games murkowski played, to game the 2010 election in collaboration with the people who bought the daily news, who slander jefferson and washington, and she voted for garland, mayorkas, and austin among others,
You mean he runs, some people prefer him and put King down as their second choice. Why is that less legitimate than some other scenario?
Why is that more legitimate than the current scenario? “When it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change,” isn’t my motto, but it does seem to apply in this case. You have not been able to prove that the results under ranked choice voting are any better than what the present system produces.
Why? He did not win a majority. Most of the electorate was against him. The outcome strongly suggests that in a head-to-head contest, he would have lost.
I said that it’s possible that Golden would have come out on top in a two candidate race. That would have been a more acceptable result than going through the sham of ranked choice voting.
Did voters care enough to choose him and his positions on the issues, or were they dilettantishly trying to hedge their bets and have things both ways? Some people prefer one method, some the other. When there is no overwhelming reason for change, why change?
I will say the only dogmatic responses I’ve encountered come from one direction, and it’s not from partisan Democrats.
You see things that way because you are a true believer and discount all arguments to the contrary as “dogmatic” and “non-sequiturs.” There are a lot of people like that arguing for RCV. While it’s literally an exaggeration to say that you view it as an answer to all our problems, putting it that way does capture the dogmatism of many proponents of RCV.
Informative article:
https://www.heritage.org/election-integrity/report/ranked-choice-voting-bad-choice
Vote exhaustion:
Or consider the mayor’s race in Oakland, California, in 2010, in which the candidate that received the most first-place votes lost the election to “a candidate on the strength of nearly 25,000 second- and third-place votes” after nine rounds of redistribution of the votes.
This also happened recently in Maine. In 2018, the first-ever general election for federal office in our nation’s history was decided by ranked choice voting in the Second Congressional District in Maine. Jared Golden (D) was declared the eventual winner—even though incumbent Bruce Poliquin (R) received more votes than Golden in the first round. There were two additional candidates in the race, Tiffany Bond and William Hoar. However, the Maine Secretary of State, Matt Dunlop, “exhausted” or threw out a total of 14,076 ballots of voters who had not ranked all of the candidates
Why is that more legitimate than the current scenario?
Your complaint is what, that more than two people ran for office? People and organizations have a right to run for public office and present themselves and their platform, even if you fancy it’s untidy.
“When it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change,” isn’t my motto, but it does seem to apply in this case. You have not been able to prove that the results under ranked choice voting are any better than what the present system produces.
You haven’t defined what constitutes a ‘better’ result in any given contest, just danced around the checkerboard offering one contrived complaint after another.
I said that it’s possible that Golden would have come out on top in a two candidate race. That would have been a more acceptable result than going through the sham of ranked choice voting.
What’s the sham? The ballot is perfectly straightforward and the instructions on how to tabulate it are perfectly straightforward.
Did voters care enough to choose him and his positions on the issues, or were they dilettantishly trying to hedge their bets and have things both ways?
What the voters were doing is assessing the candidates and rank-ordering them according to preference. This is something people do with options every day.
You see things that way because you are a true believer and discount all arguments to the contrary as “dogmatic” and “non-sequiturs.”
No, you offered non-sequiturs and ill-thought-out talking points. Offer better arguments, and you’ll get some respect.
The article is not informative. It offers the same complaint you did. But the complaint you offered is that somehow it is illegitimate in a race that has a binary result (win-loss) to require the winner to have a majority of the tally to be installed and that somehow it is illegitimate to take account of people’s contingent preferences in tabulating the vote. We’ve had runoff elections for decades. Did Heritage minions complain about those?
Ranked voting increases obfuscation, thereby reducing integrity and trust. One step forward, two steps backward.
The same people who think blacks are unable to get a photo ID are the same people who wanted to force vaccine passports upon us all. How racist is that? Sad.
Ranked voting increases obfuscation, thereby reducing integrity and trust.
It neither increases obfuscation nor reduces integrity. If it reduces ‘trust’, it’s because of the substantial population of those who refuse to think anything through.