Ranked choice voting is a very good idea. It allows people to express their preference for third party candidates, while guarding against the possibility that in so doing they will allow a truly awful candidate to win. It would almost certainly have given Gore a victory over Bush in 2000 while allowing people to vote for Nader, It might well have given Hillary a win in 2016 (not sure itâs been studied).
Itâs a fair system and one chosen by the voters of Maine and I would say the same if it had given the Republican a win, rather than the Democrat.
âBecause of the margin of victory, Poliquin had to pay a $5,000 deposit in requesting the recount. Heâll get it back if heâs declared winner.â
So this is like a coachâs challenge in the NFLâyou get the timeout back if you win?
Too bad he can pay for a recount as this SHOULD get tossed by federal courts. However sore losers are taking the Franken election mess as an primer.
If states can legitimately apportion electoral votes by sections of the state, e.g. OK, surely voters can apportion votes. Plus, states rights, state laboratories, etc that GOP likes to trot out.
Sore loser, but a loser nonetheless. I canât wait till he moves his sorry behind to Florida. Where all bad pols go to die.
Agreed. Brucie was never one with the district, he kept winning due to other ballot measures that brought out the knuckleheads in droves. And the dems needed a good candidate. Golden is a good one, brucie needs to leave.!
I like ranked choice voting too, but the whole thing just proves the need for mandatory, uniform federal election procedures. I believe it violates the principle of equal protection under the law, when some voters have ranked-choice, some have at-large, some have all-or-nothing elections.
Some get automatic mail-in ballots, others have to ask for one every time, some have to wait in line for hours, others are in-and-out in 5 minutes.
Some get their ID when their parents take them to get driversâ licenses at age 16, others have to wait until theyâre 18 to buy their own driversâ license and car, others have to make trips to the state capitol to hunt down their birth certificates to get an ID, and a few have to hunt down the retired priest of a defunct church, to see if their baptismal record can be dug up in lieu of a birth certificate that was never issued.
I donât expect the Court to be any help; the next House should just unilaterally pass a uniform election code for Representatives, as the Constitution entitles it to do. Refuse to seat anyone whose election didnât follow the code.
It takes a Republican to call math unconstitutional.
This is what my grand-kids do - try to change the rules after losing the game.
He has a separate suit pending in federal district court challenging the concept of RCV as unconstitutional. That should get tossed if the judgeâs ruling denying Poliquinâs motion for a temporary restraining order on the vote count is any indicator. The recount he is entitled to, I believe, as a matter of the margin of victory. Still in Maine overcoming 3k votes on a recount in a congressional election is a pretty big pile of snow to shovel.
I joked on Twitter this morning after reading Poliquinâs statement about the RCV process it reminded me of the old SNL ads with Sam Waterston selling Old Glory Insurance to protect the elderly against the coming robot invasion. âFor when the metal ones come for youâŚâ
Poliquin claimed he won âthe constitutional âone-person, one-voteâ first-choice electionâ
Me thinks that Poliquin is full of manure - in what part of the constitution does it even mention this âFIRST-CHOICE ELECTIONâ ⌠??
A quick search reveals no references to such a term until Poliquin started whining about having lost - it smells like a term cobbled together by some political strategy / marketing consultant so that Poliquin can attack the âRANKED - CHOICEâ method and basically venture off on some assault upon the will of the people of Maine.
MOST IMPORTANT -
The real hill that Poliquin is going to die on is going to be
- do the people of Maine have the right to require that the winner achieve a 50% or more majority?
-
- and they absolutely do ⌠Poliquin has to slay this issue first and he will die trying (Poliquinâs logic is plainly demanding that the votersâ official selection of a 50% majority requirement be disregarded and that his slim marginal lead in the first phase - a mere plurality with 46% of the vote - be imposed & overrule the choice of the citizens)
Poliquin is going into a legal battle armed with a rubber knife and a sock monkey
-in US law there is plenty of precedent for establishing 50% threshold requirements (like - - why are they having a run-off in Mississippi today?) - so - then the question becomes ⌠what methods can they use to continue the process when no candidate achieves 50% or more ⌠historical & legal precedent has legitimized a range of tie-breaking methods - Run-off elections are the most common - typically the two candidates with the top vote totals face off - but methods such as coin-flips, cutting a deck of cards, drawing straws have also been used - doubt the courts are going to muck around with a voter chosen 50% majority requirement - or delve into a voter approved selection methodology for when the 50% is not achieved.
- and they absolutely do ⌠Poliquin has to slay this issue first and he will die trying (Poliquinâs logic is plainly demanding that the votersâ official selection of a 50% majority requirement be disregarded and that his slim marginal lead in the first phase - a mere plurality with 46% of the vote - be imposed & overrule the choice of the citizens)
Who knew that a spreadsheet was a scary computer algorithm.
As I understand, that isnât quite the case.
Poliquin is complaining about the black box that is counting the votes. Iâve complained about black boxes counting votes for a decade now.
Proprietary software has no place in elections. Period. It should all be open source, and any interested citizen should be able to inspect the code. Standard compilers (or interpreters if it isnât a compiled language) should be required, so checksums can be generated to be sure that nothing funny is going on in the compilation process.
Finally, a 5% random sample of voting machines should have their results checked against an audit of the ballots cast in the machine. If the results disagree, the whole election gets recounted.
Please note that I am not saying the result is wrong, or even likely to be wrong. Iâm just saying that trusting a proprietary computer with an unclear code validation process is risky.
I totally agree with you about voting software - it is ludicrous not to do scientifically sound sampling at the very least.
That being said, I do believe Republicans think math is unconstitutional when it is not in their favor. Just sayinâ.
Just because the computer algorithm is proprietary does not mean it canât be viewed by independent experts to verify results. Yes, Open Source is good as anyone can view but that does not mean it is the better product. In a case of vote counting I could see every dick in the world would come out with why they believe the code is counting incorrectly. You would never have people believe 2+2=4 if their guy is losing.
Ranked voting is anti democratic on the face of it. It subverts the validity of votes for other parties. A proportional representation system would be democratic. Ranked voting is all about adding another layer of capitalist political control, making sure one of their twin parties wins and keeps out the ârabble,â who can only cause trouble for the stability of their economic abd political rule. That middle class elements who are afraid of that trouble and want the reassurance of keeping the rabble at bay support the gimmick of ranked voting is no surprise.
Do you know what the validation procedures are in place for this software system? I donât, but if I were a special master in this case that is where I would start.
With open-source software, if you claim there is a bug you have demonstrate its existence. It really is a put-up or shut-up situation, so Iâm not concerned about dicks coming out with conspiracy theories. You claim itâs wrong? Fine: show me the data that break the code. If you canât show me the data, then either:
- You donât care enough to prove your theory works; or,
- Your theory doesnât actually work.
In either case, the dick-in-question can just go away.
Go away, and come back after youâve studied some voting theory.
Fundamentally this is a pretty simple sorting routine - but Poliquin is going to try to make it seem like it incorporates linear programing, Markov chains, queuing theory and Boolean algebra
There ought to be another choice put on the ballots in Maine and across the US. One that people in Nevada already have. âNone of these candidates.â As to ranked voting, it is a splendid idea, but as we are about to see, a complex practice when a loser wants to make trouble for everyone.
Trust the Grumpy Old Party. If you canât win, cheat, if you canât cheat, muddy the waters, then find a way to cheat.