rank choice vote

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see FULTON FANI FUCKERY GABBARD ED FUCKING MARTIN KRAKEN PIT BULLS...

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AN 1 26

With Democrats projected to win back control of at least one chamber of Congress in this fall's midterm elections, Republicans are now banking their hopes on legislation that could make it much harder for millions of Americans to cast a ballot.

The New Republic (TNR) reported Thursday that Rep. Bryan Steil (R-Wis.), who chairs the House Administration Committee, is behind the new Make Elections Great Again Act. TNR described the legislation as a laundry list of far-right policy priorities "that would actually impose severe restrictions on voting across the country."

Steil's bill would mandate that all voters across the country present a photo ID to be able to vote, require all mail-in ballots arrive for counting no later than Election Day, make voters manually opt in to cast votes by mail and eliminate ranked-choice voting for federal elections, among other restrictions.

"Americans should be confident their elections are being run with integrity – including commonsense voter ID requirements, clean voter rolls, and citizenship verification," Steil stated. "These reforms will improve voter confidence, bolster election integrity, and make it easy to vote, but hard to cheat."

However, TNR noted that Steil omitted "one of the bill’s most troubling features," in that states would be required to create a single digital database of all registered voters to serve as "the official voter registration list for the conduct of all elections for Federal office in the State."

The Make Elections Great Again Act also requires voters to provide documented proof of citizenship for all federal elections. Voters would also be subjected to periodic eligibility reviews "on an ongoing basis, but in no case less frequently than once every 30 days." The Brennan Center for Justice reported in 2024 that more than 21.3 million people – roughly nine percent of all Americans of voting age — do not have citizenship documents readily available. Roughly 3.8 million don't have those documents at all due to them being lost, destroyed or stolen.

Steil's legislation would also empower Attorney General Pam Bondi to sue individual states if they don't comply with the new federal restrictions on voting, and would also allow private citizens to sue state election officials if they add a new voter to the rolls without verifying their citizenship. While the bill may pass the Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives, it would need the support of seven Democrats in the U.S. Senate to make it to President Donald Trump's desk.

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aha doh gerry is cause and result of polarization, amplifies!? but primary appeals to the more extreme of party, so can push in left or right? tho left has no word for flakned; see rank vote jungl primary?

https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/jim-jordan

ah poster boy on gerry

Among Democrats, liberals, progressives, centrists and Never Trump conservatives, Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio is one of the most notorious Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives. And because of gerrymandering — and because his district is so reliably Republican — the 57-year-old Jordan keeps getting reelected year after year. In an article published by the conservative website The Bulwark on May 24, Cleveland-based journalist Keith Osmun examines the effect that the 2020 U.S. Census may have on Jordan in 2022.

Jordan, a founding member of the far-right House Freedom Caucus, presently represents Ohio's 4th Congressional District — where he was first elected in 2006 after having served in the Ohio State Senate and the Ohio House of Representatives.

Osmun explains, "Since the 1930s, Ohio's 4th Congressional District has been under Republican control…. It is arguably the safest Republican district in the country. The current occupant of its seat in the U.S. House of Representatives is everyone's favorite Trump sycophant: Jim Jordan."

Ohio has 16 congressional U.S. House districts; 12 of them are presently occupied by Republicans, while four are occupied by Democrats.

Democrat Janet Garrett, who ran against Jordan in 2014, 2016 and 2018, told Osmun, "I knew the odds. I ran because I felt that it was imperative that somebody put up a fight. If he ran unopposed, they would tout him around the district as so wonderful no one wants to reproach him."

Garrett said of Jordan, "He's never introduced any legislation other than a monument to someone. He doesn't introduce legislation; he's just a bomb thrower. He didn't go to Washington to legislate."

What Ohio's new congressional map will look like in 2022 remains to be seen.

Collin Marozzi, an ACLU attorney who has been fighting gerrymandering in Ohio, told Osmun, "Gerrymandering allows Jim Jordan to be the most Jim Jordan he can be: the most bombastic, bomb throwing, partisan person in Congress. He hasn't passed a single piece of legislation in ten years.He has no real incentive to compromise because he only has to worry about a primary challenge."

Following the 2020 U.S. Census, Ohio will be losing a seat in the U.S. House — and it will have 15 U.S. House districts instead of 16. Osmun observes, "One of the happy byproducts of Ohio losing a congressional seat as a result of the 2020 Census is that the districts will be redrawn under more bipartisan rules put in place in the years since the 2010 Census…. If the changes work as intended, the ride 'safe seats' provide legislators like Jim Jordan will be a bumpier one in the midterms."

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

iowa caucus defacto?

https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/how-america-could-break-free-from-the-two-party-doom-loop/

no lnx

How America could break free from the two-party doom loop

Written by David Edward Burke / Washington Monthly January 28, 2020

There is a growing consensus that the American political system is no longer the gold standard it once was. The United States ranks outside the top 20 countries in the Corruption Perception Index. U.S. voter turnout trails most other developed countries. Congressional approval ratings hover around 20 percent, and polling shows that partisan animosity is at an all-time high. It doesn’t take a social scientist to see that our legislatures are increasingly defined by gridlock and gamesmanship.

It’s always tempting to think that the next election will turn things around, and for both Republicans and Democrats to believe that our country would course-correct if only they could elect more of their own. But what if the problem isn’t the people on the other side of the aisle? What if the two-party system itself is creating a vicious cycle, making government less effective and driving us apart?

That’s what Lee Drutman argues in Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop. Drutman, a political scientist and senior fellow at New America, writes that moving to a multiparty democracy can create fair representation, reduce partisan gridlock, lead to more positive incremental change, and increase both voter turnout and voter satisfaction. And through concrete reforms, like implementing ranked-choice voting and expanding the size of the House of Representatives, Drutman lays out the path forward.

It is difficult to imagine that the partisans who occupy the halls of power will voluntarily make room for third, fourth, or even fifth and sixth major parties. But Drutman leaves little doubt that the American political system would benefit from more viable options in the voting booth.

For anyone born after 1990, it would be easy to believe that American politics has always been the toxic blood sport it is today. But the dominance of two extremely polarized parties is a recent phenomenon—and it’s something the framers actively sought to avoid. As Drutman notes, George Washington’s final presidential address warned of “the alternate domination of one faction over another,” and John Adams worried that “a division of the republic into two great parties . . . is to be dreaded as the great political evil.” So how did we get to where we are today?

Where Drutman believes the framers erred was in failing to realize that simple plurality elections—used for most state and national contests—would foster the exact two-party system they wanted to avoid. They were justifiably concerned about the danger of “two great parties” and right to think that several smaller factions balancing each other out could be the solution. But they were so leery of political parties in general that they never seriously considered a multiparty system.

Parties are useful, Drutman argues, especially in countries as large as the United States. They help voters understand where candidates stand and make it easier for constituencies to organize.A two-party system can only succeed, however, if it strikes the right balance. If the parties are too similar, they don’t offer voters meaningful choices. If the parties are too different, they rarely cooperate. When parties become so different that they view each other as an existential threat, it justifies all manner of sins to defeat or obstruct the opposition.

One obvious counterargument to Drutman’s thesis is that we’ve had two dominant parties for most of our history without the current level of gridlock and polarization. However, he argues that for decades we effectively had a four-party system inside the two-party system, with “liberal Democrats and conservative Democrats, and liberal Republicans and conservative Republicans. Each group represented distinct and meaningful voting factions. None had a majority of its own.” From 1965 to 1990 voting patterns did not follow a “predictable one-dimensional left-right structure but reflected complicated trade-offs across competing priorities.” That time period was considered one of peak performance for Congress, characterized by landmark, bipartisan legislation. But then the landscape changed.

In the 1990s, Newt Gingrich, newly elected speaker of the House, led Republicans to adopt a “politics as war” mentality, which drove both parties away from the center. As politics grew more contentious, a series of “wave” elections replaced moderate representatives with more extreme ones. By 2016, conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans had become an endangered species in Congress, and significant bipartisan legislation went extinct along with them.

Now the two major parties largely reflect an urban-versus-rural divide, and the number of “swing” districts has halved since 1998. Our winner-take-all electoral system makes it virtually impossible for third parties to gain traction. Voters who are dissatisfied with their party’s nominee hold their nose and support them anyway, or, worse yet, stay home.

Our ineffective, weakened Congress also makes for a more powerful presidency, Drutman explains. Every election becomes more consequential as control of the executive branch and the legislature grows more important. Party leaders demonize their opponents to fire up their base. “It’s a self-reinforcing doom loop, with no obvious way out in the existing two-party system.” Shifting to a multiparty democracy, he argues, is the obvious solution.

To start, Drutman proposes that we implement ranked-choice voting, or “instant runoffs,” for congressional seats and the presidency. Under that system, voters rank their first, second, and third choices on the ballot, and so on. When tallied, votes given to the lowest-performing candidates are subsequently redistributed to the second choices of that candidate’s voters. The redistribution continues until one candidate reaches the requisite threshold and wins.

Ranked-choice voting breaks the two-party cycle by giving voters the freedom to vote for third parties without the fear of their vote being wasted or of their preferred candidate being a “spoiler” for another candidate they like. It rewards candidates with broad appeal and leads to less divisive campaigns, since candidates benefit from being a voters’ second or third choice. Several large cities, like San Francisco and Minneapolis, have already implemented ranked-choice voting, and Maine voters will use it in their 2020 Democratic primary.

Drutman argues that ranked-choice voting should be combined with multi-winner congressional districts. Multi-winner districts work like this: Imagine merging five congressional districts into one larger district with five representatives. In elections for this new, larger district, the top five finishers (after the ranked-choice votes are tabulated and redistributed) would all go to Congress. This would pave the way for additional political parties and a more ideologically diverse Congress that better reflects voters’ true preferences.

This kind of reform may sound drastic initially, but, as Drutman explains, plenty of other countries use more representative methods of voting. And the United States’s two-party system is an outlier in the modern world. Most of the countries that rank ahead of the U.S. in voter turnout or government effectiveness have between three and six effective political parties. Shifting to a multiparty democracy wouldn’t be a leap of faith—it would be America catching up with what works elsewhere.

Drutman makes the case for other changes, like dramatically increasing the number of representatives in the House and eliminating congressional primaries. Of course, as with all significant reforms, the biggest question is whether any of this can become reality.

To be sure, most of the elements necessary for fundamental change are there. Americans’ level of trust in government is hovering near historic lows, at around 20 percent. A majority of Americans say they want a viable third party. Multi-winner districts and ranked-choice voting are the best ways to give people more choices. The Constitution gives Congress the power to set the rules for congressional elections, so we could pass a law to implement ranked-choice voting or multimember districts.

But there is little evidence that the two major parties would welcome greater diversity. Republicans, in particular, may be resistant to change since their party is so often overrepresented in the halls of power. In 2018, Republicans maintained control over multiple state legislatures despite winning only a minority of votes. In the U.S. Senate, smaller states like Wyoming that tend to lean Republican are overrepresented relative to large blue states like California and New York.

But the difficulty of structural reform should not deter us from the effort. All any of us can do is soberly assess our problems, search for evidence-based solutions, and work toward the plan we think has the best chance of success. Through his thoughtful, engaging work, Drutman has done more than his fair share. If even a small fraction of the Americans who are fed up with our toxic politics work toward a multiparty democracy, we may be able to break the two-party doom loop sooner than we think.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/one-mans-revolutionary-plan-to-save-our-democracy/

rank choice voting

...What makes Beyer’s plan so bold, and so necessary, is that it dares to tackle one of the root causes of our broken politics in this era of polarization: Single-member, winner-takes-all districts.

Our winner-take-all system, in which only one person is elected to represent each district, simply accelerates dysfunction and extremism in this era of hardened partisanship. It locks most voters into congressional districts where the outcomes are predetermined and leaves too many voters voiceless and unrepresented. So Beyer simply wipes out today’s map of safe red and blue seats and replaces them with larger, multimember districts (drawn by nonpartisan commissions) of three, four or five representatives. Smaller states would elect all members at large. Everyone would be elected with ranked-choice voting, which would ensure that as many voters as possible elect a representative who reflects their views.

This is the very best way to repair Congress.

Larger districts are almost impossible to gerrymander. A ranked-choice system would open seats to urban Republicans, and Democrats across the South. Women and candidates of color would have a better chance of winning their fair share of seats. And independents of all stripes would have a real chance to win as well. The party with the most votes would have control. But everyone, and every state, would have its range of opinion accurately represented. We’d never hear about wasted votes or “spoilers” again....

https://theintercept.com/2018/03/19/ranked-choice-voting-minnesota-republicans/

MINNESOTA REPUBLICANS WANT TO BAN A VOTING SYSTEM THAT GIVES THIRD-PARTY CANDIDATES A LEG UP

Zaid Jilani

no link

LAWMAKERS IN MINNESOTA introduced legislation last week that would prohibit local governments from adopting ranked-choice voting, a system that can help third-party candidates’ chances for election and lead to a more representative government.

The bill, introduced on March 12, would have the greatest impact in Minneapolis, which has used ranked-choice voting for municipal elections since 2013. The city has elected a Green Party city council member, and it currently has a nearly equal number of men and women on city council and the most ethnically diverse set of lawmakers in its history. Just last year, a well-funded socialist was a viable candidate in a city council election. St. Paul adopted the voting method last year, and a number of other cities are currently considering it.

Unlike traditional first-past-the-post voting systems — in which the candidate with the biggest number of votes wins — under ranked-choice voting, voters rank candidates on their ballot instead of voting for just one. If no one gets a majority of votes in the first round, next-preference votes are counted until a candidate gets most of the votes.

This system eliminates the so-called spoiler effect, helps third-party candidates achieve viability, and ensures that no one can be elected without the support of the majority of voters.

The bill prohibits a list of “political subdivisions” from adopting ranked-choice voting.

The Minnesota bill prohibits a list of “political subdivisions” — such as cities, counties, townships, and even school districts — from adopting ranked-choice voting. A bipartisan group of legislators introduced it, but the two Democrats who had initially sponsored it pulled their support a few days later.

The legislative measure is what is known as a preemption bill, a tool conservative state lawmakers have used to block municipalities from setting their own policies. Many of these bills are promoted by the American Legislative Exchange Council, which has teamed up with corporations to author legislation that was used, for example, to ban municipal broadband and city living wage laws. The mayor of Tallahassee, Florida, Andrew Gillum, has made overturning preemption laws a cornerstone of his bid to be Florida’s next governor.

About a dozen municipal governments have adopted ranked-choice voting, according to Fair Vote, a group that advocates for electoral reforms. The Minnesota proposal appears to be a unique attempt at legislatively crushing local governments’ ability to adopt the voting method.

Fair Vote Minnesota had no indication that lawmakers would be filing such a bill this legislative session, said the group’s Executive Director Jeanne Massey. “As this [bill was introduced], I told someone we’d been Maine’d ,” she joked.

In Maine, voters passed a statewide referendum in 2016 that would establish ranked-choice voting across the state. The legislature objected to the referendum and blocked its implementation. Activists responded by launching a successful petition drive that will give voters the chance to overrule the legislature in a second referendum during the June primary elections. Voters will be able to test-drive the system during those elections — they will use ranked-choice voting for the first time in primaries for governor, U.S. Senate, and the state legislature.

The two Democrats who had initially signed on removed their names from the legislation after our inquiry.

The Minnesota bill has three House and three Senate sponsors. None of them responded to a request for comment from The Intercept, but the two Democrats who had initially signed on — Reps. Rena Moran and Mike Nelson — removed their names from the legislation after our inquiry. (They did not explain why or otherwise respond to us.)

Undermining ranked-choice voting would disadvantage independents and third-party candidates, who have had unusual success in the state. From 1999 to 2003, Jesse Ventura of the Independence Party was state governor; his party continued to be active in subsequent elections, such as the 2008 U.S. Senate race in which an Independence Party candidate won 15 percent of the vote. If ranked-choice voting were to continue to spread in Minnesota beyond the Twin Cities and eventually be utilized statewide, it could increase the viability of the Independence Party and others who are challenging the traditional two-party dominance.

“It’s a unique piece of legislation in how sweeping it is with respect to preemption, as well as simply abolishing the opportunity for [ranked-choice voting] ever in the state of Minnesota everywhere,” said Massey. “It’s breathtaking.”

Republican state Sen. Mark Koran defended the legislation in an interview with local news outlet MinnPost. “Every vote should count, and every vote should be as simple as ‘I picked my top candidate,'” said Koran, who is sponsoring the Senate version of the bill. “I think it changes the dynamics of, do you win by a second or third chance? It just doesn’t seem natural, and we have an established elections process that has worked well for more than 100 years.”

There are indeed complications associated with this voting system. There have been cases in which voters simply voted for the same candidate on every single line — which defeats the whole point of the system. In one San Francisco district in 2010, 2 percent of voters spoiled their ballots by over-voting for candidates.

In order to combat this spoiling of votes, cities have engaged in education campaigns to teach voters how to properly use the system. San Francisco’s city government publishes YouTube videos to teach voters how to use the system. The city of London in the U.K., which uses ranked-choice voting for its municipal elections, specifically warns voters against listing the same candidate on each line, as doing so essentially renders all votes made after the first-preference selection useless. Additionally, candidates running in ranked-choice voting elections have had to make a wider effort to reach out to voters who don’t rank them as their first choice — because they want second-preference votes, and so on and so forth.

There are signs that city education campaigns about ranked-choice voting work. Santa Fe, New Mexico, recently held its first election under this system to elect a new mayor and city council members. Voter turnout was around 40 percent, as compared to 28 percent in 2014. Almost all the voters understood how to use the system, as Fair Vote noted: “Of the 20,670 votes cast for mayor, there were only 40 ‘undervotes,’ meaning 99.8 percent of voters who cast a vote did not skip the 5-choice mayoral ballot. There were only 26 ‘overvotes’ (when more than one candidate is chosen at the same ranking), meaning 99.9 percent of all ballots that included a vote for mayor were valid.”