\u00a0The latest lunacy to seize Minneapolis – a city that seizes lunacy like Lindsay Lohan seizes appletinis – is “Instant Runoff Voting”.\u00a0 An idea husbanded by the Green Party, it basically brings to elections the sober reflection of the Lotto with the insight of a high school popularity contest.<\/p>\n
Here’s how IRV works (and I’ll note in advance that my disdain for the idea will make this description seem about as dismissive as I intend it to):<\/p>\n
What I think is most <\/em>interesting, by the way, is that the same people who kvetch and barber about electronic balloting and how Diebold is run by Republicans are the same people<\/em>, in many cases, who want to turn our democracy (whatever that means in Minneapolis) over, entirely, to a ranked sorting algorithm.<\/p>\n Seem…opaque to you?<\/p>\n We have a rare moment of bipartisan consensus.\u00a0 On a St. Paul politics discussion board, a commenter\u00a0with long-standing ties to the DFL writes:<\/p>\n …remember who is most empowered by the IRV system,\u00a0 it is those voters who chose candidates who get dropped from the ballot\u00a0 first.\u00a0 So, if you would agree that in most municipal elections the\u00a0 candidates who finish last are not some brilliant issue oriented candidate who\u00a0 just didn’t have the resources to be heard, but rather a candidate with lots and\u00a0 lots of tin foil on their head.\u00a0 And, remember those voters who voted for\u00a0 that candidate then get their second choice.\u00a0 You really start to see how\u00a0 the IRV system is In fact as someone who has been running campaigns for over thirty years in\u00a0 Saint Paul<\/span>, it doesn’t take a lot to figure out the purpose of the IRV system,\u00a0 it is to achieve by random chance and confusion what one can’t do in an open an\u00a0 informed election — elect Minor Party candidates.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n While I agree with the\u00a0writer about as often as I french-kiss Marisa Tomei, I think that’s\u00a0a great point; IRV\u00a0makes the fringe, nutcase bloc inordinately powerful.\u00a0\u00a0Combine that with a slick, coordinated message that “democracy\u00a0is\u00a0broken” and a faith-based plea to make trite protest-voting a way of life, and\u00a0you will have…<\/p>\n …a city even more strangled by fringe politics than Minneapolis already is.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0 The essence of the\u00a0new campaigns once IRV happens is vote Green, it doesn’t matter.\u00a0 Don’t\u00a0 worry, our candidate won’t get elected, your second choice will win, so it\u00a0 doesn’t matter that you voted for us first.\u00a0 Send a protest vote!\u00a0 So,\u00a0 if you can be convinced that it really doesn’t matter who you vote for and it\u00a0 won’t hurt you to throw away a vote, and if they can get enough people\u00a0 comfortable with that, then they get to win a few seats.\u00a0<\/p>\n Democracy and governance is no longer of some value, its just a parlor\u00a0 game.\u00a0<\/p><\/blockquote>\n \u00a0They want to bring the system to Saint Paul, by the way – and the proposal is getting some traction in high places.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0[IRV proponents]\u00a0want to tell you that it will be cheaper to not hold\u00a0 primaries.\u00a0 What they don’t mention is that we will need all new computers\u00a0 for every polling place to read IRV ballots and they don’t mention that the\u00a0 school board won’t be on an IRV ballot so, you might need two separate ballots\u00a0 and machines, or at least you will have one contest where you IRV and one where\u00a0 you don’t \u00a0Another thing about IRV; I measure Usability for a living; it involves answerign the questions “Who is using a product (software, hardware, toy, shopping process, whatever), “What are they trying to accomplish, how important is it to them” and so on.\u00a0 I (and a class I was teaching at the time) did a usability evaluation on the infamous Butterfly Ballot, for example – and founds scads of things that could make it incrementally more difficult to use more correctly.\u00a0 Fact is, when things are designed by people whose first interest (or competence) is not <\/em>designing things to be usable by people whose primary goal in life isn’t using that thing, you’re going to have problems.<\/p>\n And if American election authorities can’t design a punch card <\/em>ballot – a book with a pinhole – to be clear and usable, what makes anyone think that they can design a rank-based ballot that will be any clearer?\u00a0 And before you answer that question, remember – there a small but solid number of people out there who earn a very living wage, myself included, precisely because industry realizes exactly how dismally bad most people are at making things usable.<\/p>\n \u00a0And, having done campaigns, if you ask voters why they don’t vote in\u00a0 primaries, the normal answer is because they don’t know who all of the\u00a0 candidates are and that they don’t pay attention to the election until the field\u00a0 is narrowed, and of course that will never happen in IRV.\u00a0 So, you are as\u00a0 likely to turn off voters as stimulate them.\u00a0<\/p>\n But, remember it isn’t the general public that we are concerned about, or\u00a0 what the average voter will be most comfortable with, the real issue is How In\u00a0 the Heck Can We Come Up With a Scheme To Elect A Green Candidate????<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Exactly.\u00a0 If you can’t win ’em over with your platform and candidates, baffle ’em.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u00a0The latest lunacy to seize Minneapolis – a city that seizes lunacy like Lindsay Lohan seizes appletinis – is “Instant Runoff Voting”.\u00a0 An idea husbanded by the Green Party, it basically brings to elections the sober reflection of the Lotto with the insight of a high school popularity contest. Here’s how IRV works (and I’ll […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,2,28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-520","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-minneapolis","category-minnesota-politics","category-st-paul"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/520","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=520"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/520\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=520"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=520"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=520"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\njust about as far away from Jefferson’s goal of having an\u00a0 educated and informed electorate as possible.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\nIRV, that will make the average voter happy…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n