Two quick observations on our November 3rd exercises

1. Mayor Coleman the Second was reelected. It is certainly newsworthy and important. And I am sure that there are mandates in there some place and maybe somebody will correctly discern what they are and act accordingly.

In 2005 he unseated an incumbent mayor with thirty years of service in elective office and whatever personal machinery had been developed. In 2009, as an incumbent, he beat a non-incumbent with no political experience.

While that makes me question whether service as our mayor has helped Chris Coleman’s political future, it does indicate that he still has a present and we all need to respect that.

2. We approved IRV. It was close but the results did surprise me. It will be interesting to see how it develops when we choose councilmembers in 2011. It also leads me to question how we plan to pay for the 2011 school board primary.

More thoughts on IRV

I have written before about Instant Runoff Voting [IRV] before. I am still uncertain what my final position will be, but I have been leaning against it for our local elections. Last year showed that many of us are confused about how to vote on our simple first-choice-only ballots.

I tend to support allowing open ballot access which allows a candidate to list all the parties endorsing him/her. If a candidate had a majority in the September primary, he/she would be declared elected. If no candidate had a majority, the top two candidates would face each other in November. Candidates and parties eliminated in September would be out of it.

However, that is not what we are being offered for consideration this year.

Now Joe Soucheray who has been railing against IRV for a while notes that his allies include Chuck Repke and Dave Thune. That gives me a bit of a chuckle, but it should only be momentary. Soucheray mistakenly thinks that IRV is a great leftist conspiracy, so having them as allies seems to arouse him a bit.

But there really is no reason to think that IRV will aid left more than right. It just depends on who the candidates are and who the voters are. Sometimes in some jurisdictions it will work wonders for the left, other times in other places it could work wonders for the right, and in many places many times it will work one way in the election for one office while working the other way in the election for a different office. In some racially divided areas it would likely mean that candidate[s] of the less preferred race[s] are rated last by those of differing race[s].

Soucheray mentions a site which he attributes to Mr. Repke. I checked the site out and watched the videos there. I cannot agree that I follow them, because in an A-B-C election not everybody who chooses C will rank A and B in the same way, nor will all who choose A rank B and C the same way, and so on. While there may be cases in which the system seems to skew things incorrectly and I imagine that candidates and parties from all sides will check out the possibilities, it will be hard to pull those shenanigans. [If we really want to clean up our elections from shenanigans we might wish to address how anybody regardless of party can vote in any party’s primary in the even-year general elections.]

But it does seem likely that keeping all the candidates in the running until the last day will in many cases stifle meaningful debate and it does seem that many people who need enfranchisement the most will avoid voting because they cannot understand the process or will cast invalid ballots.

And I also think we would be better off deciding AFTER Minneapolis had had an IRV election or two under its belt.

My previous posts on IRV. link, link, link

Some IRV considerations on a slow election day

The debate on Instant Runoff Voting should be heating up locally shortly. I am still trying to keep an open mind. Some critics [think Joe Soucheray, for one] seem so sense partisan [or at least ideological] agenda behind the effort. Based on who seems to be supporting the move in this region, it is easy to see how he has reached that conclusion. But it seems to me that there are plenty of places where IRV, if adopted, could work for different ideologies differing from the ones that Soucheray suspects.

Full disclosure: IRV is not my favored way of addressing our ongoing situation of minority winners. I favor a two-step process, but nobody else seems to favor the process I do.

After finding out this last year how many people could screw up something like ballot marking using our present system, I have found myself wondering whether we might just be asking for a whole lot more problems with the necessarily more complicated IRV ballot. I guess that before adopting it here, it would be nice to see how Minneapolis handles it, but since we are making our decision simultaneously to their beginning their IRV experiment, we will not have that chance. And, with this year’s decision out of the way, we will probably lose whatever opportunity to make a decision on what system to use with their experience to consider.

In my precinct where 1124 people voted for electors for President of the United States, I was voter number 21 at approximately three in the afternoon today.

It would seem that our community is not committed to our two-stage election process. I just wonder how IRV might change that.

IRV in Minneapolis. Are we next?

After a period of uncertainty while the judges were doing their thing, Instant Runoff Voting [IRV] has been cleared for use in the Minneapolis elections this year.

If you have read my earlier posts, you probably know that I am not ready to sign on the IRV bandwagon yet. But, even though we have learned that SO many of our fellow citizens have difficulty filling out a ballot the way we have them now, I am quite willing to let the city upriver give it a try. And I wonder how many people over there will need to learn how to cast a proper ballot all over again in next year’s general election.

Now it seems likely that we will be voting this year on whether we want IRV for ourselves.

But might it not be better to see how Mpls. gets through its first try with the system first?

Related links:

St. Cloud Times,

WCCO Television

[Mpls.] Star[-Journal and Tribune

Dispatch Pioneer Press

Will IRV bring about delays?

I have been intrigued about Instant Runoff Voting [sometimes simplified as IRV – although it is not named for our late former House speaker] but never enough to suggest its adaptation.

Minneapolis has adopted it to take effect in this year’s election. We may be getting to vote on it sometime soon.

Now Steve Brant at the Star-[Journal and] Tribune reports that, according to election officials, it may take 10-20 days of around the clock counting to find out some of the winners.

I have wondered all along whether the better approach would be a combination of keeping the September primary date and allowing a candidate’s name to show his/her party endorsements alongside his/her name, multiple endorsements where that is the case, and to declare anybody with a majority in September to be elected.

But before we make our decisions, maybe we will at least have an idea of what the city upstream is getting itself into.

Politicians, their lawyers, and Equal Protection

Eric Black of MinnPost says it well this afternoon.

U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, Repub of Texas, who chairs the National Republican Senatorial Committee and might therefore be viewed as less than an impartial commentator, says that Dems who tell Coleman to give it up are guilty of "blatant hypocrisy" because their current position -- don't count any more ballots -- contradicts the position they took -- keep counting -- in 2000 when the U.S. Supreme Court canceled the Florida statewide recount thus making G.W. Bush president. In the interest of brevity, Sen. Cornyn did not find space to comment on the hypocrisy of Repubs who have made an opposite switcheroo between the Bush/Gore and the Franken/Coleman cases.

He has a good point. Politicians take the side that looks good at the moment and attorneys argue whatever point of law is on the side of whoever is paying them. Do you really think things would be much different if the numbers were the other way around?

I doubt whether Norm Coleman or Al Franken reads anything here.

So I won’t try to tell either of them what to do next. [After all, even if one of them happened upon this place, there is no reason to believe they would pay attention to what I am writing.]

[Old time SNL watchers: Remember when the 1980s were going to be the “Al Franken Decade”? Are we now looking at a “Al Franken recount decade”?]

I am tired of the hypocrisy on both sides. It’s just that the hypocrisy on the Coleman side stands out worse because of one simple matter: FRANKEN HAS THE VOTES AND IT IS UNLIKELY THAT HE WON’T WHEN ALL IS SAID AND DONE.

Our election laws and procedures have been shown to be remarkably good. An election this close will show the imperfections and we need to be willing to react to what we have learned, but we do darn good. It is just that there is no good tool available to measure something so close adequately. It is like trying to guess who wins an Olympic race when clocks measuring thousandths of a second cannot distinguish a winner.

But Norm’s claim that not all ballots are being counted equally, while perhaps somewhat true, misses a big point. We do have more equal treatment of ballots statewide than we have ever had before. We once had a mixture of hand-counted paper ballots, machine counted paper ballots, lever machines [which left no paper trail], and [if I understand correctly] even a few jurisdictions using punch card ballots. Now we all vote with paper ballots which makes a recount like we have just seen possible, with every ballot and ballot application open to review by observers of all/both sides.

I will try to avoid this subject for a while. It’s getting tiring.

Albert Lea editorial on Senate race

From a Tuesday editorial in Albert Lea Tribune [a paper which had endorsed Norm Coleman last year]

Coleman, who rails against career politicians, is looking like a career politician who is losing his career.

A good politician knows when he is looking bad and making his state look bad.

Throw in the towel.

Looking at Iowa AND A note on how we choose judges

Our legislators are considering a constitutional amendment being pushed by elder statespeople of both parties to eliminate our system of electing judges in favor of a system of retention elections in which voters would merely vote in favor of or opposed to keeping any given jurist on the bench. California and Iowa already have similar situations.

The Iowa Supreme Court has just overruled that Iowa Code section 595.2 [the state’s “Defense of Marriage” law]. This act was passed in an overwhelming and bipartisan manner during the tenure of former Democratic Governor [now Secretary of Agriculture] Tom Vilsack. The Court ruled that the law violates the state’s constitution.

I am not going to quibble about the law behind the ruling. I am not well enough versed in the Iowa Constitution or the arguments given to question it. I do note that coverage today indicates that the ruling was unanimous and I would suggest that since the justices all knew the election system that they have would not have made this ruling capriciously.

But I don’t know whether anybody here has wondered about the implications of things like today’s decision on elections here. I haven’t seen anything yet, but I am probably not the only one who will connect the two things this way.

We have already seen how a personalized campaign against a judge can result in removal for grounds more emotional than legal when we saw how in 1986 California voters ousted their chief justice Rose Bird and two associate justices whom they thought did not vote to allow enough criminals to be executed. Television commercials featuring children and other survivors of moral victims were shown across the state as big money was raised in the effort to remove them. It will be interesting now to see how voters in Iowa react toward their high court justices in the next elections.

Our system has worked well for the most part. People are probably correct in seeing problems coming up. We can look over the St. Croix to Wisconsin and look at their judicial elections going on right now and see some of the problems that happen there and might here. Maybe we should pause before we rush to change things here.

FYI: This ruling was by Iowa’s highest court was based on that state’s constitution and has no direct effect in any other state. Iowa has a time-consuming process for constitutional amendment and the absolute earliest any amendment could go to the voters would be in the 2012 election, so it would seem that this ruling will be in effect for some time. Iowa does not require residency for marriage, something which has kept the Little Brown Church in business. We will probably learn shortly whether our local authorities think that Minnesota will be entitled or obligated to recognize same-sex marriages performed there to residents of our state.

Three comments on the recount

Today the State Canvassing Board certified that the numbers add up to Franken.  Norm’s attorneys threaten suit.  We’ll see what happens.  In the meantime, here are three interesting posts elsewhere about the Coleman v. Franken recount.

After suggesting that Norm should run for Governor in 2010, Zach Stephenson in MNPUBLIUS, comments:

If Norm concedes next week, he’ll look gracious and avoid the “sore-loser” label that will plague him if he fights in court. Polls have shown that Minnesotans approve of the recount. They think the election was fair. I don’t think the public will get behind a court challenge. Moreover, Norm’s own words are really going to haunt him. Remember, right after the election Norm called on Al to concede. He said it was time to heal. If Norm takes this to court, he’ll be a hypocrite.

On the other hand, a concession from Norm would prove that he practices what he preaches. It would reinforce Norm’s self-styled image as a moderate and a uniter. I would expect that his favorability ratings would shoot up significantly.

From Dave Mindeman in mnpACT’s Progressive Politics Blog:

A 225 vote lead is not very big...but its value increases when you become a campaign searching for new votes. The official recount tally is over and even with the court challenges that Coleman has been talking about, there just doesn't seem to be enough numbers to overturn what is officially in the books now. . . .

The only way Coleman could possibly win now is through a prolonged and protracted court action which will do neither side any good.

Eric Ostermeier of Smart Politics, in a post noting the ineffectiveness of the Franken campaign notes

The rationale of their discontent was simply this: in an election year in which the top of the DFL ticket carried the state by a double-digit margin, why is the DFL even in a position to need a recount to win its Senate race?  [emphasis his]

There is also an interesting chart showing how previous DFL Senate candidates did against the head of the ticket and asserting that Franken is the fourth worst ever.

Former Senator Coleman?

Well, it looks like tomorrow at 11 am Central Time Norman B Coleman, jr. becomes a former United States Senator, at least for a while.

 

Something is wrong here.  I know that 58% of those who voted two months ago wanted this to happen, but when somebody becomes a former senator, somebody else is supposed to become a current one.

 

The recount and related legal things continue.  It looks to me like both the Canvassing Board and the Supreme Court are doing their jobs well and we need to thank them, but this whole thing is taking up too much time to have a successor qualified by the expiration of the term.

 

In the meantime, we will just have to hope that the rest of the Senate doesn’t abuse us and perhaps we can take comfort in the fact that the first part of a session often limits itself to preliminaries, leaving the actual passage of things until much later.

The real secret ballot question

The generous and benevolent people who run the country’s companies [aka management] went to a lot of effort to see that we learned of the need for employees to have secret ballots in union organizing endeavors. There were labor and DFL types who did not agree that such a secret ballot was in peril.

I posted a couple of weeks ago about the attempts of Marty Seifert and others [mainly Republicans] to demand photo identification for voting, noting the likely inherent pro-GOP such a disenfranchisement might bring about.

However I noted then that I would be posting about a possible source of abuse which practices now encouraged by DFLers and Democrats have come to embrace. That practice is absentee voting.

Only a ballot which has never been out of the presence of two or more judges of different parties can be really considered to have an assurance of privacy. When you get to a voting station on election day [or at an early voting location] two or more judges of different party give you your ballot which has been examined and initialed by two or more judges of different party and you take it to a booth and fill it out. You place the completed ballot into a secrecy folder and insert it into the counter yourself. If the machine is not working there are procedures established to place it into a sealed compartment where judges, again from different parties, will process it and others similarly placed there when the gizmo is working again.

After the machine prints its totals in the evening, the ballots are removed, sealed, and sent to an election office always in the presence of two or more judges of different parties.

There may be an occasional screw up but these are few and can happen with absentee ballots too.

What makes most absentee ballots [there are exceptions such as when judges take ballots to hospitals or nursing homes] so vulnerable to attacks on its privacy is clearly that any ballot spends a good amount of time out of the custody of the election judges and officials.

Back to the comment on union elections: Remember the campaign spot which showed somebody who was designed to bring to mind a gangster-type union official welcoming a poor voter in to vote? Just imagine how that could work out when it is just you the voter, your boss and a piece of paper. And if a boss is not intimidating, what about a spouse? or a mother-in-law? or your clergyperson? or whoever strikes terror in you?

Before this year’s election there was concern about the “Bradley factor,” the idea that people might profess tolerance but not carry it out in the ballot box. Can we speculate what might happen if the guys at the lodge decided to have a “ballot party”?

Maybe we should eliminate absentee voting or at least limit it to the most extreme circumstances [e.g., military, public officials whose jobs put them elsewhere]. If people think this unfair, maybe we could make early voting more common.

No picture, no vote?

The closeness of the Coleman-Franken election has prompted Marty Seifert to come out with another attempt to require producing photo identification as a qualification to vote. A Minnpost article by Marisa Helms [which also addresses other election matters] notes that Seifert and the House GOP consider the matter high-priority and says that his caucus will “push the envelope” for this “simple reform.”

Of course, the fact that this requirement would be so simple and would be hardest on people who are less affluent and who move with the most frequency would certainly not be in the mind of somebody as fair-minded as Mr. Seifert. I am certain that he would consider this pure coincidence.

He also notes that one has to show an ID to get on an airplane or buy a beer. While I am not sure that I agree with that even that amount of personal invasion, it should be noted that traveling and drinking and participating in our civic, governmental processes are different things and rally cannot be compared. We have no law now which requires the possession of identification and we should all be concerned that as we demand photo identification for ever more things that we are approaching the time when we will find ourselves having to carry internal passports, something the libertarian faction of any party must shudder about.

It should be noted that until about a quarter century ago that a voter’s registration card was present at each precinct and the judges had the opportunity to check the voter’s signature with the signature on the card. I do not know why that safeguard was ceased and I know that if used that it would likely have different results than photo ID, but it seems that it could address some of Seifert’s concerns and not require the presentation of the ID card.

But we know that everybody’s concerns about fairness in election depends on perspective.

There will be another post soon on one of the possible sources for abuse that DFL people seem to like.

Earlier posts on Marty Seifert can be seen by clicking the label "Marty Seifert." Two posts of interest are

http://ccmusings.blogspot.com/2008/03/well-now-we-know-how-much-time.html [3/3/08]

and

http://ccmusings.blogspot.com/2008/03/rosario-seifert-is-sir-punisher.html [3/10/08]

SOS Ritchie expects "massive" voter turnout

MinnPost is reporting that Secretary of State Mark Ritchie is predicting a “massive” voter turnout on November 4^th.

I suspect that we will have sufficient trained election personnel to avoid the perils that some states seem to have no end of such as trying to open polls in locked up buildings, failing to print enough ballots or have enough machines to handle them [which seems to happen especially often in neighborhoods where the ruling party thinks itself weakest], dangling chads, or names mysteriously left off the ballot [as happened on the absentee ballots of a black community in Ohio last time when a “printing error” just happened to forget to include the name “John Kerry”]. Even though my unscientific exposure to election judges suggests that they may not be as non-partisan as our judges [who always have been supposed to be affiliated with the political parties] were in an earlier generation, our judges do indeed do good work.

There is a lot of hypocrisy about big election returns. So many people think that big turnouts are a good thing. But, as I noted in an election day post last year, a big turnout just for the sake of a big turnout is not necessarily anything anybody wants because if the turnout might be coming from the wrong people.

And if you can get the day off and are affiliated with one of Minnesota's major party, you might want to call your county auditor to see if they need help that day.

Election Strategies

It’s been up there for several days, but I just noted a post in City Hall Scoop [link here] suggesting that Pakou Hang’s candidacy might have cost Kevin Riach election to the school board.

I’m not sure that I agree, but the case is made interestingly. The article suggests that the increased turnout in Ward Six caused by the unsuccessful Hang candidacy brought out more Conlon voters.

People always need to be reminded that people and referendum items on ballots do affect other things on the same ballot. This is why we had a constitutional amendment on the right to fish and hunt a few years back and it is why Michele Bachmann and Governor Plenty wanted us to vote on one to outlaw gay marriage for last year’s elections, a move echoed [with varying degrees of success[ in several states.

GLBT issues have been used this way by the right for some time. Old timers can remember that Rosalie Butler won her last election in the 1978 city election when the city’s gay rights ordinance then in effect was defeated in referendum. One commentator noted that, if you believed all the hype the various parties were giving out before the election that 50,000 bigots had outvoted 30,000 perverts. [That is why it is not out of line to suggest that Dave Thune had courage when he introduced a new gay rights ordinance several years later.]

Other subjects have also skewed elections. It seems hard to believe now, but the GOP came close to taking control of our city council as recently as 1982 [the first year for ward elections]. The DFL elected Bill Wilson, Leonard Levine, and Victor Tedesco solidly enough and the Republicans picked up three seats with Bob Fletcher, Hugo Masanz, and Chris Nicosia. [Purists will note that the GOP had not endorsed Masanz and that indeed the DFL endorsed him in the next election, but the GOP did publicly note its “support” of him in his run against the DFL-endorsed Liz Anderson.]

In the seventh race, the Ward Two seat, the DFL candidate Jim Scheibel narrowly beat his GOP opponent by 25 votes. If thirteen of those people had thought differently the GOP would have won the Council. [Historians may note that his opponent was a man named Dave Thune, but I suspect that it must have been a different guy.]

What made that election so tight? A referendum on whether the City should be allowed to investigate municipal ownership of cable television. It wasn’t to have municipal ownership, it was just to be able to consider it as one possibility.

Sometimes other things on a ballot have an effect and once in a while the effect is not what the candidate or cause expected.

There is no great lesson here. But before you sign that referendum petition or suggest to somebody that he/she should run for something, you might want to think twice, reflecting on the bigger context of things.