Hobnobbing the Headlines
Hissy fits over parking tickets; pols game the system--we're shocked! The ladies hop on the weird voting bandwagon...
Weird Coincidence ‘o’ the Week
While everyone. else was getting their pants in a knot over “leading” mayoral candidates’ driving records (here and here1)…
…as if that has anything to do with their so-called policies,2 the real scandalette award goes to WillyWeek’s Sophie Peel, who revealed a rather more serious manipulation of the electoral process. Basically, some of the 118 people running for government paychecks ($133K for city council) are gaming the system in order to get in on the city’s gravy train of matching funds for campaigning.3
Her story got the ultimate killer-reporter’s accolade…
…although given the cheesy record of prior secretaries of state this may be a bit tarnished.
Peel named names (including, to my disappointment, Liv Osthus, aka stripper Viva Las Vegas) who I hope will win just to provide some comic relief from self-satisfied Portland pols. She could do it, given the distortions of the new voting system (see below)…
How…odd that in the same issue, WillyWeek’s strangely selective “City Council Entrance Interview” series spotlighted one of the accused double-dippers, Bob Weinstein. Do you suppose in stenographer Eliza Aronson”s powder-puff grilling, Weinstein was asked…you already know the answer.4
The Ladies Grease the Skids
With the clock ticking toward what we predict will be a very interesting city election, the forces behind the weird new voting schemes are busily educating the public, greased by around a $1-million of the mopes’ money.
Having been monomaniacal5 in following the emergence—from where? don’t ask—of the radical new city charter, I thought it would be nice to see how the re-education process6 is going. So I tuned in to the ZOOM session sponsored by the teacups-on-doilies folks at the League of Women Voters. Let’s just say that the panel was stacked…
…wiith folks doing well by doing good. Yes, there was a rep from the county’s elections office, which radiates confidence in the wonky new methods of finding winners. Kali Odell kept to the official party line—All Is Well, Sleep Soundly—but did drop one or two tidbits, sotto voce. In “the first week or so,” we might not know the final winners of those 118 races, but the county will have bar charts and “updates” daily, just to maintain suspense.7
There were many comparisons of “RCV” voting with, variously, favorite flavors of ice cream (the Oregonian selected doughnuts to explain it), such as voting for favorite acts at get-out-the-vote concerts, and, of course, slices of cake. Despite their confidence, verging on euphoria, no one on the panel mentioned how radical—and virtually unknown anywhere else—that 25-percent calculation for councilors is; nor did they mention that another city, grungy Baltimore, repealed three-member council districts a few years back.
The Portland threefers scheme had been engineered, obviously, to put more minorities of various hues into office (I won’t bore you requoting the charter commission’s confessional, which admits that the city is too damned integrated to draw lines favoring any particular minority).
Even Odell, who has been full-time working on the election mechanics, got tongue-tied when she tried to explain how the voting-tabulation machines will slice up votes for those 25-percenters. RCV is simple by comparison, since it takes whole votes and scoots them up the list of candidates.8
This doesn’t happen with the transferrable scheme—the algorithm will chop up votes when the first hopeful hits the magic 25-percent-plus-one mark and will then allocate that single vote in bits-n-pieces to other candidates who may (or may not) have been ranked by the possessors of that single-now-transformed-to-many vote. Reread that sentence and you’ll know why Odell stumbled.
The ZOOM call allowed the audience—about 100 people—to ask questions visible only to the panelists. I asked about a dozen; one actually made it past the vigilant eye of the backstage League lady manning the laptop.
It was for Tiffany Montemayor, a senior director of outreach at the Ranked Choice Voting Resource Center—formerly a flack for the Alaska Division of Elections. We have written about the Alaska adventure—how RCV sent a Democrat to Congress for the first time in the Red state’s history, despite said Democrat starting the rounds of counting in a distant third place.
Montemayor got a wary smile when asked about efforts in Alaska to do away with the entire RCV scheme—it’ll be on the ballot in November, along with the one-term Democratic congressperson who fluked in last time.
She got there because the state’s GOP was badly split between rival candidates (a kind of Trumper v. anyone else contest strangely reminiscent of the Rubio-Gonzalez mashup). This time the GOP is gaming the system by banging heads among rival candidates, forcing some withdrawals to reduce the candidates who’ll be ranked—a lesson Portland professional pols will quickly learn when the city council is seated.
Needless to say, Montemayor didn’t predict how the old-fashioned first-past-the-post vote , which passed first time around by 4,000 votes after a five-day recount, will turn out. The political pros are mad as hell, and have learned how to game the system…so…
Another panelist, Grace Ramsey, of nonprofit Democracy Rising, is on the city’s dime fronting the RCV for the masses campaign, doling out chunks of city dollars to 11 “community based” (you know what that means) nonprofits here and there. I fired off a request to know what her organization was being paid but it didn’t make it past the lady with the laptop.
Followup questions circled back to the matter of counting those 25-percent votes for council. Odell said the county will be putting out “preliminary results” daily, add that it could look like someone had been eliminated “but that could change the next day” because the actual votes will take some time, days maybe, to reach the black boxes of the vote-chopping machines.
Odell’s remarks lit a lightbulb above my head, depite the fact that I got a D in 4th grade arithmetic. So I fired off a question: How can that 25-percent be calculated accurately before the actual total vote is determined? In other words, how long do we have to wait until all of the ballots trickle in, courtesy of the Post Office? And if they’re based on an incomplete vote-count, why bother with calculations that could change “the next day?”
If someone gets an early 25+1 before the total vote is known and the black box starts chopping up the “excess” votes and moving them around inside the algorithm to other candidates…well, what would happen?
The questions didn’t make it past the lady with the filter.
But Odell had news for disgruntled candidates who might demand recounts. No problemo: the county gave that a test with 5,000 ballots and it only took three days to figure out.
And then it was over. The URL for the ZOOM meetup isn’t on the League’s webste, although you can watch a cute video presented by one of the panelists on YouTube…
…complete with the goddamn cake.
The O’s Shane Dixon Kavanaugh’s reveal on candidate Rubio’s weird behavior behind the wheel was countered by WW’s Nigel Jaquiss’s riposte on candidate Gonzalez’s errant driving record, which took until the fourth graf to reveal the misdeeds were 21 years ago. Kudos for deep-digging!
Basically: tax the bejeezus out of the mopes and give it to our nonprofit racialist friends.
Interesting question: if the candidates get the bucks from the city and don’t spend it all on obnoxious mailers and yard signs, will they have to give the leftovers back?
By my count, of the 98 candidates running for city council, WillyWeek has managed to entrance interview 13—13.2653 percent.
Thank god we don’t have to send citizens to camps to rearrange their political synapses as do more progressive countries.
In case you’ve misplaced columns detailing the vote mechanics: If no one in the much simpler ranked-choice voting for mayor doesn’t get 50-percent, plus one vote and win, then lower-ranked candidates will be eliminated from the bottom-up, and many voters will effectively vote two, three even more times as the machines reallocate the losers’ votes ever upward. None of the panelists spoke about this well-known feature (not a bug) of the scheme.
Subtle irony: the more you lose, the more times you get to, in effect, revote.