Washington is totally broken.
Washington is broken, Washington right now is
broken. Nothing will get done in Washington this
year because Washington is broken.
For years now, politicians have been telling the
American public that they can't deliver their
campaign promises because of the gridlock in
Washington. But with so much at stake, from
health care to education to Social Security, it
seems there is more than just ideological
differences standing in the way of social
progress. At times, it seems like the whole
system is set up to fail.
But two researchers are claiming that the
industry that spent $6.5
billion in 2016 and five point seventy three
billion in 2018 is flourishing.
The parties, the political industrial complex,
which works very well together in one particular
way, and that is to rig the rules of the game to
protect themselves jointly from new competition.
Politics isn't broken.
It's fixed. A movement has been growing across
the country to change how the system works.
Places like Maine, San Francisco and Santa Fe are
changing the way their representatives are chosen
to allow voters to rank their preferences instead
of choosing only one representative.
Initial surveys of ranked choice voting in
Minneapolis, St.
Paul and Cambridge show voters are more satisfied
with the conduct of local campaigns than in
similar cities with plurality winner takes all.
Voting could ranked choice voting save
Washington? In 2002, the late Senator John McCain
campaign to support instant runoff voting, also
known as rank choice voting.
Hello, this is Senator John McCain.
I'm calling to urge your support for ballot
measure 1 on August 27, ballot Measure 1 will
adopt a fairer voting method.
It will lead to good government because Alaska
will elect leaders who have the support of a
majority of voters.
And that same year, then Senator Barack Obama
introduced SB 1789 that would have created
instant runoff voting for Congress in state
primaries as well as authorized it for local
elections. Ranked choice voting is an alternative
way for citizens to vote for who they would like
to represent them in office.
You pick your favorite. Just like always.
But then if you want, you can also say, this is
my second choice, my third choice, my fourth
choice and my last my least favorite choice.
The polls close and now all the first place votes
are counted. And if that candidate has a true
majority, meaning over 50 percent while the
election's over and that candidate wins.
But if after the first place votes are counted,
none of the five has over 50 percent.
Then the candidate that is in last place is
automatically eliminated from the race.
And voters who had selected that candidate first
now have their second place votes counted.
Instead, we rerun the totals and you continue on
that process until the election produces a true
majority winner.
Mean you were always going to elect the candidate
with the broadest appeal to the most number of
voters. You could vote for me as your number one,
knowing that you could vote for Hillary Clinton
or whoever your safety is.
As your number two researchers, Catherine Gale
and Michael Porter, claim, Democratic and
Republican candidates have no incentive to work
towards societal greater good because they're
beholden to the party more than their
constituents. Instead, they argue, the parties
are operating in a duopoly prohibiting
independent candidates from achieving success,
creating a formula that rotates different
figureheads and limits opportunities for
innovation. A duopoly is an industry where there
are two dominant competitors, and in the politics
industry, we, of course, have the Democrats and
the Republicans as our two dominant rivals.
Think of Coke and Pepsi, as mentioned in a recent
Freakonomics podcast episode.
It's in their best interest for Dr Pepper never
to gain the notoriety of the other two sort of
brands, the Democrats and Republicans.
They are a combined duopoly.
They dominate this space.
There's a reason why people like Mike Bloomberg,
Howard Schultz and whoever else you can name
that's considered running as an independent has
not won. Oh, you call it unfair, but that's just
the way our political system.
That's what it's turned into. Now you're looking
for a perfect process.
That's not what democracy is.
And if you're looking for, you know, everyone to
come out a winner, that's also not what democracy
does. Not generally T-ball.
Everybody gets a prize.
There are winners and losers.
And how you vote shapes who wins and who loses in
today's climate. There's incentives for, you
know, people to be partisan in every single moves
being tracked, every word they say from the time
in before they announce a president is being
tracked, recorded monitors, it's impossible to
try and suddenly change your way halfway through
a campaign. You're gonna get called out on it.
And many of these call outs are done by members
of the candidate's own parties.
The vice president has still failed to
acknowledge that it was wrong to take the
position that he took at that time.
If you want to do well, running for office in a
ranked choice voting election and you want
supporters of other candidates to rank you as
their second choice, then there's an incentive to
be a little nicer to those candidates and maybe
not attack them. The idea that somehow elections
are going to get less rancorous, that's just not
going to happen. We are in a state in this
country where people have fundamental
disagreements about very important issues.
That's not going to change just because you
change the way candidates are chosen in the
voting process. Rancorous voting is compelling
for a number of reasons. I think in today's
politics, it's most compelling isn't just allow
us to have more than two choices to allow new
players to sort of enter the marketplace of ideas
and to be considered and evaluated and voted upon
for what they're saying and what they're
offering, rather than the sort of a horse race
partisan impact of what they might mean for
splitting votes and so on.
The third party candidate ultimately just siphons
off votes. A third party candidate ultimately
undermines the the nominee of a particular party.
And in this case, if it's the Green Party
running, a third party candidacy will have the
same impact that it did in 2016 or when Al Gore
ran and Ralph Nader was the spoiler in that race.
A third party candidacy is a spoiler.
I want to see an alternative political party.
At least two political parties are telling these
Americans have nowhere to go and people don't
like choices like Tweedledum and Tweedledee.
If you have more choices and more opportunity for
new players to get in the arena, that that can
ultimately create better, better products for
consumers. And I think that that's the same the
same basic dynamic in politics.
Galen Porter argue that candidates and elected
officials may be able to get bipartisan laws
passed, but there is no reward for not supporting
the party, because if you vote against the party
line, you won't receive their support in the next
election. Ranked choice voting would change that
because voters can be more or less supportive of
elected officials based on their actions, not
just their policies and positions.
If you solve anything in a bipartisan way, you
likely won't make it back through your primary.
When a lot of crap you know, I hear that argument
from so many Democrats and Republicans that they
say they're getting burned at home because
they're working across the aisle and not working
across the aisle. They're posturing.
Right. I've never seen a politician lose an
election because they build a bipartisan
coalition and accomplish something.
I think they do lose credibility when they show
themselves to be hypocrites and in a political
climate where there's no reward for coming in
second. The party's support can make or break a
candidate. Imagine a market where you as an
emerging business could only make your first
dollar when you were the biggest company in that
market. Right. So that so that you can't grow
like like if you start up at 10 percent, you're
making nothing. 20 percent, you're still making
nothing. 30 percent, you're making nothing.
Finally, get up to 40 percent or whatever it is.
And you can actually make all the money I make.
Right. But it but it's like really hard.
So the market is very dualistic that way.
When you look behind the scenes, we find that
Democrats and Republicans work very well together
in one particular way, and that is to cooperate.
Some would say collude to set rules and practices
that protect the industry from themselves, that
protect themselves jointly from new competition.
That's one of the reasons Maine chose to adopt
ranked choice voting.
Then you have the state of Maine, which is for us
the next thrilling story.
It's a state that has advanced first voting,
first on the local level.
Then they have moved in that used different for
congressional elections and all their primaries
in 2018. And now they've adopted it for president
Maine, as you know, last year.
So the 2018 election had the first federal
election ever, a congressional race using the
ranked choice voting system.
That race shows why ranked choice voting is not a
good idea. The candidate who got the largest
number of votes, the largest plurality in the
first round of tabulations did not actually win
the race. And because there were multiple rounds
of tabulation, apparently thousands of ballots
cast by voters were thrown out.
However, supporters of the process claim it gives
more power to the voters by making votes for
third party candidates.
Count when the tally moves to an instant runoff.
Think of the duopoly example of Coke and Pepsi.
Just because a voter prefers Dr Pepper, it
doesn't mean that he or she doesn't want soda at
all. This change in the process challenges the
duopoly of the two parties and reforms the
industry. Opponents argue that this requires too
much of the voter. You talk to the average voter
about this, and I think the average voter has the
same feelings that former California Governor
Jerry Brown has.
They find ranked choice voting to be confusing
and overcomplicated virtually without exception.
It's been a very positive, supportive eye
reaction from voters saying, I liked this better
than I what I did before, the very strongest
supporters from people under 40 who are not sort
of used to a single choice ballot, they're like.
Of course, this is better to be able to to rank
rather than vote for one.
According to an exit poll conducted by the Bangor
Daily News in Maine, over 74 percent of people
said ranking choices was either somewhat easy or
very easy in the US.
It's been used in Minneapolis, St.
Paul and Santa Fe with five new cities using it
in November. Twenty nineteen.
And then the fact that you can't get elected for
president next year without winning or competing
for electoral votes in Maine, and you won't be
elected for president without learning something
about rancorous voting because you have to win in
Maine. Other countries like Australia and Ireland
use a version of ranked choice voting.
And while some claim the process favors
progressive ideals, the conservative Prime
Minister Scott Morrison, won re-election in
Australia. All of these rules, practices and
norms have been created outside of the
Constitution. And therefore, the good news is
that as dysfunctional as so much of this politics
industry is, it's invented and we, the citizens
can force changes in that invention.