Step right up, get your snake oil

Regular readers here know that I get a good deal of amusement out of election porn – the flood of glossy mailers that arrive in our mailbox during each election cycle. This season's crop has been ample.

But among the funny papers has come one flyer that gets me mad, because it's so misleading. This one is hawking Measure 117, "rank choice voting," another goofball experiment being foisted on Oregon voters by out-of-state interests, in this case apparently from California.*

The whole thing, four 8½-by-11-inch pages of slick come-on, contains one paragraph in particular that I find highly objectionable:

There are a couple of suspect statements there. First, "Right now, a candidate can win an election with as little as 30% of the vote." What are they talking about? All but one of the races affected by the measure – President, Congress, governor, state attorney general, and state secretary of state – are currently covered by partisan primaries, and then a decisive general election.† In the general election, the candidate with the most votes wins. If it's close and there are multiple parties or a heavy write-in vote, yes, that could be less than a majority.

But the percentage of votes needed depends on the number of candidates on the general election ballot. If three candidates appear – a Democrat, a Republican, and one fringe-party candidate – the lowest possible win total would be 33.33 percent, plus one vote, of total votes cast (less if write-ins get votes). If four candidates appear – a Democrat, a Republican, and two fringe-party candidates – the lowest possible win total would be 25 percent, plus one vote, of total votes cast (again, less if write-ins get votes). Okay, these are fewer than a majority. But where does the flyer's 30 percent number come from? To me, it's a mystery. Maybe I'm missing something.

An even bigger problem is the next sentence: "Measure 117 guarantees that the winning candidate has support from more than 50% of voters." Depending on how you look at it, that statement is either highly misleading or downright false. In "rank choice" voting, the winner has to have only 50 percent plus one of the votes that are counted in the final "round" of tabulation. (All of the "rounds" happen simultaneously, in the bowels of a computer program.) And as I've illustrated in this blog post, the votes counted in the final round are going to be fewer – and possibly a lot fewer – than the total of votes cast. Some ballots are declared "exhausted" and don't count in the final round. And so there is no "guarantee" that the winner will have a majority of the total votes cast, even counting second and later rankings.

Example: In a four-way race, the first-choice votes are: Candidate A, 252; Candidate B, 251; Candidate C, 250; and Candidate D 249. There are no write-in votes. Candidate D is eliminated, and all of the Candidate D fans' second-choice votes are now counted. 

It turns out that of Candidate D's fans' second-choice votes, 100 of them were for Candidate C, and 50 of them were for Candidate A. (The rest of the Candidate D fans didn't rank a second choice.) As a result, the "second round" outcome is Candidate A, 302; Candidate B, 251; and Candidate C, 350. Candidate B is eliminated, and Candidate B's fans' second-choice votes are now counted. 

It turns out that Candidates B's fans' second-choice votes are 125 for Candidate D, none for anyone else. Candidate D is already eliminated, so those second-choice votes don't count. No Candidate B fan ranked a third or fourth choice. 

The result of the election is that Candidate C wins, with 350 votes. That is slightly less than 35 percent of the total votes cast.

If "rank choice" voting is so great, you wonder why its pushers have to be such weasels in selling it. And by "they," look at the groups who signed on to this thing:

It's amazing how organizations that were once grounded in civics education and principle have now morphed into shameless political flag-wavers. League of Women Voters, City Club, they've jumped the shark. 

And what does "rank choice" have to do with women's bodily autonomy, the environment, or civil rights? If anything, the connections are quite a stretch. A stretch that's caused me to reconsider who the good guys are around here. "Rank choice" voting is not your friend. I've stated the case against it, here. Oregonians, vote no.

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* The local mouthpiece is Jefferson Smith's tarnished legacy, the Bus Project. Even with their name changed, I can't believe they still exist.

† State labor commissioner is a nonpartisan race decided by a primary and then, if no majority has been achieved in the primary, by a runoff, between the top two primary vote-getters, in the general election.