\nHere’s my opening bid:<\/p>\n
\u2022The Senate race might still be headed for a recount. <\/strong>But there’s a decent chance that it would be with DFLer Al Franken, not Republican Sen. Norm Coleman, in the leader’s spot.<\/p>\n[smug, self-serving speculation removed for brevity’s sake]<\/p>\n
And how would the Senate race have changed in message, tone and maybe outcome if the voters’ second choices had mattered all along? Might the fight have been more about, say, health care, and less about old comedy sketches? (See how delightfully speculative this game can be?)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
And the “Recount” would be done entirely by machine, centrally, at the Minnesota State Department, managed almost entirely by sorting algorhithms, far too complex for people – indeed, there’d be almost no way for actual humans to follow it.\u00a0\u00a0Odd, really, considering that among IRV’s most ardent supporters are the same people who thought Diebold and the other electronic balloting operations were in the tank for the GOP (who’ve been curiously silent for the past two cycles).\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\u2022U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann would not be headed back to Congress. <\/strong>The outspoken Republican culture warrior wound up at 46.4 percent on Tuesday. Every other vote cast in the north suburban Sixth District, I’ll venture, was an anti-Bachmann vote.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\nI’ll venture that Lori Sturdevant was huffing paint when she wrote this piece.<\/p>\n
No, I have just as much evidence as she does.<\/p>\n
Seriously.\u00a0 Was “every vote” cast for Jesse Ventura in 1998 an “Anti-Norm Coleman, Anti-Skip Humphrey” vote?\u00a0 Of course not.\u00a0 Many were “ignorant nutslap who think it’d be fun to vote for a wrestler” votes.\u00a0 Many more were “Lower fees on my jet-ski” and “Hey, $1,000 back from the government!” votes.\u00a0 Many many more were “I don’t care much about politics, but I saw Jesse Ventura’s ad, and it made me laugh” votes.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In the Sixth?\u00a0 I suspect (with every bit as much evidence as Sturdevant brings to the table) that the “Anti-Bachmann” votes were easily diluted by the “pox on both their houses” votes, the “Hey, a Norwegian last name” vote, and – rare as this might be – the tiny film of IP voters who realized that Bob Anderson who actually a fiscal conservative and former Republican.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Note, by the way, her main reason for supporting IP so far (other than “pluralities make me sad”); it’ll get her pet candidates elected.\u00a0 The ends, in Lori’s curious little world, do justify the means.<\/p>\n
\n\u2022Republican Erik Paulsen would still have the U.S. Rep.-elect title in the Third. <\/strong>My thinking: Paulsen is close to the 50 percent mark already, at 48.5 percent. My unscientific, skimpy sample of voters who opted for the IP’s David Dillon include a fair share who would have given their No. 2s to Paulsen.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\nSo Paulsen benefits from real-life ambiguity, but every single person who voted for Bob Anderson <\/em>was an “Anti-Bachmann” voters.\u00a0 Such is the order of the world in that special little space we call “Lori Sturdevant’s mind”.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n\n\u2022
State Rep. Ron Erhardt of Edina would have been reelected. <\/strong>Instead, he was the second-place loser to Republican Rep.-elect Keith Downey in a city that Barack Obama carried with 55 percent of the vote.<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\nRight.<\/p>\n
Which is also in a state with a statistical tie for Senate, and where conservative <\/em>Erik Paulsen won by eight points<\/em>, both in Lori Sturdevant’s special little world and the real one!<\/p>\nHow, you ask?<\/p>\n
Don’t:<\/p>\n
\nIn third place in the District 41A contest, just 134 votes behind Erhardt, was DFLer Kevin Staunton. If Edina voters used IRV, would DFL voters have given their No. 2s to a small-government, socially conservative Republican, or to a maverick former Republican who was a prime mover of the big transportation bill in 2008? If second choices had been registered and counted, this one wouldn’t have been close.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Presuming, of course, that Lori Sturdevant – she of the selective ambiguity and constantly-shifting context in this district – is really that <\/em>clairvoyant.<\/p>\n\nThree-way races have become the norm at the top of the ballot and are proliferating further down. Last week, the Edina legislative seat was won with 36.7 percent of the vote.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
And as a result of which…what?<\/p>\n
The earth opened and swallowed the city whole?<\/p>\n
No?\u00a0 The mayor, elected with a third-and-change of the vote, had to govern by compromise<\/em>, as an executive with a plurality rather than a decisive mandate?<\/p>\nThe horror!<\/p>\n
Seriously – this would be the future of politics with IRV:\u00a0 candidates elected with phony “majorities” (derived from obscure machinations carried out without the\u00a0vaguest possibility<\/em> of human scrutiny, without even a paper trail<\/em>!), who exist in a political netherworld, not really certain they have a majority, but unsure of how far from majority they really are.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\u00a0Every Minnesotan who thinks democracy should mean majority rule will be watching.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
And every Minnesota who thinks that “a phony majority delivered by a voting system one degree of separation from a math-major parlor game is a way to run a government” should have their heads examine.<\/p>\n
But not by Lori Sturdevant.\u00a0<\/p>\n
UPDATE:\u00a0 A commenter to the column asks: “What if we could instant run-off the worst columnist at the Strib?
\nWe can dream”<\/p>\n
The hard part would be actually ranking the “choices”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u00a0Lori Sturdevant remains the DFL Party’s primary unpaid PR flak among the Twin Cities’ mainstream media (although Rachel Stassen-Berger at the PiPress is closing in fast).\u00a0 In yesterdays’ column, she pines for “Instant Runoff Voting” because – why else? – it would have put more DFLers in power: Play the what-if game that’s the rage […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,20,4,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3625","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-campaign-08","category-democrats","category-media","category-minneapolis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3625","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3625"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3625\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22270,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3625\/revisions\/22270"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3625"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3625"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3625"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}