The election is barely past us, and already everyone’s trying to spin the results to suit Their Side. It’s been particularly amusing to watch the “progressives” try and spin this latest election as anything but a disaster. It’s a form of “junkie logic,” the same kind a drug addict uses to try and con you into loaning money, only this time the con is on the voter and anyone with common sense.
The usual people are spinning their best (instead of reporting, oddly enough) and predictably, some elected officials are upset too and are trying to contort what happened in November into some sort of a victory.
Heck you can hear it straight from the professional blog-commenters and Greens (yes, sigh, a few of them are still around..) at some event, but frankly, why bother? Junkie Logic is never much fun to listen to, neither is parroting or rubber-stamping the latest from the Politburo.
Ok, enough picking on the “progressive” kids. Let’s just look at some facts, and since I’m not in the business of defending one side or another, try and see if we can cut the nonsense one by one :
“Ranked Choice Voting will increase turnout, and be more inclusive than runoffs. It will save money and more people will participate.”
Oh really. Now let’s take a look at the numbers from our last big runoff, in 2003, supposedly evil because “less people” vote in runoffs (and yet in a twist of Junkie Logic, are the numbers now used by those who promoted RCV/IRV/WTF to say that Mayor Newsom “didn’t win”):
PRECINCTS COUNTED (OF 562). . . . . 562 (100%)
REGISTERED VOTERS – TOTAL . . . . . 466,127
BALLOTS CAST – TOTAL. . . . . . . 253,872
VOTER TURNOUT – TOTAL . . . . . . 54.46
Wow, 54%! Now lets look at how we did under the Magical Perfect RCV/IRV/WTF system the “progressives” prommised us would increase voter turnout (and cut costs!)
PRECINCTS COUNTED (OF 580). . . . . 580 (100%)
REGISTERED VOTERS – TOTAL . . . . . 419,598
BALLOTS CAST – TOTAL. . . . . . . . . 149,424
BALLOTS CAST – TOTAL CARD 1 . . . . 149,424
BALLOTS CAST – TOTAL CARD 2 . . . . 150,098
VOTER TURNOUT – TOTAL . . . . . . 35.61
VOTER TURNOUT – TOTAL CARD 1 . . . . 35.61
VOTER TURNOUT – TOTAL CARD 2 . . . . 35.77
That sound you here is the Junkie Intervention phone ringing, but no one is answering because they don’t want to hear the news – under the Magical RCV/IRV/WTF system, turnout was dismal, a mere 35% of voters turning out (100,000 fewer than in evil 2003!). But we were promised by radical advocates for the system that if we adopted it, more people would vote and the final vote would be a “true reflection of the people’s will.” (And whatever you do, do not note that there are actually about 40-50,000 fewer registered voters in San Francisco than there were in 2003! That’ll throw the junkie logic off even more!)
Suddnely, now that the vote result is not what some people wanted, that’s not the case, at least according to the Bay Guardian and assorted so-called “progressives.” Junkie Logic to the extreme.
Oh and that claim that this system would “save money” has been pretty much put to rest since we had to hand count, hand rewrite and handle ballots by hand because the voting machines weren’t, um, legal. The spectacle of radical so-called “elections reform” folks like Steven Hill actaully advocating for illegal machines just beacuse it made their phony RCV/IRV/WTF “reform” look bad was, well, crazy, to say the least.
Now, if that Junkie Logic were not enough, let’s take a look at the second big “Progressive” talking point, that of Mayor Newsom’s vote total:
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