RCV and the illusion of choice 1

You know ranked choice voting is a dumb idea when David Brooks endorses it. (Though US democracy is now under real assault by a proto-fascist Republican Party, Brooks recently warned readers about a completely imaginary threat: what will happen if the country's liberals take over after the Trump debacle---the US could become another Venezuela!)

Like the folks at Fair Vote and other RCV supporters, Brooks ignores a significant downside of RCV: blurring or avoiding altogether the policy debate voters need that can only happen after a primary and in a traditional run-off election between two candidates.

For another significant flaw in RCV, take the current campaign for Mayor of San Francisco, please: Mark Leno and Jane Kim have made a ranked-choice deal to encourage their followers to choose each other for their second choice. 

If Leno and Kim finished first and second in a traditional primary, Leno's ridiculous promise about ending homelessness in the city by 2020 would be debated in a runoff, and Kim could point out that Leno is a demagogue for making that wildly implausible promise.

But, just as important, Kim must now bite her tongue during the campaign about Leno's unprincipled promise, since she wants his supporters to make her their second choice under the RCV system. That's important in a campaign with eight candidates for mayor, since it's unlikely that one will get more than 50% of the vote in the first round.

Since Fair Vote is the most important supporter of the RCV pseudo-reform, of course it likes the Kim/Leno deal:

Kim and Leno have welcomed the unique features of ranked choice by holding a joint press conference and unveiling a joint ad, offering one another merit-based praise and asking voters to support both candidates in the June 5 election. Pedro Hernandez, deputy director of FairVote California and himself a San Francisco resident...commented on this display of campaign magnanimity. “That kind of civility, instead of those two candidates knocking each other down,” he said, “was exactly what ranked choice was made to do.”

That is, ranked choice actually dilutes the political and policy contents of elections, as if there are no campaigns except one based on personal attacks or one based on this bland, dumbed-down, milk-monitor "civility." 

The implication: attacking your opponent's policy proposals is somehow boorish and unacceptable. (See Jane Kim's website, with a list of specific proposals to deal with homelessness but no mention of Leno's flagrant demagoguery on the issue.)

When the RCV system was on the ballot in 2002, the Voters Advisory Commission warned about the negative political results of the system:

...there could be collusion between various candidates to be listed on each other’s campaign literature as their second or third choices. The cost of that collusion would be to reduce the level of meaningful debate on the issues and to hide ideological differences. The losers would be the voters and the media who would be unable to discern one candidate from another.

Exactly. Which is why a run-off election and a debate between the two candidates with the most votes in a primary are crucial to enable voters to distinguish the candidates. 

The only advantage of RCV: the city saves money by not paying for run-off elections.

In a just released report by Fair Vote, based on an analysis of San Francisco elections under RCV, saving money is listed as an important argument for that system:

By implementing RCV, the city eliminated the need for costly December runoff election. A runoff for a district supervisor used to cost the City and County of San Francisco $340,000 while a December mayoral election used to cost the city $3.7 million...RCV saved the costs of running two citywide runoffs and 20 district runoffs over eight different election years. Collectively, not holding these runoffs represents savings for taxpayers of more than ten million dollars...While there were some costs involving voter education, additional ballot printing, and making equipment ready for RCV, taxpayer savings still have been significant...(page 2, emphasis added).

$10 million is chump-change and insignificant in a $11 billion city budget. And if you care about democracy, even that amount is a bad investment, since the RCV system actually degrades the city's democratic process as described above by the Voters Advisory Commission. 

More tomorrow.

A bad government gets worse

From The Intercept (Hidden horrors of "zero tolerance"---mass trials and children taken from their parents):

...Another parent who appeared in [Judge Ronald]Morgan’s court was from a Central American country that provides no meaningful protection to women and children who are victims of homicidal domestic violence. She asked for her identity to be concealed, because she fears retaliation by the U.S. government. 

We will call her Delia. Before fleeing her country, she was for years beaten up, cut, assaulted with guns, and threatened with death by her partner. He also threatened to kill their young child. When she hid in another city, he found her and dragged her home.

Delia said she fled her country weeks ago and went on the road to Mexico, eventually crossing the Rio Grande with her child on an inner tube. She saw three Border Patrol agents watching her and floated in their direction, so she could turn herself in.

Delia said that when she arrived later that night at the hielera — the Border Patrol processing office — she told the officers that she and her child needed asylum. She described the beatings and assaults and death threats. “Oh, come on!” she said the officers snickered. “You and everyone else with that old story!”

“You’re going to be deported,” she remembers them telling her. “And your child will stay here.” The next morning, the child was taken. Delia fell on her knees during the removal, wailing and begging not to be separated. Officials looked on indifferently, she said, as her child screamed incessantly.

...It was Thursday, the fourth day of “zero tolerance” in his court, and defendants were telling their stories. 

The judge had just asked Holly D’Andrea, the assistant U.S. attorney handling illegal entry prosecutions that day, if it were true that families were being reunited in detention. D’Andrea sounded uncertain, but answered that she thought it was true.

“Tell you what,” the judge said slowly, with a hard edge in his voice, “if it’s not, then there are a lot of folks that have some answering to do. Because what you’ve done, in effect, by separating these children is you’re putting them in some place without their parents. If you can imagine there’s a hell, that’s probably what it looks like.”

Seconds later, he pronounced a blanket sentence for all of the defendants: no prison, no big fine — merely time served. With that, his court concluded. 

In 46 minutes that morning, 32 people had been convicted, sentenced, and dispatched en masse to ICE detention. “All rise!” said the bailiff, and the judge exited the room. The chained migrants then shuffled and clanked to their fates, without their children.

The meaning of life

Photo: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images

David Remnick:

The meaning of life is that it stops. Especially in his later years, Philip Roth often quoted this remark attributed to Kafka, and it was hard not to think of it when the news came that his heart had given out. He lived to be eighty-five, but he had little expectation of making it much past seventy. 

Over the years, there had been stretches of depression, surgeries on his back and spine, a quintuple bypass, and sixteen cardiac stents, which must be some kind of American League record. By the time Roth was in his seventies, he would open his eyes in the morning and experience a moment of ecstatic surprise: he had pulled it off again, stolen another taste of being alive, a self, conscious of the beautiful and chaotic world...