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April 23, 2020 - Adventures in HellwQrld
35:05
Ranked Choice Voting Podcast

I talk about Ranked Choice Voting and how it's super amazing good and we all need to push for it. Get pushing dammit, put your back into it! Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/hellwqrld. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Hello everybody, Poker and Politics here.
Here to talk about Ranked Choice Voting.
And first of all, I'm going to explain the benefits of Ranked Choice Voting, and then I'm going to explain how it works.
The first thing about Ranked Choice Voting is it gets rid of spoilers.
You can vote for whoever you want without the fear that by voting for them you are allowing someone that you are drastically opposed to To be able to slip in the back door and steal the election.
In this case, let's just say that you wanted to vote for the Green Party candidate, but you were worried that by doing so you would cost Joe Biden the presidency and allow Donald Trump to win re-election.
Biden's not quite liberal enough for you and you wish to express your preference by voting for the Green, but you're scared to do so because if Trump gets in, that's really bad.
But with Ranked Choice Voting, you can vote for the Green, And you can mark Joe Biden down as your second option.
And if the Green does not do well, as you expect them not to do, your vote will transfer to Joe Biden and you will be protected from Donald Trump winning as a result of spoilage.
And we all know the stories of Jill Stein being a spoiler in 2020, Ralph Nader being a spoiler in 2000, so on and so forth.
Now, spoilers are not exclusively anti-democratic.
Maybe in presidential elections recently they have been, but Scott Walker lost in Wisconsin for the governor's race, and he lost by less votes than the Libertarian got.
Roy Moore, the accused, credibly accused pedophile Roy Moore, Lost to Doug Jones by less total votes than the number of write-in votes that were cast by people who were obviously protesting the fact that they were Republicans who did not want to vote for Roy Moore because he was a pederast.
So it's very possible if those people had been allowed to cast their protest vote of a right in first, and then put in Roy Moore second, that he could have been a senator.
Conor Lamb, the internet darling who won his race in Pennsylvania, I believe that's the right state, may have got it wrong, but Conor Lamb beat the Republican by less votes than the Libertarian.
So again, ranked choice voting probably would have given it to the Republican.
Republicans in general don't talk about preventing spoilers because they think they just look at the whole president thing and they're like, well, we'll sacrifice a senator or a congressman or a governor here and there because we get the spoiler advantage in the presidency and that's what really matters.
One day it may come back to bite them.
There may be a right-wing splinter, a spoiler candidate that arrives and whammo blammo they lose the presidency as a result of it.
Which is, it's awful.
It's really awful because spoilers are bad.
They are bad for democracy because they have undue power for way too little influence.
They obviously don't attract a lot of votes and a lot of Popular support, but in a tight election they can be devastating, and that gives them much undue sway over these kinds of things, which is why ranked choice voting is something that I'm very passionate about and I care about.
Now, the state of Maine has ranked choice voting, and the reason why Maine has ranked choice voting is because of Governor Paul LePage.
Paul LePage won re-election with 46% of the vote, which is not a majority, but it is incredibly better than his first go-around when he won election with 37% of the vote.
That is right.
A full 63% of the state did not vote for the man.
And he still won office.
Because two liberals ran against a Democrat as minor party candidates.
And when this happened, the Democrat that was running against LePage freaked out.
He was just like, hey, can we do ranked choice voting?
Can one of you liberals please drop out and not vote split?
And none of it worked out.
They didn't change the election to ranked choice voting.
They didn't do anything to fix it.
And the minor party candidates did not drop out.
And the Democrat ended up getting 35%.
The Page got 37.
The minor party candidates got the rest of it.
And the Page won.
So that was obviously a disaster.
And a bunch of activists in Maine said, well, we're not going to let it stand for that.
And they managed to get through all the legal red tape and finagling.
And they got a ballot initiative on the ballot.
And it won.
and the ranked choice voter became the law of the land in the state of Maine.
And how did it work out in the first run in 2018?
Well, it worked out perfectly.
Because in 2018, in Maine's second congressional district, The Democrat Jared Golden ran against the Republican Bruce Lequeen.
I'm terribly wrong with that last name, and I'm just going to call him Bruce from now on.
But anyways, Jared ran against Bruce, and they were joined by a couple of independents named Tiffany Bond and Will Hoare.
And I'm not even making that name up.
H-O-A-R.
Will Hoare.
And on the first go-around of first place votes, because again, in Ranked Choice Voting, you rank your candidates in order of preference, so you have a first pick, second pick, and so on and so forth.
So, after the first tabulation of votes, Bruce was ahead of Jared by 2,100 votes out of nearly 300,000.
2100 votes out of nearly 300,000.
And Tiffany Bond had 16,000 votes, and Will Hoare had about 7,000 votes.
So what they did in this situation was because Will had the lowest number of votes and nobody had a majority of votes, Will was eliminated and his second place votes were then added to everybody else's totals.
And this did not get anyone over 50% because in order to win a ranked choice voting election, you have to get to 50.1% to win.
So because no one still hit 50%, they then eliminated Tiffany and transferred all her second place votes to the remaining two candidates, Bruce and Jared.
And when it was all said and done, Bruce received 4745 votes transferred to his total and
Jared received 10,427 votes transferred to his total.
So he went from a 2000 vote deficit in the first ballot to a 4000 vote lead in what would be the third round of tabulations
because they got rid of Will first and it still wasn't enough to change anything, so they had to get rid of
Tiffany also.
And after the third round of tabulations, that got Jared Golden to 50.62%, which is a majority, and that makes him the congressman-elect from the 2nd District of Maine.
Of course, as your typical Republican would do, Bruce immediately filed a lawsuit and said that Frank Choi's voting was unconstitutional, that he had gotten the most first-place votes in the first place, so he should have totally won.
He was robbed, this is totally unfair, blah blah blah.
And the judges laughed at him and threw the case out of court because they said, you knew the rules, you knew how they were playing the game.
Tough break.
Now, the good news about this was that of the 20, about 24,000 or so votes, 25,000 votes
that were cast for the minor party candidates, there were 15,000 votes transferred.
About 8,000 votes got squandered.
Now, there might have been people that just picked one and then refused to fill out a second option.
There might have been people that just did Will and then Tiffany, or Tiffany then Will, and refused to mark off a third option.
But about two-thirds of the populace used the option of picking either Bruce or Jared as an option on their ballots to have their votes transferred to them.
So really, in the end, it worked.
People were into the system, and they used it, and it was effective.
In the future, I would hope that we would get more than 66% participation on the transferring of the votes, but This is exactly what it's supposed to do.
It is supposed to prevent spoilers and make it so that the ideological partner of the eliminated parties prevails.
And that seems to be the case.
If someone wants to tell me that Tiffany or Will was just a flaming conservative, that would be really awesome and I'd love to hear about it, so that'd be cool.
But from everything that I had read, it said that this pretty much worked out the way I've said it did.
Which was that these were two leftist third-party groups, and they ran, and when they didn't get enough support, their votes were transferred to the Democrat.
And the two of them combined almost got 8% of the total votes, which is a really good showing for minor party candidates.
And with ranked choice voting making it so you don't have to be worried about casting a spoiling vote, This is the chance to allow these kinds of candidates to grow and flourish.
So there's really just no, there's really no counterpoint to this, I would say.
Someone brought it up to me, they talked about vote trading, and they talked about an election in San Francisco, which one of my friends I know him from online playing Secret Hitler, and also he is on Twitter.
But he brought to my attention about the Oakland mayor's race having ranked choice voting, and then this article was given to me by one of the people that I follow on Twitter.
Number one on Facebook, exclamation point.
He sent me this article about Gene Kwan winning the Oakland mayor's race via ranked choice voting.
And the article is hilarious because it explains that Gene worked diligently in the system to forge a coalition against the main Candidate, which was Don Pereira, or Peratta, however you say it.
But Don Peratta was the big money guy.
He was the guy that was kind of like, I guess you'd call him the establishment choice, as it were.
And what Jean did was she literally rallied all the other candidates and said, we need to form a coalition where We make sure that all the ranked choice votes get transferred amongst us and we tell our voters, we tell our supporters, that you don't put Dawn into the coalitions.
And it worked.
Dawn won on the first ballot and so on and so forth, but as the lesser and lesser candidates got eliminated and more votes got transferred, eventually Quan got enough votes to get a majority and she won.
And so on and so forth.
And then they go to the Parada campaign and he says, it's a travesty that a candidate could win 78% of the precincts and lead by more than 11,000 votes after the first votes are counted with a margin of 10% and still lose the election.
And any other contest would be a landslide win.
Ranked choice voting is an injustice and Oakland will pay the price, he laments.
And then Then they talk to Parada.
This is what makes me laugh so much.
Parada never told supporters who they should list second and third as he pulled ahead on the strength of first place votes on election night.
He was asked by a reporter what he thought would happen next.
It's a good question, he said.
I don't understand how ranked choice voting works.
To which I would say he should fire his entire campaign staff and blacklist them and tell everybody that has anything to do with electoral politics to never hire those people again.
Because the whole point of running an election is to win the election under the parameters of the rules.
And if you don't know the rules, it makes winning really hard.
It would be like Hillary Clinton waking up the day after the election against Donald Trump, going to a podium and saying, I won the popular vote.
I should be president.
I don't understand what's going on.
This is ridiculous.
I've been ripped off.
Which everyone would react by pointing and laughing at her because the game was played under the Electoral College rules.
You knew that.
How could you not know that?
So the idea that this guy would run in an election that was held under the rules of Ranked Choice Voting and not understand that is hilarious.
And this is kind of the point of Ranked Choice Voting is that you have to be conciliatory to your ideological allies.
And this election seems like it was kind of a nonpartisan kind of setup in San Francisco.
So I think it's very possible that if Parada had gone out and actually hustled and worked and had talked to the supporters of the other non-Kwon minor candidates and told them, look, I care about what you guys care about.
I'm working on the issues that you Working for second place votes is a big part of this.
Guys, pick your candidate first, then pick me second, because I'm more on the ball than
Quan is.
I know the system.
I'll be able to handle these things.
I'm smart.
I'm savvy.
I'm hip.
Like, working for second place votes is a big part of this.
Being a consensus choice is really a large part of the whole idea of ranked choice voting,
but polarizing extremist candidates really can't work out in a broad field.
If you have like three conservatives and three liberals running Odds are that when the votes get divvied up, that the more moderate, mushy middle kinds are going to be the ones that get there, because they're going to be able to build a broader coalition than the extremists.
And that might not be that appealing to people who want extremism and they want change, but for people that want coalition building, who want networking, who want to try to build an actual solid grassroots movement, I think that's a good thing.
And it also prevents you from like really going scorched earth on someone that is on your side of the aisle, as it were.
Again, if there was like three Democrats and three Republicans running for a seat, The Democrats really can't train their firelight heart on each other because if you do that, you might alienate people and they might make you their third choice instead of their second choice.
And that might be enough to put the other person over the top and make them the winner.
So you have to be a little smoother, a little friendlier to those people.
Now you can obviously train all your fire you want on the other side because the odds of someone voting split
first choice Republican, second choice Democrat is not very likely.
I mean, if someone can bridge that gap, then they're going to love ranked choice voting,
but it's tough to do in America these days.
But that's the, again, that's the whole point is that you want a candidate that gets the
majority of people to approve of them.
Everyone's like, yeah, that guy's fine.
That gal's fine.
I'm okay with them winning.
They may not be everything I wanted, but they're definitely not what I didn't want.
They didn't want the...
You don't want the Paul LePage thing where, again, 37% is enough to get you into office, and the vast majority of the state said, no, I don't want that guy.
So that is the nature of ranked choice voting, and it blows my mind that Pereira, who the article says was the guy that had the money, had the backing, that he didn't understand what he was getting into, and he didn't know how to run his campaign.
Is insanity.
And the only reason why the people that ran his campaign are able to complain about it is because ranked choice voting isn't as well known nationally as it should be.
so they can claim they got tricked by an anarchic, a weird system of Byzantine rules that are inscrutable.
And it's like, no, it's really simple.
I believe the Oscars does it this way.
I know that one of the major award shows does ranked choice voting.
So MVP in baseball is done by ranked choice voting.
If your first place vote gets five points, your second place votes get three, so on and so forth.
So this isn't brain surgery.
This isn't rocket science.
It's just a way to allow more people to be involved in a campaign without actually ruining things and leading to all kinds of intercedent squabbling.
Imagine if in 2016 we had ranked choice voting.
And you had on election day Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, and Ted Cruz running for president.
And that was a thing you could do.
And you could even throw in John Kasich if you wanted to.
But you actually had this diverse field of people that you could pick from to be the president.
You would have had rallies where you would have had Trump and Cruz campaigning together.
You would have had Hillary and Bernie campaigning together.
And on those rallies, they would have said, give me your number one vote and give them the number two vote, obviously, because we can't have crooked Hillary and crazy Bernie win the presidency and vice versa.
Hillary and Bernie would have said, Give us a one, give the other one a two, and keep Trump out of the White House because he's a nut, and Ted Cruz is a scumbag, and his dad killed Kennedy.
So, I mean, like, this is the kind of thing that could happen.
You could have these broad coalitions.
We could kind of forego the whole primary process because you don't need to just narrow it down to one person to be the The standard bearer of the party, because of ranked choice voting, the whole election will be handled in one election.
It'll be a lot simpler, a lot more streamlined.
I mean, you might have to wait a few days to find out who the president is, because we would have to kick a bunch of people off after they didn't get enough votes in a certain spot here and there.
And the actual call is going to get really screwy because it's a stupid thing and we need to fix that.
And I have a question about that.
But in general, this is such a better system.
And if I couldn't sell you on it, then that's my fault.
It's my bad.
But someone else, let me see if I can find my questions.
Questions, questions, questions.
That is not that question.
You can talk about the movement to make the Electoral College irrelevant by states giving all their delegates to whoever wins the popular vote.
It seems like that should be another un-no-brainer, says Asks Pewtergod.
That is something that, like, the 270EV Compact, as it's called, is basically a kind of a rule in abeyance.
That says, once enough states to get to 270 agree to make their electors vote for the popular vote winner, once that happens, that law will go into effect on those states and the popular vote winner will win the presidency and the Electoral College will be bunk.
That is a good idea.
The problem is it's a really heavy lift.
Nevada, which is basically a blue state, their governor vetoed a 270 PAC law And basically just said, we like being a swing state.
We want candidates to have to come over here and kiss our ass and tell us how pretty we are.
So thanks, but no thanks.
And that's the thing is that these states like having a little leverage.
They like having a little swagger.
And the red states will never do it because they're scared that the Republicans won't win the popular vote ever.
So it's a real heavy lift to do this.
It's really brutal.
My honest belief on how to really fix this is to get rid of the Permanent Appropriations Act, I believe, of 1929.
The act that pinned the number of Congress people that we have, or the number of people in Congress, to the 435 in the House and the 100 in the Senate.
Repeal that law, the state of the number of representatives a state gets is equal to one per the smallest population state in the Union, which right now is Wyoming, with about a half a million people or so, somewhere around there.
And like California would get like 13 more representatives, New York would get like seven, Texas would probably get around seven, Florida would get more.
But you plump up the House of Representatives to another probably another 150 reps, something like that, and
once you plump that up then it makes it so that the electoral college much more accurately reflects
what each state is actually worth based on population.
Because now California, instead of being worth 55 electoral votes, California would now be worth 68 electoral votes.
And New York would be bigger.
And Florida would be bigger.
Texas would be bigger.
All these states would be just bigger.
Because the more populous blue states are blue, that would benefit the Democrats and it would make the Electoral College basically a popular vote by proxy kind of setup.
It'd be very close.
It would be very tough to pull off what Hillary did, where you win by three million votes and you still lose.
I'm sure someone could do the tabulations and figure out what my hypothetical situation would actually have looked like if we had done it.
So, there's ways to game it.
There's ways to game the Electoral College, which is terrible and awful and an atrocity, and Rick Wilson can go fuck himself on his love of the Electoral College.
Because it's bad.
It existed exclusively to give slave states the ability to have influence on who our presidents were.
It was literally a compromise for slave states.
That and the Three-Fifths Compromise.
Everyone likes to trash John Adams, but he would have won re-election in 1800 over Thomas Jefferson had it not been for the Three-Fifths Compromise giving the slave states Undo the numbers of electors that they should not have had based on population.
So, yeah.
Fuck the Electoral College.
Fuck everything.
Fuck Jimmy Madison, that piece of shit.
He's ruined our nation.
Stupid Constitution.
Fuck the Senate, by the way, also.
Just venting there.
So, yeah.
Number one on Facebook asked, he asked about vote trading and so forth.
The vote trading, which is again from the article that you listed, that is just playing the system.
It's moneyball.
It's analytics.
It's like when you run a campaign under Electoral College rules and you know that you have to campaign hard in Florida and Michigan and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and you just abandon Alabama and California and Louisiana and
Massachusetts you just tell those states to fuck right off because
Those states are gonna go to the people are gonna go to and you only focus on the states that could go either way
any system
Gets gamed. It's inevitable People nowadays talk about I went out back when the world
still existed and I actually had a job People would say oh I hate the NBA nowadays how they ever
do is take three-point shots though They should abolish the three-point line. Just get rid of
it And I told them if they if you do that, you know, it's
gonna happen The nerds are gonna figure out the new way to beat the system.
Because the whole point of having nerds in sports is for the nerds to crunch the numbers and figure out the most efficient way to win the game.
And once the nerds have figured that out, everybody's gonna do it.
And in games like basketball and baseball, it's very obvious what you're supposed to do, and everyone has to do it.
In football, it's a little more chaotic.
I mean, there's different ways to skin the cat.
I mean, there's things that you should do, but obviously teams win different ways.
The Kansas City Chiefs had a very prolific offense.
49ers had a very strong defense and they had a very close Super Bowl.
So, I mean, that's the thing.
It's like, there's different ways to handle it, but everyone has a general
gist of like what is good and what is bad.
And in a ranked-choice voting election, people are going to figure out what is the best way to win a ranked-choice election.
At the same time, they've also already figured out what's the best way to win a first-past-the-post election.
I wanted to bring up one vicious example of a spoiler.
John Tester in Montana He had won twice without getting a majority of votes because a Libertarian had been on the ballot that siphoned enough Republican votes away to deny the Republican victory and let Tester win office.
The Republicans were sick of this and they found themselves a Green Party candidate to run against Tester in 2018 Tester got that Green Party candidate disqualified from the ballot, insufficient signatures, whatnot, will you, so on and so forth.
And furthermore, it was revealed that that Green Party candidate was actually being paid by the Republicans to run as a Green.
And if that doesn't show you how ridiculously cynical third parties are in America right now, I don't know what will.
So I mean, that is just, that's what they did.
That's what they do.
Rick Wilson in Running Against the Devil, he said that.
He said, look, I've funded Greens.
I've funded third party candidates to siphon off votes from the Democrat.
It's just politics.
It's just throwing elbows.
It's just being rough.
It's just winning at all costs.
And that just kind of goes to show you that, like, people game the system.
However, whatever the system is, people are going to figure out a way to try to maximize their advantages and to achieve victory no matter what.
And once they figure out the most efficient ways to achieve victory, they're going to streamline that process and work on it and do everything they can to make it stronger.
Um, a little off topic question, uh, was from, uh, Narc was, can you talk about, uh, Kemp throwing, uh, Trump throwing Kemp under the bus today?
And, uh, yes, that's hilarious.
I really feel like, uh, this is, this is the whole zeitgeist of the real Donald Trump, not the QAnon super spy hero, Donald Trump.
This is the Donald Trump who doesn't want to get blamed for anything.
the deep state totally snuckered just just crushes everyone with his super
genius level IQ the smartest man who ever lived Donald Trump this is the
Donald Trump who doesn't want to get blamed for anything this is the Donald
Trump who just wants to get the economy reopened get everything working again
make life as close to normal as it can be under the year of the coronavirus and
then just just roll from there Just get things going.
And he wanted these states to open up, and then Kemp opens up, but the last thing he wants is to have Georgia spike in cases and deaths and it's on him.
So he turns around and he's just like, Hey, I don't know what about that camp and what he's doing.
And really like this whole coronavirus thing and this whole election just comes down to Trump saying, no, I don't take responsibility.
That's it.
That's everything.
That line should just be played on a loop from now until November 3rd.
Mike Bloomberg should just run an ad that's just literally Trump saying that for 30 seconds over and over and over again.
Just, no, I don't take responsibility.
Just, that's it.
Just tell everyone, look, this is the president.
This is what happens.
When something goes wrong, he will not own up to it.
It's not his fault.
He will never accept it.
He will shrink his responsibilities.
He's just someone you can't trust in a crisis.
So don't vote for him.
And that's about it, really.
That's me punching Donald Trump for a little bit on the podcast, because that happens every now and then.
Best friendobanavasion asks if there's any way he can get involved.
My audio is terrible enough as it is.
A call-in would probably be too much for my listeners to bear.
But if we can square away a chance to actually do a podcast somewhere, social distancing and whatnot, will you?
Hey, we can look into it.
Things could be done.
So yeah, that is my questions section and I'm pretty much tapped out of information on RCV.
I do believe it was on its way to getting enough signatures to be on the ballot in Massachusetts this year.
I was a part of Ranked Choice Voting.
I have the t-shirt.
I attended some meetings.
My frustration with them was just the fact that they did not try to get it on the ballot in 2018.
The people that were running it, very awesome people, dedicated people, earnest people, sincere people, but I just felt that they were really trying to build this thing up in a way that it didn't need to be built up.
I kind of feel like Ranked Choice Voting sells itself.
And I also think that if you just, if you lose an election, which is, it would suck to lose, but if you lost an election, you still put it out into the consciousness of the American people.
And it's the kind of thing where once you start uncorking that bottle, the G is going to get out sooner or later.
And the other thing is, is that in 2018, it's a midterm election.
You have a lot less voters.
You can sneak it in.
You can sucker punch them.
You can get that thing on the ballot, get it passed, and the next thing you know, people just kind of have to deal with it.
And once they deal with it, they're going to find out they like it.
And in Massachusetts, it really won't have that much of an impact because there's not a lot of spoilers in this state, but it will have an impact because it gets the ball rolling for other states to do it.
Maine started it, then you get Massachusetts, and then on and on and on.
It just snowballs.
It just works.
You build momentum.
And, um, but they waited for 2020 and last I knew it was looking good, but coronavirus.
So I don't know how the signatures were working out for the rest of it, but I hope it's on the ballot in 2020.
If it is, I will be, I'll be screaming from the hilltops.
We gotta vote for it.
We gotta get it into Massachusetts and just build it up.
Take this circus on the road and go to all the other states that allow for ballot initiatives, for laws to be passed.
And get more of them to get it on the ballot and get it done.
Because it's an idea whose time has come and we gotta get moving on it.
So thank you for coming to my TED Talk about Ranked Choice Voting.
Hope it wasn't too dull.
And I'll be back to make fun of QAnon in a couple days.
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