Re: The joy of Democracy

On Sat, 5 Oct 2024 19:04:16 -0000 (UTC), Lars Poulsen wrote:

Ranked choice eliminates the "wasted vote" issue with third parties, and
can allow a startup party to gradually become viable. And it tends to
drive the candidates towards the center. If the "top four" are all
republicans, the winner will be the one who is least offensive to the
minority democrats.

I will vote for the initiatives but I really don't think it will have much
effect. I received the voter information pamphlet today. It's put out by
the Montana secretary of state and for initiatives it has the text of the
initiative, arguments for and against, and the rebuttals.

The problem it's trying to solve is somewhat unique to Montana. There
isn't the concept of being a registered Republican or whatever. For this
years primary I received 4 ballots, Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, and
Green. Fill out one and discard the other three.

Suppose I pick the Democrat ballot but feel that for a particular office
the Green candidate is better. Can't do it. There's another little facet.
Suppose I'm a Libertarian. Their ballot often only has one person for each
office so there's no need to fill it out. I can fill out the Republican
ballot and select what I feel is the worst candidate.

Those against the initiative point out that with one primary ballot with
everyone on it you might have 13 candidates for dog catcher, 4
Republicans, 5 Democrats, and 2 each Libertarian and Green. Good luck
sorting that mess out.

Then in the general election you get the top 4. From the historic patterns
the Greens and Libertarians won't make it. As is they struggle to get
enough votes to even stay on the ballots. State wide I think the Democrats
will get the short end so you might have 3 Republican dog catcher
candidates and 1 Democrat. It's a purple state so you can get odd results.
I forget which was which but for a while the governor and lieutenant
governor were from different parties.

The connected initiative requires a majority, not a plurality. That seems
like a recipe for a least one run off for almost every office.

The other objection which I can't evaluate completely is that both
initiatives were heavily funded by out of state interests rather than a
real grass roots attempt and that the interests are trying to use Montana
for an experiment. If it devolves into a fiasco they can say 'well that
was interesting' and leave Montana to pay for the clean up.

By the way - which state are you in?

Montana. With a total population of about 1 million this tail isn't
wagging any dogs. Nationally only the Senate race is attracting interest
-- and a lot of out of state money.