On ranked-choice voting

The New Neo Posted on by

North Dakota’s governor recently signed a bill prohibiting ranked-choice voting in the state. That started a conversation and disagreement in this open thread on the subject of ranked-choice voting. In red or blue states, ranked-choice voting often pits people from the same party against each other in the final round, and because people from the opposing party have no candidate, they can vote for the candidate the members of the dominant party don’t want. It also causes confusion and delay in getting final results.

I don’t especially like it. It’s not that the two-party system – with a primary for each party and generally a single nominee for each party – is perfect. Certainly not. But I prefer it to a system where the final candidates sometimes end up being from the same party, and/or where second-choices can determine elections.

Take the example of the re-election of Lisa Murkowski to the Senate in 2022:

This was the first U.S. Senate election in Alaska to be held under a new election process provided for in Ballot Measure 2. All candidates ran in a nonpartisan blanket top-four primary on August 16, 2022, and the top four candidates advanced to the general election, where voters utilized ranked-choice voting.

Murkowski had been a vocal critic of Donald Trump during his presidency and opposed several of his initiatives. Murkowski was one of seven Republican senators who voted to convict Trump in his second impeachment trial in 2021, and was the only one up for re-election in 2022. On March 16, 2021, the Alaska Republican Party voted to censure Murkowski and announced that it would recruit a Republican challenger in the 2022 election cycle. Kelly Tshibaka, a former commissioner of the Alaska Department of Administration, was endorsed by Trump and the Alaska Republican Party. Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell and the National Republican Senatorial Committee supported Murkowski.

In addition to Murkowski and Tshibaka, Democrat Pat Chesbro and Republican Buzz Kelley also advanced to the general election. On September 13, Kelley suspended his campaign and endorsed Tshibaka but remained on the ballot. Murkowski received a plurality of first-place votes; however, because no candidate received a majority of the votes in the first round, an instant runoff was triggered. Murkowski won reelection in the third and final round, winning most of the second-choice votes from Chesbro’s voters.

Perhaps Murkowski would have won anyway, even under the rules of a traditional election. But her majority vote came from Democrats who preferred her to the other Republican (see the chart at the link; rounds 2 and 3).

Another Alaska election that same year was the House race in 2022 in which Democrat Mary Peltola was elected in a Republican district. In the open primary dictated by the rules (rather than primaries to select a candidate from each party), sole Democrat Peltola had gotten about 36% of the vote and the two GOP candidates combined to get about 56% of the vote.

However, the two GOP candidates (Begich and Palin) stayed in the race and spent much of their money and time attacking each other. If one had been eliminated in single-party primaries, that would not have happened (unless one ran as an Independent). In the final vote, Peltola won in this manner:

Peltola won the election with 54.94% of the vote in the third round of ballot-counting, after two other candidates, Begich III and Bye, were eliminated and their supporters’ votes were reallocated to the remaining candidates, according to the Alaska Division of Elections. Peltola had won nearly 49% of the vote in the first round, putting her close to victory from the beginning. Even though only about 10% of the eliminated Republican candidates’ supporters ranked Peltola as their next choice, rather than Palin, it was enough to secure her win.

In this case, as far as we can tell it wasn’t Peltola’s being chosen as second choice by Democrats that put her over the top (she was the only Democrat in the race), it was being chosen as second-choice by a small number of voters who had supported the losing GOP candidate Begich and who placed her rather than the controversial Palin as their second choice. The fact that a ton of money had poured into the state to support Peltola didn’t hurt, either.

In 2024, however, Begich ousted Peltola. The Republicans were wiser that time, despite ranked-choice voting still being in operation in Alaska:

Peltola finished first in this summer’s top-four, nonpartisan primary, followed by Begich and Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom (R). But Dahlstrom, backed by President-elect Trump, then bowed out of the race as the party sought to avoid fissures that were seen as paving the path for Peltola in the midterms.

House Republicans’ campaign arm had targeted the Alaska seat as an “offensive pickup” opportunity and named Dahlstrom to its “Young Guns” list, but its chair praised Dahlstrom for her exit. Begich then picked up Trump’s endorsement.

So although this was a ranked-choice race with an open primary, the GOP made sure that the general was like a conventional race rather than a ranked choice one; it featured a single candidate from each party. The results were that Begich won – this time despite Peltola’s candidacy being supported by about seven times more money than his (probably mostly from out-of-state), and despite the fact that she was endorsed by Murkowski and also had gotten more votes in the initial primary than the two GOP candidates combined.

Or, take the 2022 election of Oakland’s mayor Sheng Thao who won – barely – because of 2nd-place votes, giving her the victory over the person who actually got the most 1st-place votes. Thao ended up being recalled after a year in office, by the way.

I mention that ranked-choice often sows confusion; this article explains some of what I mean:

With a ranked-choice ballot, however, if there are five candidates running for each of those offices, then a voter is supposed to “vote” 30 times, ranking all five candidates for each of the six offices.

This requires a longer, more complicated ballot with more instructions, more pages and more ways to make mistakes. The process takes longer, which means more ballots are left incomplete. Many voters simply don’t have an opinion about who is their third, fourth or fifth choice in many elections. Yet leaving rankings blank creates the possibility of a ballot being excluded from the final results.

Counting ranked-choice ballots must be centralized and can only proceed after all ballots are returned and adjudicated. Initially, only first-preference votes are counted. If a candidate has a majority, he or she wins (and the whole ranked-choice process becomes irrelevant). If not, then the least popular candidate is eliminated, ballots with that candidate first are “adjusted” to move up the second preference to be counted as a first preference, and there is a new round of counting. Any of those ballots that have no second preference are eliminated.

This means that some ballots are counted for the same candidate in every round, while voters who prefer the least popular candidates may be counted for several different candidates as their choices are eliminated. If a voter’s preference is eliminated with no more rankings, then that voter’s ballot is considered “exhausted” and is not included in any further counting or in the final results.

Lastly, I believe it’s telling that it’s mainly the left pushing for ranked-choice voting:

Progressive groups and their donors spent more than $100 million last year pushing ranked-choice voting …

Mahdawi has supported terrorism and lied about the Palestinian deaths he’s witnessed

The New Neo Posted on by

[Hat tip: commenter “miguel cervantes.”]

The Trump administration’s push to deport anti-Israel Columbia student activist leader Mohsen Mahdawi (my previous post on him can be found here) has become a cause celebre. But as one might suspect, much of the story – the narrative, as it were – that Mahdawi tells about himself is either a lie or a misleading distortion.

For example, he describes the deaths of loved ones at Israeli hands without mentioning any of the following details (the link is to the “X” page of David Collier):

It took me two days to find holes in the story. …

Mohsen says he was 10 when his best friend was shot in front of him in the al-Fara refugee camp. I checked the fatalities database for the time period. When he was 10 years old NO CHILDREN AT ALL were killed at his camp.
Something is wrong. …

But we shouldn’t be surprised. Only four people died in total during those four years in his camp. If only four people died over the course of four years, how did Mohsen scrape seven bodies off the wall in one night?

Did nobody bother to check any of his stories?

The answer is “no.” The stories are too good to fact-check by the MSM. However, so many of these stories – just like race hoaxes such as the one perpetrated by Jussie Smollett – are lies that rigorous fact-checking should be the first thing the MSM does when writing a story. Of course, it’s not. In my previous post on Mahdawi I mention the extraordinary lack of curiosity and research on the part of the MSM in writing this story; their failings were quite obvious.

More:

Then there is Mohsen’s family. He posted an image of seven people to his social media, mourning all of their deaths. I identified four. All were terrorists killed while fighting the IDF. His entire family appears to be terrorists – or terrorist supporters. …

… Mohsen claimed in an IG post that his two cousins were ‘assassinated’ – saying “an Israeli sniper unjustly shot the two brothers in the head.” In fact they died because they shot at Israeli soldiers and the soldiers shot back. …

In his Facebook group [from 2012] Mohsen promotes a show that ‘highlights the sacrifices of our martyred heroes, prisoners, and wounded.’ The show basically involves Mohsen’s mother going to the homes of the worst terrorist prisoners. He posts loads of these videos glorifying terrorists. …

Mohsen Mahdawi posted and promoted this in his own Facebook group: The Khaybar chant – an explicit call for a massacre of Jews, Vermont US Senator Peter Welch defended Mohsen as standing up against antisemitism. Mohsen’s own behavior strongly suggests otherwise. …

There’s no excusing any of this. The man who can do no wrong lied and promoted deadly terrorists and genocidal antisemitic chants. The media is failing us. The politicians are failing us. The truth is staring at us in the face but nobody wants to see it.

Actually, quite a few people see it – and have seen it for many many decades. It became crystal clear at the turn of the century with the al Durah hoax, although that was not its beginning. I’ve been writing about this sort of thing for the entire time I’ve been blogging. But things have only gotten worse, especially with the Democrats and the universities.

The man whose “X” feed I took those quotes from, David Collier, has also published this article on the subject at his website. Please read it for more details. And here is David Collier’s background. His name rang a bell with me, and sure enough, he was the person who just a couple of weeks ago exposed the BBC as creating a pro-Palestinian propaganda film that was subsequently pulled:

The BBC was recently caught publishing a documentary that secretly relied upon, and paid, the family of a senior Hamas official.

In the public outrage that followed, BBC executives were forced to take the documentary offline.

The documentary, titled “Gaza: How To Survive A War Zone,” allegedly cost over half a million dollars to make, and yet the Hamas ties to the production were exposed in less than twelve hours of the show airing. …

The unique aspect of the “BBC-gate” documentary saga was that it exposed BBC anti-Israel bias across the entire news-delivery supply chain. Once it left the hands of Hamas propaganda agents in Gaza, across the fixers and journalists, all the way to the BBC executives who rubbed their hands with glee and dreamed of global awards, the failure was complete, catastrophic and inexcusable. Not one part of the system did its job properly.

The MSM and the Democrats have decided to defend the Palestinian side, and part of doing so is to not question the stories of those like Mahdawi. Another benefit of spreading his story is to make him seem like an innocent victim of a marauding and tyrannical Trump administration, and promoting that narrative about Trump is one of their main goals.

Not the AMA of yore

The New Neo Posted on by

The American Medical Association (AMA) is not just leftist, but also on the take from the American taxpayer. Here’s how it works:

The Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) codes clinicians use to report services to health insurers have become a linchpin in the American health care system. These codes are federally mandated, and all health care providers must pay royalties to the AMA to use them. That’s a heck of a cash cow for the AMA.

In 2023, the AMA raked in a staggering $495 million in revenue. A full 62 percent, $308 million, came from royalties tied to the use of CPT codes. And every dollar is paid for by taxpayers, via Medicare and Medicaid, or employers and employees in the private health insurance market.

Who knew? Not I. But it’s been going on for a long time. Here’s the history:

In 1983, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) mandated that CPT codes be used to report services under Medicare Part B. By 1986, Medicaid programs also had to adopt these codes. The 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) then solidified CPT codes as the national standard for electronic health transactions. These federal mandates essentially forced every health care provider to rely on the AMA’s CPT code system, creating a monopoly. Cha-ching!

There are other codes such as the International Classification of Diseases (ICD), which is free. But adopting that or something like it would eliminate much of the funding the AMA uses to pay its administrators hefty salaries and to support and lobby for policies such as trans treatment for prisoners.

The administration’s COVID lab leak page – and why there was such an initial push to deny the lab leak origins of COVID

The New Neo Posted on by

The Trump administration has a 500-page online report explaining how the COVID pandemic was from a lab leak. You can find it here.

Summary:

1. The virus possesses a biological characteristic that is not found in nature.

2. Data shows that all COVID-19 cases stem from a single introduction into humans. This runs contrary to previous pandemics where there were multiple spillover events.

3. Wuhan is home to China’s foremost SARS research lab, which has a history of conducting gain-of-function research (gene altering and organism supercharging) at inadequate biosafety levels.

4. Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) researchers were sick with COVID-like symptoms in the fall of 2019, months before COVID-19 was discovered at the wet market.

5. By nearly all measures of science, if there was evidence of a natural origin it would have already surfaced. But it hasn’t.

But for quite a while Democrats, the press, and health agencies went all in on the idea that the lab leak theory was “debunked” and not just preposterous but racist. And this was the message despite the fact that it was always a credible explanation for COVID and that points one through three were known quite early on.

And yet all talk of this was quashed, probably for the following reasons:

(a) To protect China.

(b) To protect Fauci.

(c) To protect “science.”

(d) To follow the principle of “if Trump suggests something is true, say it’s false.”

All of them are of interest, and for all of them books might be (and probably have been) written. But at the moment I’ll discuss “c” in particular: the idea that in order to save “science” we had to undermine it. The end result of that tactic has been the public’s increased distrust in science, health agencies, the government, and the press.

In the case of COVID origins, science was actually the culprit. That is, as number three at the website says, the pandemic came from conducting “gain-of-function research (gene altering and organism supercharging) at inadequate biosafety levels.” Poorly controlled and irresponsible science causing a worldwide pandemic of major proportions has long been the stuff of horror science fiction novels and films, a Frakenstein’s monster of fearful proportions. If this time it was true – and it was (at the very least; some think the release was deliberate but I don’t favor that idea), and they had to know it was true – the authorities felt that fact had to be suppressed or the public would become more anti-science than before.

Which is what happened anyway, of course, with the public’s added distrust that results from having been lied to and manipulated about such as important thing.

In addition there was the snobbery of health authorities and government officials who believed and believe that much of the public and especially the MAGA right are science-hating troglodytes. The idea of giving them any evidence for hating science even more was abhorrent, even if the evidence was true. Maybe especially if the evidence was true.

But little by little, the very inconvenient truth came out.

David Hogg plans to pull the Democrats to the left

The New Neo Posted on by

A certain segment of the Democratic Party thinks this is the wave of the future, led by the 25-year-old David Hogg, who is vice-chair of the DNC:

The move puts Hogg, the now 25-year-old who first gained national stature as an outspoken survivor of the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, on a collision course with his own party and some Democratic House members.

Leaders We Deserve, which Hogg co-founded in 2023, announced plans on Tuesday to spend $20 million in safe-blue Democratic primaries against sitting House members by supporting younger opponents. In an interview with POLITICO, Hogg said the group will not back primary challenges in battleground districts because “I want us to win the majority,” nor will it target members solely based on their age.

The Democrats don’t have a history of primarying incumbents, but that is what Hogg is proposing. He’s not destructive enough to propose this in districts that are considered at risk, however. It is a plan to pull the party as much as possible to the left and to the young (Hogg himself is exceptionally young for his position).

DNC Chair Ken Martin is said to have differing views from Hogg, so I don’t know how this will play out.

From Hogg:

“Our base is craving dramatic change,” Hogg said. “We need to show our base we’re here to fight for them. We need to show there are younger faces stepping up.”

But Hogg did name-check two exceptions: Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who is 85, and Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), who is 80. He described them as “fighters who are delivering.”

But they’ve also both drawn generational challengers — Saikat Chakrabarti, the 39-year-old former chief of staff to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who is running against Pelosi, and YouTube influencer Kat Abughazaleh, 26, who is running against Schakowsky. Hogg said Leaders We Deserve they would not intervene in either race.

Pelosi is running again? Indeed.

James Carville had a few choice words for Hogg:

… [Carville] blasted Hogg’s actions to Chris Cuomo on News Nation: “I don’t know if I have standing, but I might give the DNC $10 to sue him. He’s a contemptible little twerp if you ask me.”

NOTE: And Nate Silver predicts that AOC will be the Democrats’ presidential nominee in 2028. She recently turned 35 – my how time flies! – so she’ll be old enough.

The left’s scare tactics on Social Security

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “fullmoon” asks a question (the first part of the comment is a quote from a post I wrote):

“[Biden] hammered on the idea that Social Security is threatened, something Trump and other Republicans have denied over and over again. But this is a message that Democrats have been pushing from even before the election with some success; I personally know people who believe Trump is intent on taking away their Social Security, and who have been in a panic about it ever since November.”

This really is amazing to me. When I was too young to know what social security, or a republican was, my grandma worried about republicans taking it away.

How in the world can anybody old enough to be collecting still believe that? Boomers have been hearing that lie their entire lives, and many still believe it.

It’s a good question. I think the answer has to do with the fact that so many Democrats long ago swallowed certain ideas about the right that are at this point so deeply held that they are unquestioned. The first is that Republicans, or anyone on the right, are bigots. The second is that Republicans are always trying to take benefits away, either through frugality and/or through sheer cussed meanness. There are other ideas about Republicans – such as that they are stupid “bitter clingers” and science-deniers. But it’s the second one that’s functioning in the Social Security story being told.

It’s not as though there is zero evidence for it, either. For example, especially around the year 2000 but at other times as well, the GOP has expressed concern about the Ponzi scheme nature of Social Security and how long it can go on, saying something must be done. That “something” would of course be a proposal for a solution that would preserve it as best as possible, but it would involve change.

Some Republicans have at times talked about the possibility of raising the retirement age, for example, as a cost-saving device which would reduce total payments but not affect anyone currently getting Social Security. That makes a lot of people nervous. And although DOGE’s efforts to reduce waste and fraud should be the sort of thing everyone can get behind, the left stirs up distrust in a group already extremely distrustful of Trump and the right, characterizing the whole thing as having nefarious intent.

Here’s a typical press release from the Democrats. It starts this way:

As Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress attempt to advance legislation to give massive tax breaks to billionaires and undermine Social Security …

I would wager that if I were to poll most of my Democrat friends, the majority – and perhaps all – would believe that Republicans would like to take away their Social Security.

NOTE: See also this.

The DEI school lawsuits in New Hampshire and elsewhere

The New Neo Posted on by

I was surprised to see this news today:

Arguments begin Thursday in a New Hampshire court case involving President Donald Trump’s demand that schools end diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in public schools or risk losing federal funding.

The New Hampshire case is one of several lawsuits contesting the administration’s demands and seeking to determine if the federal government can withhold billions of federal dollars for schools to educate low-income students.

The National Education Association and the American Civil Liberties Union are suing the administration, accusing it of violating congressional regulations that say federal agencies cannot dictate matters of local instruction, The New York Times reported.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not the least bit surprised that Trump’s directive is being challenged in court. After all, everything Trump does is being challenged in court. The courtroom is a tried-and-true way for the left to get its way when it can’t pass a law in Congress and/or when the presidency is held by the other party. Just find a leftist judge and hope that either SCOTUS refuses to hear it, or SCOTUS agrees. And DEI in grade schools is one of the main ways the left hopes to continue to indoctrinate the youth of the US in the preferred type of racism.

But why New Hampshire? That isn’t the usual venue for these cases; it’s basically a purple state. Perhaps it’s merely the lawsuit occurring today, because the article also says the case is one of “several” similar ones, and I have little doubt that in a blue state (or if the judge is leftist, even in New Hampshire) the court will rule against Trump’s order and the case will be appealed. And indeed, later in the article it says the states suing on this issue are “mostly blue.”

I see also that one New Hampshire district that appears to be involved is Hanover, home to Dartmouth and one of the most blue areas of the state. You can see from this chart that the county in which Hanover is located, Grafton, was the part of New Hampshire in which Kamala Harris got the highest percentage of the vote in 2024, 59%.

Here’s the statement on the case from the Hanover official:

“The U.S. Department of Education’s unclear ban on DEI undercuts our ability to adequately meet the needs of our students and overrides our communities’ decision to uphold these values in our public schools,” said Jay Badams, superintendent for New Hampshire’s Hanover and Dresden schools, NHPR reported.

But are there no limits to what local communities can teach and what values it decides to “uphold”? The original civil rights cases that involved the schools established that the federal government had a say in the matter when localities were practicing anti-black racism. Now that anti-white racism may be involved, the shoe is apparently on the other foot.

From the Times article:

The Trump administration has set out its case in a series of executive orders and memos. It believes that when schools allow transgender students to play on the sports teams or use the bathrooms of their choice, they are violating the rights of girls under Title IX. And it believes that D.E.I. programs violate the Civil Rights Act, which prevents discrimination based on race, color or national origin.

The administration has not offered a detailed definition of D.E.I. But it has argued that programs that separate students by race in order to provide targeted support are a form of illegal segregation. …

The Trump administration has also argued that teaching about concepts like white privilege is discriminatory toward white students.

That seem quite obvious to me.

Some good news on the education front from Christopher Rufo

The New Neo Posted on by

Rufo observes:

After mounting a successful fight against DEI, the political Right has come to accept that if there must be a civil-rights regime, it should be one of its own making. Rather than continue to defer to left-wing interpretations of civil-rights law, the Right can now advance a framework grounded in colorblind equality, not racialist ideology.

The first field of battle is higher education. The Trump administration has set its sights on the Ivy League universities, which have not only advanced the ideologies of left-wing racialism but made them administrative policy.

Many Ivy League presidents see themselves as heirs to the civil-rights movement. In fact, they are among the most active practitioners of racial discrimination, stereotyping, and segregation in America today. Shielded by a virtuous public image, elite universities have institutionalized discrimination against disfavored racial groups, implemented DEI policies based on racial rewards and penalties, hired and promoted faculty according to skin color rather than merit, and overseen racially segregated student programs, dormitories, and graduation ceremonies.

The Trump administration has ruptured this illusion. In a series of letters to Ivy League presidents, it has threatened to withhold billions in federal funding, citing violations of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and other non-discrimination policies.

The argument is straightforward: racial discrimination is wrong whether it targets whites, Asians, and Jews or blacks and Hispanics. Any institution that continues to discriminate based on race is ineligible for federal support.

I think Rufo is somewhat too optimistic. But I think the general thrust is true: more people are aware of the extent of the problem, and Trump is using the tool of withdrawing federal funding – or the threat of withdrawing federal funding – to deal with it.

In the larger sense and not just limited to universities, the idea that discrimination against some ethnic groups is in the service of non-discrimination has been going on for many many decades and is a deeply flawed premise and needs to stop. The right has long been saying that we need to go back to equality of opportunity rather than a false and unattainable goal of equality of outcome. We’re taking steps in that direction.

Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) The man arrested for firebombing Pennsylvania Governor Shapiro’s residence is a pro-Palestinian socialist. Fancy that. We won’t be hearing too much about those things from the MSM.

(2) Joe Biden – remember him? – gives a speech that reminds us of what he does best: lie. Does he think he can run again for president? Actually, he can – after all, he only served one term. He hammered on the idea that Social Security is threatened, something Trump and other Republicans have denied over and over again. But this is a message that Democrats have been pushing from even before the election with some success; I personally know people who believe Trump is intent on taking away their Social Security, and who have been in a panic about it ever since November. The GOP wants to cut fat and fraud in the system, but not benefits.

(3) Chinese companies’ move in the trade war:

China is taking the trade war to a new battleground: America’s TikTok feeds.

Chinese suppliers have been flooding American social media this week, urging users to outflank President Donald Trump’s 145% tariffs on Beijing by buying directly from their factories.

One TikTok user, who goes by Wang Sen, claims that he is the original equipment manufacturer for most luxury brands, while standing in front of a wall of what appear to be ultra-spendy Birkin bags. OEMs work behind the scenes to make the products that another company then sells under its own brand.

“Why don’t you just contact us and buy from us? You won’t believe the prices we (will) give you,” he said in one clip.

This doesn’t seem so very new to me, although mention of the tariffs might be. But I’ve noticed for years many many companies based in China (although there is sometimes an attempt to disguise that fact) that sell goods that look like one thing in the online photos and text and actually end up being very shoddy when delivered. People complain all the time about such companies and their products, and there are tons of them.

(4) The UK Supreme Court rules on the definition of men and women, and finds the traditional point of view sufficient.

(5) The wife of deported El Salvadorian (and alleged MS-13 member) illegal alien Kilmar Abrego Garcia had twice alleged that he was guilty of domestic violence.

(6) A full half of Democrats would like the party to move further to the left:

The poll, which took place April 2-6 with 859 Republicans and 885 Democrats, found that among Democrats, 50% wanted the party to “become more progressive,” while only 24% said “stay the same” and 18% said “become more moderate.”