Hare, Prayer and Everywhere....
Nov. 13th, 2022 10:48 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
captainsblogWelp, there goes that red tsunami we were all afraid of: Arizona and Nevada have both been called for the good guys. I'm expecting Joe Manchin to pour millions into getting Herschel Walker into the remaining GA seat so he won't be rendered totally irrelevant by a majority not needing his vote.
The Fox News boards have been fun this morning. One accused Joe (Biden, the slightly more powerful one than Manchin now) of buying millennial votes through student loan forgiveness. That drew this reply:
You mean you can influence an election by tipping what you're going to do and get votes based on that? How novel.
Sincerely,
The Late Sheldon Adelson, Ron Lauder, Peter Thiel, and the real dark-money donors we haven't even identified yet.
Other, more state-specific complaints have appeared about places that have adopted Ranked Choice Voting as their ballot method. In RCV, you indicate a first choice and as many second, third...∞th alternatives as you can stomach support for in determining a "majority" winner. If the first round doesn't produce a majority winner, the lowest contestant is eliminated and the next one down on any of their ballots gets that elector's vote, repeating until a majority is reached for each seat. The method kept Sarah Palin out of Congress in Alaska, so of course she's calling it FRAUDYOUBETCHA! It gives loons like Shill Stein a chance to get their voter base measured without it leading to the disastrous consequences that she gave us in 2016.
This system of counting votes is merely logical and shouldn't, in theory, lead to any change in actual elected officials. (That would be "proportional representation," used in some parliamentary systems, where minor party candidates can actually hold office.) I go back with the idea of RCV a long time, though, back when I first saw it under a strange name:
The Hare system.
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My first semester at Cornell was the fall of 1977. The school's trustees had just abolished its University Senate, a 60s era sop to stop the hippies from taking over buildings. The Senate gave significant power to students, making up an equal share with faculty of its voting membership, and entrusted with matters of importance. Its replacement was a neutered "Campus Council," which of course all the Model UN overachievers in my freshman class ran for without regard to the meaninglessness of the office. That, anyway, is the meaningless background. Meaningful here is that it was my first experience with that they then called the "Hare system" of RCV.
Dining hall tables had cards explaining it, using apples, oranges and bananas as the choices. Took me a few minutes, but it clicked. Why waste time and money on runoffs if your rules require majority-not-plurality? Why not let all candidates have a fair chance to let their true popularity be expressed without worrying that your vote would be "wasted" on an unelectable third-party candidate?
Then again, this was 1977, when the three channels on the tv hadn't rotted our brains out completely; and it was a university community, which might be statistically inclined to statistics more than, say, Wasilla, Alaska.
I heard very little about this method after that until it started popping up in the past decade and, now, is used statewide in several jurisdictions and locally in others, including NYC. In primary elections within a party, it discourages candidates from overappeal to "the base" because radical positions will cause voters to leave them off their choices. Probably in places like PA and NH, it would have resulted in a GOP nominee being more electable, but since they don't understand it and a few crazies lost under it, they call it things like "Marxist."
Including that chick who can see Russia from her house.
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The M-word also gets thrown around outside this specific voting issue, as there are the inevitable name callers who insist that Democrats are just a bunch of Marxists. I saw one of those on Foxsucker, and here’s the reply THAT drew:
Marxists, hmmm. Let me check my Little Red Book:
Indoctrination and suppression of all points of view you disagree with. Um, YOU do that. You’re the one banning books and indoctrinating schoolchildren that the Founding Fathers and Confederate leaders were perfect and never had a wrong idea.
Redistribution of wealth? You again. We’re not the ones that rammed through that 2017 tax bill that redistributed almost all the benefits to the top one percent and corporations.
Faking democracy with elections that always bring you out as the winner? Da. You’re the ones that can take an almost 50-50 state like Wisconsin and gerrymander it into an almost supermajority for Republicans in both houses of the legislature. And then you come here and scream like a stuck pig when Democrats try to do anything close to that.
Elimination of religion? Amen, brother. You’ve kept the cross but crossed out almost everything Jesus said about loving your neighbor, welcoming the stranger, and helping the poor.
Now I understand why you are the ones that get identified with the red color, comrades.
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Jesus has also been busy in the past week's descent into Hell: He now has a verified Twitter account.
I mentioned the parodies here previously, and I still haven't been banned for my bad works. More recently, though, the fun has come from spoofers who (literally) bought into the blue-check system, where anyone could pay eight bucks to get "verified" and the crucial checkmark next to it. This piece summarizes some of the better ones, which often lead to spoofs on spoofs to make the pain for the real holders of the names even worse.
Eli Lilly's stock price actually fell after a fake site announced that its overprice-gouged insulin product would now be free:
They're Chiquita Banana and they'd like to say something:
Oops, that wasn't them:
That wasn't them, either. (Actually, it was.)
Orenthal and Chappelle got in on the action:
But best of all, The Son His own self. There's been an @sign-Jesus Twitter account for 14 years, but He finally got to pay His eight shekels and got His blue checkmark. Elon has shut off the bluecheck tap while he recovers from this mess, but since people paid, he can't just unverify them for content. The Jesus account remains live and is saying all the things you'd expect from Him rather than the crap put out in His name from people like Joel Osteen and Franklin Graham.
He's even omniscient, reaching down to the poor unfortunate souls of Buffalo as we turn to the heavens for our quarterback's elbow to recover by kickoff:
Amen.
no subject
Date: 2022-11-13 11:39 pm (UTC)I don't know if it's still true, but Australia used to use a preferential voting system where one of the candidates was "none of the above." If it won, which I'm not sure it ever did, there would be a new election, and none of the candidates who got none-of-the-aboved would be permitted to stand in the new one.
(Amusingly, one Geoff Richardson changed his name to Of The Above None, so that it would appear on the ballot as "NONE, Of The Above").
Man
Date: 2022-11-15 11:52 am (UTC)