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posted by martyb on Friday November 16 2018, @05:29AM   Printer-friendly
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.


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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by bussdriver on Friday November 16 2018, @06:05AM (18 children)

    by bussdriver (6876) Subscriber Badge on Friday November 16 2018, @06:05AM (#762562)

    Amazing how the corrupt still fight like hell against democracy; even after they lost, twice and court cases to finally get this in place. Sure hope this lawsuit fails! Only a very corrupt judge could shoot down math.

    PLEASE get involved: https://www.fairvote.org/ [fairvote.org]

    • (Score: 4, Interesting) by hemocyanin on Friday November 16 2018, @06:20AM (11 children)

      by hemocyanin (186) on Friday November 16 2018, @06:20AM (#762569) Journal

      I am a long time third party voter (prefer Greens when I can vote for them, but I've voted Libertarian as well and for my cat a lot). I'm sort of divided on ranked choice voting. I get that it might make people more likely to vote outside D or R, but the unintended consequence is that it allows the Ds and Rs to just get worse by taking away the ability to spoil. Spoiling is a super-power because it has the potential to make the Ds and Rs pander a bit to those they see as potential voters. With RCV however, the Ds and Rs are freer to say "screw 'em, I'll just get their votes second time around."

      • (Score: 2) by krishnoid on Friday November 16 2018, @07:12AM

        by krishnoid (1156) on Friday November 16 2018, @07:12AM (#762580)

        With RCV however, the Ds and Rs are freer to say "screw 'em, I'll just get their votes second time around."

        I bet your cat would be more likely to say that ... and probably win as a result. Maru 2020.

      • (Score: 5, Interesting) by maxwell demon on Friday November 16 2018, @07:41AM

        by maxwell demon (1608) on Friday November 16 2018, @07:41AM (#762584) Journal

        With RCV however, the Ds and Rs are freer to say "screw 'em, I'll just get their votes second time around."

        But if the other D/R candidate does pander to them, those third-party votes will go to that other candidate. Which means the D/R candidates still have an incentive to pander to them.

        Indeed, I'd say they have more incentive, since unless a third-party candidate wins, even the votes of those who with a simple vote would never give up their third-party vote for one of R/D now will end up voting for one of them, and this very story is about how that can decide an election

        --
        The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
      • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 16 2018, @09:07AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 16 2018, @09:07AM (#762612)

        With RCV however, the Ds and Rs are freer to say "screw 'em, I'll just get their votes second time around."

        Bullshit?? You can vote just like before, for ONE and only ONE candidate. Ranked voting allows you to vote for more than 1 candidate or allows you to vote *against* more than 1 candidate. It's more freedom.

      • (Score: 2) by driverless on Friday November 16 2018, @09:53AM (6 children)

        by driverless (4770) on Friday November 16 2018, @09:53AM (#762626)

        Is RCV any different from the rest of the world's STV? Just wondering, from the description it sounds pretty much identical.

        • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday November 16 2018, @03:46PM (4 children)

          by Immerman (3985) on Friday November 16 2018, @03:46PM (#762717)

          I think in this case it's the same. Basically it comes down to implementation details - I believe STV is the simplest way to implement a RCV system. There's lots of others once you get people used to ranked voting, designed to give "better" results according to various criteria, but they mostly come with the penalty of being harder for most people to understand, and being able to understand how the system works is kind of important to having people feel like the vote isn't being rigged.

          • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday November 16 2018, @06:32PM (3 children)

            by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Friday November 16 2018, @06:32PM (#762792) Journal

            Besides which, most of the systems produce a "best choice" in a considerably larger percentage of sample cases than does "plurality wins", which was the worst choice outside of single party in the Scientific American article a couple of decades ago. Condorcet voting was the best, but is more complex and hard to describe, and not that much better than Instant Runoff.

            All of the systems have the liability that they increase information overload, and all the ones studied in the article have the defect that they don't include "none of the above".

            --
            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 Friday November 16 2018, @07:48PM (2 children)

              by Immerman (3985) on Friday November 16 2018, @07:48PM (#762819)

              How does including "none of the above" improve things over just not voting? Or do you mean the ability to vote *against* a specific candidates, instead of only for their opponents?

              There are some systems that attempt to select the least unpopular candidate, rather than the most popular, which is an interesting philosophical premise, though that would seem to me in practice to give a greatly outsized advantage to relatively unknown minor candidates that you would have voted against if you knew anything about them. Unless everyone gets in the habit of voting against such candidates on general principle - in which case you've locked them out of the race even more soundly than under first-past-the-post.

              • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Saturday November 17 2018, @05:07PM (1 child)

                by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Saturday November 17 2018, @05:07PM (#763148) Journal

                I mean the ability to say "none of the above are acceptable, hold another election, with all current candidates disqualified". Ideally it would never win, but it should be there.

                --
                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, @03:27PM

                  by Immerman (3985) on Sunday November 18 2018, @03:27PM (#763508)

                  Now there's an interesting idea. My gut response is that it would never be anything but symbolic. But then I think of the silent majority that don't vote in most elections, many because they don't think there's a meaningful difference between candidates. Give them the power to force a "do over" from scratch? That might be interesting.

                  I assume you would be able to vote "none of the above" as your first (or any other) pick, and have your vote roll over to your next choice as normal if it didn't win? After all, you don't want to discourage people from voting the rascals out if that's their first impulse. Ranked voting, AND the option for a blanket no confidence vote below any point? That could be devastating to modern politics - but I'm really not sure if for good or ill.

                  It would certainly cause some succession problems. What would you do, let the second-place candidate serve in the interim? The job still needs to be done, but you probably don't want the incumbent holding on to their job after they would have lost it otherwise - that's setting up some seriously bad mojo perverse incentives.

        • (Score: 1) by aebonyne on Friday November 16 2018, @11:38PM

          by aebonyne (5251) on Friday November 16 2018, @11:38PM (#762901) Homepage

          Short answer: no, they're the same thing. Single transferable vote (STV) [wikipedia.org] is a generalization of instant-runoff voting (IRV) [wikipedia.org] to multi-seat elections. In other words, for a single-winner election, STV and IRV are identical [wikipedia.org].

          (Instant-runoff voting is what people usually mean when they say "RCV" even though other ranked-choice voting (RCV) [wikipedia.org] systems exist; the main lobbying group for IRV in the US, FairVote [wikipedia.org], likes to conflate the two.)

          --
          Centralization breaks the internet.
      • (Score: 1) by unhandyandy on Saturday November 17 2018, @03:48AM

        by unhandyandy (4405) on Saturday November 17 2018, @03:48AM (#762950)

        No, only with RCV does a third party candidate have any chance of spoiling: people are free to vote 3rd party without the fear of their votes being wasted, so a 3rd party candidate can get many more votes than under a plurality (or majority) system.

        Another way to look at it: if not for RCV, Golden would have won in the 1st round because most 3rd party voters would have voted for him rather than "waste" their votes. This way at least the 3rd party candidates got a fair count of their supporters.

    • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday November 16 2018, @09:59AM (1 child)

      by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Friday November 16 2018, @09:59AM (#762628) Homepage
      Nah, not yet.

      The operative words are "sprawling 2nd District". That implies it's been gerrymangered. Fix the gerrymandering, at the hands of an independent - perhaps even programattically assisted - review committee, and then you'll have something closer to democracy.

      For something that's almost as close to democracy as what most modern civilised nations have, you'd need to have proportional representation and get rid of the electoral college. (A device which permits, in extreme circumstances, a movement with less than 0.0001% popular support to have their president elected.)
      --
      Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 16 2018, @08:09PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 16 2018, @08:09PM (#762824)

        It doesn't look too bad: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maine%27s_2nd_congressional_district [wikipedia.org] basically divided up on county lines (I assume that what those lines are) and most of Maine is mostly empty so this district covers most of Maine outside of the cities along the coast.

        Though I'm from the other side of the country, and mostly know about Maine from Steven King books.

    • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 16 2018, @06:15PM (3 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 16 2018, @06:15PM (#762776)

      It sounds like you are describing Florida's senate and governor elections. Broward and Palm Beach counties have a habit of delaying results. They like to wait until they know two things: which voters didn't bother to show up, and how many votes are required for the democrat to win. They then fill out ballots for the voters who didn't show up.

      And yes, it becomes multiple court cases. Democrats are still fighting to steal the election.

      • (Score: 3, Informative) by edIII on Friday November 16 2018, @10:25PM (2 children)

        by edIII (791) on Friday November 16 2018, @10:25PM (#762867)

        Complete and utter fucking bullshit, that has never been proven, not even fucking ONCE. Show me one fucking investigation, one instance of under-cover work by law enforcement or the press, ANY fucking instance where it was shown that this behavior is endemic to just the Democrats, much less the country. There have been investigations, and they've shown that there isn't anything significant going on in the entire United States.

        Keep saying it though like it will magically become true, or that the evidence actually exists.

        You know who demonstrably steals elections? Republicans. It's called gerrymandering, and it's so fucking transparent when they make these self-serving maps. What's the fucking difference between manipulating the vote, by manipulating district populations, and crafting ballots to pad one candidates vote count?

        Only one of them is factually true.

        Next you're going to tell me there are stinkin' illegal aliens directly from the caravan, driven by democrats, to vote repeatedly while changing outfits. An electoral catwalk, if you will. Of course, never providing any fucking evidence. Even when the white nationalist racist shitheads decided to try their hand at voter intimidation and record this all happening, they couldn't find any evidence. Not even with a large group of organized people trying to catch the bad ol' Democrats in the act.

        When they made those statements, and announced their investigation, I supported it. By all means, as long as your not attempting to intimidate or sway the vote, monitor the elections and who goes in and out. They got jack, diddly, and shit. However, the evidence of Republican vote stealing is in the legislatures under public record. Trying arguing your way out of that.

        --
        Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 17 2018, @03:43AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 17 2018, @03:43AM (#762944)

          Actual ballot fraud is pretty much just democrats, particularly the kind that involves poll workers with power. (examples below)

          Gerrymandering is generally legal. In weird cases it isn't, and in weird cases it is actually required, mainly due to court cases over non-white people.

          Gerrymandering in Maryland was bad enough that a court recently forced it to be redone. That, by the way, was democrats suppressing republicans.

          But back to ballot fraud:

          In the 2016 election, numerous counties in California had more votes than possible voters. Only one of these counties votes republican. Now, you claim to want "one fucking investigation", but who would want that? Only the party that isn't in power would be interested. The fact that there are more votes than possible voters is evidence enough for anybody who cares. The math says there is fraud.

          I watched the 2018 Florida results come in. Nearly all republican counties had turned in all their votes before a single democrat county did. The legal deadline is a half hour. Some democrat counties were days late, yet still somehow expect their votes to count. That's like turning in your homework a month after the grades have been recorded in your transcript. The nice thing about being late is that you can tell who didn't show up to vote, just in case you want to fill out ballots for them.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 17 2018, @09:52PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 17 2018, @09:52PM (#763224)

          It's a democrat. She did her own personal fraud, and also was an election official.

          https://www.trentonian.com/news/local/ex-chief-investigator-of-mercer-county-elections-charged-with-voter/article_36260ad8-e933-11e8-8644-8f650e30e530.html?fbclid=IwAR3FKhuDt8mipXlQU2y-apX3_-TI1wP-z2L5XWcGlJx9Lgl0t_2QHH1ekAg [trentonian.com]

          It's actually amazing that New Jersey didn't brush that under the carpet. The awful thing about voter fraud is that the people who should prosecute it are normally the beneficiaries, and thus very uninterested in prosecuting. It is also, due to lack of clear identification at all, just fundamentally difficult to investigate in the democrat-run states.

  • (Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 16 2018, @06:17AM (5 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 16 2018, @06:17AM (#762568)

    Ive been submitting lots of amd, intel, nvidia etc tech related stories (and also shitposting a bit on politics articles), apparently this leads to an ip ban?

    • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 16 2018, @08:30AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 16 2018, @08:30AM (#762594)

      You're only giving us one option to consider in a RCV article?

      Maybe you get IP bans because you're not the only one posting crap from the VPN you're using. Or maybe you're posting stuff that gets marked as spam.

      No matter what the reason is, try upping the quality of whatever you post/submit.

    • (Score: 4, Touché) by FatPhil on Friday November 16 2018, @10:03AM

      by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Friday November 16 2018, @10:03AM (#762632) Homepage
      Who is "I"? Log in, and then we can look at the problem because you will be able to clearly define the problem. Presently the problem is "rando on a part of the internet designed for spoofing identity is being tripped up by protections against abuse of such things". Erm, so they're working then?
      --
      Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
    • (Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Friday November 16 2018, @10:12AM (1 child)

      by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Friday November 16 2018, @10:12AM (#762634) Journal

      You don't have an "IP ban" (we go by a hashed "IPID", not IP, and it is not even close to being banned). And IMO your shitposting is not concentrated on the politics articles.

      If you are having "invalid form key" errors, that is not a ban.

      --
      [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 16 2018, @12:20PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 16 2018, @12:20PM (#762659)

        Not sure if you can actually track it, but the other posts would be calling out the crispr and dark/black stuff in outer space hype, and general crappiness of medical research. That reminds me, what happened to all the crispr articles? Seem to have disappeared once the stocks of all these companies started tanking, eg CRSP [yahoo.com]. You can also see ntla and edit crashing.

        So its looking like it was a pump and dump all along.

    • (Score: 2) by edIII on Friday November 16 2018, @10:33PM

      by edIII (791) on Friday November 16 2018, @10:33PM (#762868)

      Try logging in. I've done my own share of shitposting to some people (sorry kallow), and I submit articles as often I find them. My success rate for approval is quite high actually.

      It may simply be related to the protections in place, and becoming a logged in user will give you a higher success rate. Which doesn't prevent you from logging in via a VPN either. You can still hide your identity fairly effectively.

      Not to mention, the people running this site have earned our trust. Takyon, NCommander, Buzzard, MartyB, and anyone else I'm leaving out have demonstrated themselves to be worthy of our respect and trust.

      --
      Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by bradley13 on Friday November 16 2018, @07:56AM (10 children)

    by bradley13 (3053) on Friday November 16 2018, @07:56AM (#762589) Homepage Journal

    Ranked choice is not a bad step, but it is only one step towards a better system, similar to what we have in much of Europe.

    I read a German article not to long ago. It was amusing that there is no German word for Gerrymandering. The concept does not exist, because the problem does not exist.

    For seats in the House, the European system would throw all the seats for a state into one big pot. People would vote for their top X candidates. The candidates receiving the most votes would win the election and get seats in the House.

    This not only eliminates "winner take all"; it gives small parties a real likelihood of getting into Congress, and it makes districts and Gerrymandering completely irrelevant. Which would be a huge improvement over the current system.

    --
    Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
    • (Score: 5, Informative) by bob_super on Friday November 16 2018, @09:04AM (7 children)

      by bob_super (1357) on Friday November 16 2018, @09:04AM (#762610)

      There are lots of studies about the comparative benefits and pitfalls of each system.
      Israel's Knesset is purely proportional, which gives excessive power to the extremists parties which keep the current coalition in power, and results in terrible policies.
      France has a two-round system which kept the main couple parties more stably in power, allowed some minor parties in, but denied the extremists the representation they arguably democratically deserve when they get 10 to 20% in the first round.
      Germany and the UK have another single-round flavor which leads to three-party dominance, with minor parties getting in but never growing much.
      The US has obviously the most dysfunctional two-party system, before you even consider how FL can't count, Gerrymandering, and the Electoral College messes. Yet, before Newt, it worked well enough.

      Instead of equal voting by all people regardless of how informed they are, the best system is probably Pratchett's "one man, one vote", where the Patrician is the man, has the vote, but it works for everyone because he shrewdly leads in the right direction (unlike pretty much any non-fantasy dictator or king)

      • (Score: 2) by isostatic on Friday November 16 2018, @12:16PM (2 children)

        by isostatic (365) on Friday November 16 2018, @12:16PM (#762658) Journal

        Israel's Knesset is purely proportional, which gives excessive power to the extremists parties which keep the current coalition in power, and results in terrible policies.

        Why?

        Lets say there are 4 parties

        A gets 17%
        B gets 40%
        C gets 32%
        D gets 11%

        Possible coalitions would be

        B+C (72%)
        A+C+D (60%)
        A+B (57%)
        B+D (51%)

        None of those parties are guaranteed to be in, and that's assuming that all members act as one.

        • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday November 16 2018, @04:59PM (1 child)

          by bob_super (1357) on Friday November 16 2018, @04:59PM (#762737)

          You're trying to do math. How about reading the news ?
          Pandering to the small extreme parties in his coalition has led the Bibi government to make a lot of dangerous choices. That's not a hypothetical, that's facts.

          • (Score: 2) by isostatic on Friday November 16 2018, @07:34PM

            by isostatic (365) on Friday November 16 2018, @07:34PM (#762817) Journal

            He doesn't have to pander though, Bibi just prefers to ally himself with groups like Jewish Home and Shas rather than Zionist Union and Yesh Atid. That's a problem with the politicians in charge of the various parties that can't seem to compromise.

      • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday November 16 2018, @06:44PM (3 children)

        by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Friday November 16 2018, @06:44PM (#762802) Journal

        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)

          by Immerman (3985) on Sunday November 18 2018, @05:51PM (#763560)

          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)

            by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Sunday November 18 2018, @07:46PM (#763589) Journal

            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

              by Immerman (3985) on Wednesday November 21 2018, @12:49AM (#764490)

              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.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 16 2018, @06:19PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 16 2018, @06:19PM (#762777)

      Ranked choice encourages politicians to focus on being unobjectionable to everybody. This means not offending everybody from Antifa to the alt-right.

      That may be a poor outcome. Sometimes, the best thing to do is something that would offend some people.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 17 2018, @08:32AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 17 2018, @08:32AM (#762999)

        It's far more democratic than our current system which forces most people to choose from two evil candidates.

  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by FatPhil on Friday November 16 2018, @11:21AM (5 children)

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Friday November 16 2018, @11:21AM (#762647) Homepage
    Apparently, the Republican candidate doesn't understand how run-off voting works:

    “It is now officially clear I won the constitutional ‘one-person, one-vote’ first-choice election on Election Day that has been used in Maine for more than 100 years,” Poliquin said in a written statement after the results were announced. “We will proceed with our constitutional concerns about the ranked-vote algorithm.”

    No - it is now officially clear that those who felt the freedom to vote for minor candidates knowing that they would still have their preference between the big two counted were perfectly happy to so do. Had they known that the less democratic plurality scheme was in use, many of these people would have realised that their third party vote would be wasted, and would have "tactically voted" (it's a terrible term that makes a bad thing sound clever) - in a ratio of 2:1 for the Dems. And you'd have lost.

    This election is the first step towards lifting the veil on the idea of voting for minority candidates - they clearly aren't wasted votes, because they do not stop you from influincing the final outcome even if your first choice isn't taken. One might even say that such voters are expressing more with their vote than big-two voters are (they aren't given more power or influence, but the information-theoretic payload delivered by their vote is bigger). I hope this encourages more people to vote for minorities next year.
    --
    Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
    • (Score: 2, Disagree) by SixGunMojo on Friday November 16 2018, @12:46PM (1 child)

      by SixGunMojo (509) on Friday November 16 2018, @12:46PM (#762670)

      I'm pretty sure he understands how run-off voting works, he's just running the Clintonista playbook from the 2016 election:

      "but she won the popular vote!" Well congradu-fucking-lations, but them's not the rules of the game.

      I'm also pretty sure had this gone the other way (R over D) this would have become a national shitstorm about stolen elections and "the will of the people".
      Then we'd really be hearing from people who don't understand run-off elections.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 16 2018, @08:47PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 16 2018, @08:47PM (#762840)

        I'm also pretty sure had this gone the other way (R over D) this would have become a national shitstorm about stolen elections

        What makes you say that? All the "shitstorming" I've seen so far has been due to a D winning the popular vote but somehow still losing the elections. So far it seems like Republicans are the ones who throw temper tantrums. Calling for vote recounts is not "a shitstorm", that is simply attempting to ensure the integrity of democracy.

        See I have the benefit of actual evidence to draw my opinion from. All those Republicans that gerrymandered the fuck out of their districts are now so very angry that they still lost.

        I dream of a new conservative party that can actually handle objective reality and actually uphold the standard conservative values without the Bible thumping bullshit. * am not conservative but it pains me to have to even hear about the level of insanity the current GOP has normalized

    • (Score: 5, Touché) by DeathMonkey on Friday November 16 2018, @06:29PM (2 children)

      by DeathMonkey (1380) on Friday November 16 2018, @06:29PM (#762790) Journal

      Apparently, the Republican candidate doesn't understand how run-off voting works:

      Sure he does! He understands that it makes the election more responsive to the will of the people and is, therefore, bad for Republicans.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 17 2018, @03:46AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 17 2018, @03:46AM (#762948)

        You wanted Jeb Bush, didn't you?

        Because run-off voting is how you get the blandest candidate possible, which was Jeb!

      • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Sunday November 18 2018, @12:25AM

        by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Sunday November 18 2018, @12:25AM (#763266) Homepage
        Touche, but you're overlooking the fact that there's still a large number of people who do have that rather perversely thought out will
        --
        Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
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