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from the raises-a-challenge-only-after-votes-were-cast dept.
NPR is reporting that Democrat Jared Golden has been declared the winner of Maine House District 2 after ranked-choice voting (RCV) boosted his vote count over Republican Bruce Poliquin. Poliquin had received more initial votes than Golden, but did not receive the requisite 50% of the vote.
Maine's new ranked-choice system of voting allows voters to rank candidates in their order of preference and to transfer their votes if no candidate gets more than 50 percent.
Local newspaper Portland Press Herald fills in some details:
Golden captured 50.5 percent of the vote to Poliquin’s 49.5 percent to become the first challenger to defeat an incumbent in Maine’s sprawling 2nd District in a century. The Marine Corps veteran and Lewiston lawmaker also made history by winning the nation’s first congressional election to utilize ranked-choice voting, enabling him to erase an initial deficit by securing the second- and third-choice votes of people who cast their ballots for two independents.
The final vote tally was 139,231 votes for Golden versus 136,326 votes for Poliquin – a margin of 2,905 votes.
However, Thursday’s ranked-choice voting results won’t be the final word on the 2nd District race, which was one of the most expensive in the country. Poliquin defiantly declared Thursday afternoon that he “won the constitutional ‘one-person, one-vote'” tally on Election Day and vowed to continue his lawsuit challenging the legality of ranked-choice voting.
[...] Poliquin led Golden by 2,632 votes after Election Day, according to unofficial results from the Secretary of State’s Office. But neither Poliquin nor Golden received majority support during the initial tally, with both pulling in roughly 46 percent, while independents Tiffany Bond and William Hoar received a combined 8 percent of the vote.
That triggered Thursday’s ranked-choice runoff, which came after staffers in Secretary of State Matt Dunlap’s office spent several days scanning and downloading all of the nearly 290,000 ballots cast in the 2nd District on Nov. 6. The runoff only took a few minutes to complete as a specialized computer software eliminated Hoar and Bond from the equation and redistributed their supporters’ votes to the candidates – either Poliquin or Golden – who they had ranked highest.
In the end, Golden gained 10,232 votes from the ranked-choice retabulations while Poliquin gained 4,695 votes. That allowed Golden to overcome a 2,632-vote deficit from the initial vote. Roughly 8,000 of the ballots cast for the independents did not designate an additional choice or did not select either of the major-party candidates.
Maine voters first approved the switch to ranked-choice voting in November 2016 and then reaffirmed that decision via a second ballot initiative in June.
Also at WGME.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday November 16 2018, @06:44PM (3 children)
Perhaps, but consider the Colligatarch of Allan Foster's "The I inside". If we're very lucky that may be about 10-20 years in our future. I consider it a real plausibility, though not a likelihood. I don't consider "the Patrician" to be either plausible or dependable. (What about the succession?) And anyway the Colligatarch is more desireable.
But first we've got to get through the next 10-20 years, and possibly a bit longer, and we also need to be quite lucky about the goals and methods of the dominant AI.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Sunday November 18 2018, @05:51PM (2 children)
I think the AI concept might be plausible - though probably a *lot* further out than just a few decades. We can't yet even build AI that provides reliably good advice for guiding human-controlled automobile traffic, much less guiding an economy.
I just don't think it's very plausible that the people in power would yield that power to a machine that makes "better decisions" for the bulk of humanity. Either the computer serves their interests at the expense of the rest of humanity or, and this is where it gets implausible, it manages to serve the rest of humanity while ALSO serving their interests better than the first machine could.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Sunday November 18 2018, @07:46PM (1 child)
Read how the Colligatarch worked. It didn't replace top management, it replaced the advisors of upper management (including of governments). And if you decided to go against its advice, that was figured into its future advice all over the world, and not just to you.
This doesn't require a super-human AI, merely a human-level AI, but one with a spread of focus. And if you followed it's advice, your plans would work together with those of others who followed its advice to give a better result.
This still isn't something on the close horizon, but seems doable in a few decades. Lots of middle management has already been replaced.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday November 21 2018, @12:49AM
So if the U.S. politicians had such a machine, why would it share it's advice with the Chinese, rather than using that edge a leverage to increase U.S. geopolitical power, and their own perosnal wealth and power?
The problem is any such "superAI" is going to belong to someone - probably a large organization given the resources required to develop and operate it. And pretty much the entire history of civilization is a case study in how people and organizations leverage the advantages they have in order to accumulate more advantages. The AI might well be capable of improving the conditions for all of humanity - but only if it is instructed to do so, and human nature is such that it's vanishingly unlikely that anyone in a position to give it orders will have any interest in pursuing those goals.