Sen. Hawley interviews Zuckerberg under oath: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOdrPruSnrw
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Dominion’s Democracy Suite® provides the most comprehensive and transparent Ranked Choice Voting functionality in the market today. Ranked Choice contests allow up to 10 candidates to be presented in an easy to understand format. Tabulation of RCV contest ballots (in-person, mail-in and vote centers) seamlessly integrates as part of the overall tabulation process and applies standard AuditMark® and Results Tally and Reporting functionality. This product is not currently part of U.S. EAC certification. Availability may be subject to state certification. https://www.dominionvoting.com/optional-solutions/
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12-99-20 (Ranked-choice voting RCV first used in San Francisco in 2002, in Berkeley in 2010, in St. Louis in 2018.) New York City is slated to become the largest city in the nation to use a ranked-choice voting system. However, a group of city council leaders and other organizations are arguing in court that it's not the right time for such a drastic change.
Six New York City Council members, who are part of the council's Black, Latino and Asian Caucus and organizations representing a variety of voters from different backgrounds, filed a lawsuit against the city's Board of Elections on Tuesday that seeks to stop it from changing the city's voting system from a traditional plurality method to ranked-choice. 17 cities across the nation, including Minneapolis and San Francisco, vote through ranked-choice voting, according to the nonprofit group Ranked Choice Voting Resource Center. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/york-city-leaders-sue-postpone-ranked-choice-voting/story?id=74629165
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A recent poll conducted by the Public Religion Institute finds that only 55 percent of Democrats and 44 percent of Republicans believe their votes will be tallied accurately….
RCV allows voters to rank candidates by preference. If one candidate wins a majority of first-place votes, she is declared the winner. If no candidate takes a majority, then a series of virtual runoffs commences (virtual because voting takes place just once, and “runoffs” occur in the tallying process). In each runoff round, the last-place finisher is eliminated from contention. All ballots on which she was ranked first are now repurposed. The second-place candidate from these ballots is given another first-place vote in the next runoff. …
RCV hasn’t been used extensively in the United States. Nor has it been tested at the state level since the early twentieth century. But it has been used in municipal elections in California, Minnesota, Washington state, and elsewhere. And for nearly a hundred years Australians have elected their lower house of parliament using the method….The problem is exhaustion—this is ballot exhaustion, which happens when voters rank too few candidates to stay meaningful until the final runoff. https://democracyjournal.org/arguments/ranked-choice-voting-is-not-the-solution/
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8-23-19 You will not believe what “reformers” have devised to tinker with and manipulate our elections. It is called ranked choice voting (or “instant runoff voting”)—but it is really a scheme to disconnect elections from issues and allow candidates with marginal support from voters to win elections. …In 2010 the Australian Labor Party won the House of Representatives with just 38 percent of first-place votes on the initial ballot, while the second-place Liberal-National coalition captured 43 percent. That hardly sounds like a firm mandate….We are thus left with a plutocracy insulated by election laws that confuse corruption with free speech and by voters who don’t care about policy details, leaving legislators to continue doing the bidding of donors while riling the troops with identity politics.
We do not often agree with former California Governor Jerry Brown Jr. (D), but he was right in 2016 when he vetoed a bill to expand ranked choice voting in his state, saying it was “overly complicated and confusing” and “deprives voters of genuinely informed choice.”2 David Sharp, “Ranked Choice as Easy as 1, 2, 3? Not So Fast, Critics Say,” Associated Press, October 9, 2016, https://apnews.com/62c997cfd2ab403ca0b3c3333e1a9312 (accessed August 17, 2019).
Going back to our original example of the 2008 presidential election, not all voters are going to rank all five presidential candidates on their ballot. Many voters may only list their top two or three candidates, particularly when there are candidates on the ballot for whom they would never even consider voting. Another example of this problem is demonstrated by what happened in Australia (which uses ranked choice voting) in the 2010 election. The liberal Labor Party won the Australian House despite receiving only “38 percent of first-place votes on the initial ballot, while the second-place Liberal-National coalition [the center right choice] captured 43 percent” of first-place votes.5 Waxman, “Ranked-Choice Voting Is Not the Solution.”
In other words, more voters wanted a center-right government than a left-wing government but ranked choice made sure that did not happen. Or consider the mayor’s race in Oakland, California, in 2010, in which the candidate that received the most first-place votes lost the election to “a candidate on the strength of nearly 25,000 second- and third-place votes” after nine rounds of redistribution of the votes.6 Sharp, “Ranked Choice as Easy as 1, 2, 3?”
This also happened recently in Maine. In 2018, the first-ever general election for federal office in our nation’s history was decided by ranked choice voting in the Second Congressional District in Maine. Jared Golden (D) was declared the eventual winner—even though incumbent Bruce Poliquin (R) received more votes than Golden in the first round. There were two additional candidates in the race, Tiffany Bond and William Hoar. However, the Maine Secretary of State, Matt Dunlop, “exhausted” or threw out a total of 14,076 ballots of voters who had not ranked all of the candidates.7 Baber v. Dunlap, 376 F.Supp.3d 125, footnote 6 (D. Maine 2018) (“Whether RCV [ranked choice voting] is a better method for holding elections is not a question for which the Constitution holds the answer…. To the extent that the Plaintiffs call into question the wisdom of using RCV, they are free to do so but…such criticism falls short of constitutional impropriety.” Baber, at 135).
Ranked choice obscures true debates, true issue-driven dialogues between and among candidates, and eliminates genuine binary choices between two top-tier candidates. You never really know who will be running against whom in the final vote count with ranked choice. Your votes are thrown into a fictional fantasy in which no one knows which candidate is really a substitute for another candidate who may not survive the initial rounds. It is all a numbers gimmick. You, as a voter, are not given the opportunity to make the final decision between competing substitutes. As Professor James G. Gimpel, an expert on voter behavior, testified in a recent case challenging Maine’s ranked choice voting law, “unlike ordinary elections and ordinary runoffs, voters are required to make predictions about who will be left standing following an initial tabulation of the votes.” Ibid., at 131.
He believes that “a portion of the voting public has insufficient interest and information to make a meaningful assessment about likely outcomes.”9 Ibid., at 132. Thousands of ballots were discarded in the Second Congressional District that was being litigated in this case, illustrating, according to Professor Gimpel, “that those voters guessed wrong due to an information deficit.” Ibid.
Ranked choice destroys clarity of political debate and forces voters to cast ballots in hypothetical future runoff elections. When we have Republicans versus Democrats versus Greens and Libertarians, we know who is running against whom and what the actual distinctions are between the candidates on issues. Second- or third-choice votes should not matter in America; they do not provide the mandate that ensures that the representatives in a republic have the confidence and support of a majority of the public in the legitimacy of their decisions. Not only is ranked choice voting too complicated, it disenfranchises voters, because ballots that do not include the two ultimate finalists are cast aside to manufacture a faux majority for the winner. But it is only a majority of the voters remaining in the final round, not a majority of all of the voters who actually cast votes in the elections. Ballot exhaustion is not just a minor problem with ranked choice voting. According to the 2015 study, “a substantial number of voters either cannot or choose not to rank multiple candidates, even when they have the ability to do so.”10 Burnett and Kogan, “Ballot and Voter ‘Exhaustion’ Under Instant Runoff Voting,” p. 49.
Instead, many voters “opt to cast a vote for their top choice, neglecting to rank anyone else.”11 Ibid.
Additionally, some jurisdictions that have implemented ranked choice voting also limit the number of candidates that can be ranked. All of the localities in the study limited voters to ranking three candidates—even when there were more candidates in the race. Thus “if each of a voter’s top three candidates is eliminated, his or her ballot becomes exhausted and, as a result, is excluded from the final total.”12
Ibid., p. 44.
In other words, a ranked choice election will, in the end, boil down to only two opposing candidates, but many voters (not knowing how the roulette wheel will spin) will not cast ballots between those two choices. That voter ends up with no say in the contest between the final two candidates in the black box elections governed by ranked choice voting. Of course, had that election been between just those two candidates in the first place, that same voter would have heard debates, listened to the issues discussed, and made an informed choice between those two. With ranked choice voting, a candidate whose support was too marginal to get into public debates may end up winning—eliminating the process that informs the electorate and forcing average American voters into the world of mixed strategy game theory, where they are forced to try to predict the probability that particular candidates that they favor or do not favor will survive multiple rounds of vote tabulation.13 Mixed-strategy game theory “is a probability distribution that assigns to each available action a likelihood of being selected.” See “Mixed Strategy,” International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. 2nd ed., p. 290, http://www.columbia.edu/~rs328/MixedStrategy.pdf (accessed August 17, 2019).
Ranked choice voting also provides voters with an incentive to tactically game the system and falsify their preferences for candidates. For example, if enough Ross Perot voters had listed George H. W. Bush as their second choice over Bill Clinton in 1992, Bush might have won that presidential election instead of Clinton. Since Perot came in third in the race, his votes with Bush as the second choice would have counted for Bush in the second round of vote tabulation. If you could convince enough other voters to do that, you could potentially eliminate a viable candidate from the next rounds of ballot tabulations—even though he is one of the two candidates in a multiple-member field with the largest plurality of support. As one analyst says, the tactic is to “‘up-vote your lesser-evil candidate and ‘bury’ your lesser-evil candidate’s most viable opponent.”14 Jason Sorens, “The False Promise of Instant Runoff Voting,” CATO Unbound, December 9, 2016, https://www.cato-unbound.org/2016/12/09/jason-sorens/false-promise-instant-runoff-voting (accessed August 17, 2019). Sorens argues that ranked choice voting is worse than “the status quo because it neuters third parties” by eliminating their “blackmail power.” Under our current system, Sorens contends, major parties have “an incentive to cater a bit to ideological minorities” to avoid those third parties fielding a candidate in a race that will take votes away from the major party candidate.
While this might sound farfetched, in today’s social media world, it would not seem that difficult to implement and coordinate such a strategy, particularly in local elections where there is a much smaller electorate. It is easy to imagine sophisticated insiders and campaign consultants creating and employing such a strategy to reach their candidate’s supporters and voters for second-, third-, or fourth-round recalculations of voting results. The answer to this gimmickry is runoff elections. In the normal electoral process in the vast majority of states, there is a runoff election several weeks after a general election in which no candidate won a majority of the vote. It is true that some voters might not turn out for a runoff election that is held several weeks after the general election because their preferred candidate did not gather enough votes to be in the runoff. However, the added time window gives potential voters the opportunity to reexamine and reeducate themselves about the character and views on issues of the two candidates who received the largest pluralities in the general election. Voters have a greater opportunity to make an informed choice than with instant runoffs (i.e., ranked choice voting). Runoff elections guarantee that the winner of the runoff election has a genuine mandate from a majority of the voters—a crucial factor in a democratic system….When a body politic comes to believe election outcomes are a gimmick, beware. See J. Christian Adams, Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2011), and John Fund and Hans von Spakovsky, Who’s Counting? How Fraudsters and Bureaucrats Put Your Vote at Risk (New York: Encounter Books, 2012).
You should pay close attention to, and be highly skeptical of, anyone who wants to tinker with long-standing and revered electoral institutions, whether that is the people controlling redistricting, voter registration, citizen-only voting, or the Electoral College.
We have detected a pattern. Most of the time, when fundamental transformations to elections are proposed, the people proposing them have two characteristics. First, they think it will help their side win. Second, their ideological perspectives are usually rooted in a transformational extreme: They want to change the rules to manipulate elections outcomes in order to force the public into their distorted vision of a supposedly utopian society. Foes of the Electoral College, for example, want to undo it because they want large, densely populated cities with their one-party control over election administration determining who becomes the President of the United States. Foes of legislatures drawing district lines oppose the people having control over the process because they want friendly bureaucrats who sit on “independent” redistricting commissions and who are unaccountable to voters drawing lines instead In the end, it is all about political power, not about what is best for the American people and for preserving our great republic. So-called reformers want to change process rules so they can manipulate election outcomes to obtain power. Ranked choice voting is no different. https://www.heritage.org/sites/default/files/2019-08/IB4996.pdf
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