Introduction
I would like to take a moment, dear reader, to explain why ranked-choice-voting is a really bad idea. I am doing this because certain malevolent forces have managed to get the option of approving said ranked-choice voting onto the ballot this November in Idaho. I said that this was a really bad idea, but do not wish to mislead you by underselling the badness of it. If bad ideas were a monarchy, this would be their king. If bad ideas were cliches, this would be a stitch in time and a bird in the bush. If bad ideas were a five-gallon bucket, there would be at least ten gallons all over the floor.
I suggest you read through this piece by Dan McLaughlin over at NR, then read through the rest of what I have to say below, and then in the conclusion I may tell you what I really think about all of this. All this in addition to the fact that if bad ideas were a dog’s breakfast, this would be a half-eaten taco behind a dumpster in a Mexico City barrio.
Explaining the Mechanics of This Bad Idea
Those in favor of this travesty will call it a proposal for an “open primary.” I have already seen an ad that treats it like fresh mountain air, the way Salem cigarettes used to do in their ads. Springtime fresh. Fresh mountain air seems brisk enough, and all bracing and healthy like, but since I am tired of this metaphor, it is simply the expensive paint to give the haunted house some curb appeal. This would not be an open primary according to the traditional definition, but should be called—more accurately—a “jungle primary.” And by jungle I am not referring to the beauty of exotic butterflies, but rather to the snakes, to the large and slimy ones.
All of this is being brought to you courtesy of Prop 1, and so you should consider it your duty to show up on election day in order to vote no against this beast from the lagoon, all while singing at least two or three imprecatory psalms.
If passed, how will it go? How will it work? All the candidates, no matter what party they belong to, are all in the same primary election. We throw everybody into the same pot, and the four top vote-getters then get to advance to the general election. In that general election, you do not get to vote for just one candidate, no, but you must instead rank all the candidates in order of your preferences. This forces you to vote for each candidate at some level. Maybe you didn’t want to vote for any commies as your third and fourth choices, but that’s is too bad. You aren’t against democracy, are you? Hater.
Please keep in mind that jungle primaries and ranked-choice-voting are not the same thing. They are not the same bad idea—rather, they are two very distinct bad ideas that have been bundled into one. The end result will not be simply additive, but rather a force multiplier of bad ideas. The ideal election system, for sensible people, would reduce as much friction as possible between the casting of the votes and the announcement of the winner. This is a system that introduces additional friction—more handlers, more opportunities for glitches, more chances of delay, and more yawning invitations to corruption.
The officials who are to be entrusted with EVERYTHING will then take all the ballots to a secure location somewhere, in order to conduct some SERIOUS MATH. After lots and lots of tabulations, which will not be a transparent process—are you joking?—they will take a few days to continue doing their SERIOUS MATH, until they finally figure out that they needed to carry the 2, divide by 6, multiply by the square root of 16, and then a winner is declared. It takes this long because the lowest vote-getter is dropped, and then the second, third, and fourth preferences of those discarded votes have to be taken into account. And call me nervous, but I can’t shake the feeling that people who come up with ideas like this one are not very good at math.
So if this proposal does not give you the fantods, then you are frankly quite beyond the reach of any normal-person fantods. Or willies, or jim-jams, and perhaps this is because your conscience has been seared with a hot iron. I would suggest a period of soul-searching, and perhaps a spinal adjustment by a burly chiropractor. You need to do something.
The Old Idaho Has Got to Go
What about here in Idaho? In statewide elections in Idaho, the progressive left does not actually stand a chance. That is, they do not stand said chance when each political party picks their guy and then the Idaho voters choose between the two. The clear purpose of Prop 1 is to enable the left to win statewide elections in a state where otherwise, as a New York cab driver might say, fuhgeddaboudit. They intend to do this by means of electoral ratcheting.
Do the Boise Pride Fest people want this? They do. Ah. Do all the left-wing lawyers want it? They do. Ah. Do those neighborhoods that have yard signs promoting various commie miscreants also have a lot of yard signs up urging a “vote yes on Prop 1”? They do. Ah. This is actually all you need to know.
What this will do in Idaho is rob the Republican party of the right to select a candidate for their own party. It removes the right of like-minded political actors to decide on their own strategy. As things now stand, Republican primaries usually have some RINO running against some hardliner conservative. In such a system, here in Idaho the election can go either way. Sometimes the RINO wins, and sometimes the hardliner wins, and other times the hardliner wins and magically transforms while in office, turning into a RINO. But whatever happens, whoever wins that primary will most likely win the general election, and we all know that even the Republican squish will be better than whatever Menshevik is put forward by the Democrats.
Under Prop 1, the hardliner, the RINO and the commie go into the same jungle primary, and all of them will most likely advance to the general election. So rather than two Republicans toughening one another up as members of the same party, this mandates a splitting of the conservative vote. Please allow me to say that again. This mandates a splitting of the conservative vote. Someone might reply that it could split the commie vote also, but with this system, splitting the vote of the conservatives will have far more of a negative impact on them.
Alaska is a 60/40 Republican state, and this misbegotten system is what enabled a Democrat to defeat Sarah Palin for an open congressional seat there. That was the whole point of adopting the system in the first place, I refer you again to the McLaughlin piece. This is a bit of electoral chicanery that will allow Democrats to win after multiple rounds of ranked-choice voting. And carrying the two, etc. And accusing anyone who voices any suspicions of being a conspiracy theorist, and an election denier. And a white supremacist.
Speaking of Chicanery . . .
At this point, someone might be tempted to take me aside and warn me that I myself am sounding a mite conspiratorial. You don’t want to come off like one of those election deniers, do you? Of course I do. Let me roll out my troglodyte credentials. Paper ballots, straight up, all counted on election night before 11 pm, is the way. Lemon squeezy. No early voting, no ballot drop-off boxes, no electronic machines, no FBI raids on opposing candidates, no convoluted legal cases during an election, and no more calls for dropping the Electoral College for doing exactly what it was designed to do. Just call me old-fashioned.
Having mentioned that, the people who want to abandon the Electoral College are also the people who want to determine the winner of the World Series by adding up the total number of runs scored in the series. Sorry. That is not the baseball way.
Slaying this Beast at the Ballot Box
Despite the constitutional problems with all of this, reasonable people lack the confidence that the Idaho Supreme Court would slap it down like they should. After all, they have parties hosted by the swells of Boise to attend, and their wives don’t want to go and be stared at like something the cat just deposited on your throw rug inside the front door. It kind of spoils the evening for her.
Having mentioned the constitutional problems—even though that is not likely to be where the political action is—I should at least mention one aspect of the constitutional high-handedness involved in all of this. Prop 1 actually extinguishes the First Amendment right of party expression. Parties no longer have the freedom to select their own nominees—instead they can easily be shackled, against their will, to one or more candidates who simply claim affiliation with the party, and who made it past the jungle primary. In other words, someone who was the second choice of a bunch of Democrats could be the Republican office holder, and wind up in that position because he was the second choice of a bunch of Democrats. But to disenfranchise a party like this is to rob individual citizens of the right to coordinate their political action with others, which in turn disenfranchises them.
And so this measure is emitting noxious fumes that the Idaho Supreme Court is unlikely to smell, which raises the question of what is to be done. If this measure is going to be defeated—and have I mentioned that it needs to be defeated?—it needs to go down at the ballot box. And by going down, I means that the good people of Idaho need to soak it with a full can of lighter fluid, and touch it off. Ideally, this should be accompanied with loud whoops.
If this is not defeated, it will simply prevent Idaho from continuing to be Idaho. It will interfere with the state being able to govern itself as a majority conservative state, and will instead allow the same people who hate every form of electoral accountability to take complete control of the process here. They will do this in elections for the state legislature, for federal offices, and for statewide offices.
It needs to be stopped, the same way all monstrosities should be stopped. Unfortunately, the conservatives need to make up a lot of ground because we need to get this done in the next few weeks.
If I might be so bold, may I ask that you send a link to this post to any of your friends who are Idaho voters?