Ranked Choice Voting makes legislative and media inroads
Ballots will appear in mailboxes late this week in Washington State for the August 3 Primary election for many local offices. The two top vote getters for each office will advance to the general election in November. Primary elections (especially in mid summer) are often plagued by low voter interest. Low ballot return may result in advancing candidates to the November general election with the support of an enthusiastic minority but unacceptable to an unmotivated majority. Consider, for example, a field of five candidates from whom a given voter is allowed to cast just one vote. As an extreme example, the two top vote getters could each receive, say, only 21 percent of the vote, propelled by a devoted extremist following. How about a system that demands that the advancing candidates have wider support?
Ranked choice voting (RCV) offers that alternative. Depending on the particulars of enabling legislation, RCV would require to have some support from a minimum of fifty percent of the participating voters. One method would winnow the candidates down to five in a conventional primary (if there were more than five contenders) and use RCV in a general election. With RCV the voter casts votes in order of preference for as many candidates as the voter finds palatable. If one candidate receives 50% or more of the votes among the first choice votes, that candidate wins. But, in a field of candidates in which no candidate garners 50 percent, second choice support is considered: the candidate with the fewest first choice votes is eliminated and the second choice votes on those ballots are distributed among the remaining candidates. That process is repeated in additional rounds until one of the candidates demonstrates some support from 50% of the voters.
Recently the New York City mayoral and city council races were conducted using ranked choice voting and gained favorable media attention from both conservative and liberal outlets. For example:
In this NYC case of RCV we are looking at a Democratic Primary result that is also the presumptive result of the November general election. (NYC highly favors Democratic candidates in the general election.)
New York City is pretty far off, so what does this NYC coverage have to do with us in Washington State? The King County Council will soon vote on placing ranked choice voting on the November ballot for the voters to consider adopting. King County government, which includes Seattle, operates under a home rule charter (unlike thirty-two of the other thirty-eight Washington counties). Under that charter King County can choose to modify its voting pattern on its own. Thirty-two of the other thirty-eight counties in Washington State are “non-charter” counties (including Spokane County). Non-charter counties operate under the State Constitution (Article XI, Section 5) and the laws passed by the legislature that make up the Revised Code of Washington, instead of “home rule.” For any of these counties or their municipal governments in the state to make a change to RCV first requires the legislature to change the Revised Code to allow it. A bill to make that change narrowly missed advancing to a vote in the Washington State legislature this last session—and may well be considered in the upcoming session.
Ranked choice voting is catching on. The State of Maine went to statewide RCV in 2020 through a multi-step process that stretched over several years. Alaska goes to statewide RCV in 2022 in response to statewide ballot measure 2 passed in 2020. A wikipedia article, Ranked Choice Voting in the United States, details the growth of RCV. The article describes the duration and complexity of efforts necessary to institute positive change in our democratic system—and it suggests, that, as with other movements (like final adoption of women’s suffrage, for example), ranked choice voting is reaching a tipping point.
Educate yourself. Check out Fairvotewa.org. Talk over RCV with friends and acquaintances. This is one of many steps that will help the people take back democracy.
U.S. Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers (CD5, eastern Washington) wants all moderate and independent voters to believe that she is a thoughtful protector of the environment, that she understands the threat of climate change and is working hard to ameliorate its effects in our region. Just ask her. She will pivot to her support of hydroelectric power so swiftly your head will spin. On her website she posts statements like her plan to “Expand domestic energy supplies and explore alternative energy sources.” Wildfires fueled by climate change? She is quick with statements about the need for forest cleanup, but not a peep about climate change. To be fair, McMorris Rodgers might acknowledge that the climate is warming, but, if pressed hard for an answer as to the cause, she will tell you the “science is unsettled”.
Once upon a time I believed that the folks we send to represent us at all levels of government were privy to information I was not, that they would use that information to vote wisely on the issues before them. In short, I trusted them, once elected to office, whether Republican or Democrat, to represent my interests and the best interests of the country.
Politicians work hard to promote trust that they are wiser than we are, deep thinkers who consider all the facts. Words are carefully chosen. “Clean energy” and “alternative energy sources” glide off their tongues so freely you could almost imagine they understood the origin of climate change and were acting accordingly. You will not hear McMorris Rodgers say that global warming is a hoax. That would be too direct. Instead, she will sidestep in the same manner as she did a direct question about geologic time, hiding her lack of scientific literacy.
There is no more glaring example of McMorris Rodgers’ (or the Republican Party’s) denial of science than a recent vote concerning methane. Yes, methane, the primary constituent of natural gas, the carbon-based gas mined by the petroleum industry and shipped around the globe in huge tankers as LNG, liquified natural gas. Right wing pundits like the late Rush Limbaugh tried hard to convince their listeners that methane only comes from the intestines of cows and other ruminants—thereby making a serious subject laughable, a useful pivot from the facts.
Methane is a major greenhouse gas. Its release into the atmosphere is responsible for about a third of the global warming we now experience. Roughly a quarter of methane release occurs in the process of petroleum and gas extraction. (Some of that methane, instead of escaping into the atmosphere, gets burned and goes into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide and water. That is the “flaring” one sees at oil refineries and in some petroleum and gas fields.)
For decades the petroleum industry has touted natural gas (methane) as a “clean” alternative to other carbon fuels, while conveniently ignoring the methane escape into the atmosphere that occurs during petroleum fuel extraction. If methane can be sold as a fuel and it is harmful to the atmosphere, why, one might ask, why isn’t the industry diligent in capturing methane and selling it? Money and profits is the answer. Releasing methane into the atmosphere at oil well heads is cheaper than the infrastructure necessary to capture and sell it at current prices. It is also cheaper to abandon a low producing well that continues to emit methane than it is to properly cap it. Even a far right news source like Newsmax Finance acknowledges this.
Under the Obama administration the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) listened to the science and set common sense rules for the petroleum industry to require monitoring and reduction of methane emissions. Under the Trump administration’s pro-fossil fuel, anti-climate science regime, the EPA finalized a rule change in August of 2020 reversing the Obama era rules.
Up to last August McMorris Rodgers faced no vote concerning methane. The rules and the reversal were all undertaken under the power of the executive branch of government, specifically the EPA. McMorris Rodgers could go on murmuring about clean hydropower and “exploring alternative energy sources” and ducking questions about the science of global warming, always trying to leave the impression of studied concern.
However, on June 25, 2021 a roll call vote was taken in the House of Representatives on S.J.Res. 14, which would throw out the Trump EPA rules and revert to Obama era regulation of methane:
S.J.Res.14 – A joint resolution providing for congressional disapproval under chapter 8 of title 5, United States Code, of the rule submitted by the Environmental Protection Agency relating to “Oil and Natural Gas Sector: Emission Standards for New, Reconstructed, and Modified Sources Review”.
McMorris Rodgers, along with 190 other Republicans, voted “Nay.” (Eight Republicans did not vote.) Every Democrat who voted (two did not vote) and 12 Republicans voted “Yea.” The bill passed the House 229 to 191. McMorris Rodgers even gave an impassioned speech on the House floor in which she argued against methane regulations as unnecessary. She totally ignored climate science, railing instead on consumer prices and energy independence.
S.J.Res. 14 had already passed the Senate on April 28, 2021 by a vote of 52 to 46. (CRA rules in the Senate avoided the filibuster that Republicans most certainly would have raised if, under the rules, they could have. See P.S.) President Biden signed S.J.Res. 14 into law on June 30, 2021, re-instating the methane emission regulations of the Obama EPA.
McMorris Rodgers is a creature of big business in general and the fossil fuel companies in particular. Her vote on S.J.Res. 14 is a clear denial of the science of global warming. Lacking any science background, she has no basis from which to comprehend even the basic physics of greenhouse gases. She is opposed to all regulation imposed by government even if it is clearly in the best interest of the country and world. All regulation is a threat to progress (unless it benefits her or her offspring—see The ADA…).
McMorris Rodgers is incapable of considering climate change as an issue that must be addressed. Re-electing this woman in 2022 is a threat to our children, our grandchildren, and the world we live in.
Keep to the high ground,
Jerry
P.S. Bills brought to the Senate under the Congressional Review Act (CRA) cannot be filibustered. That is the rule passed passed by Congress as part of the Contract with America Advancement Act of 1996 pushed by Newt Gingrich. The CRA lay like a landmine for 16 years (with one exception) until Republicans under the Trump administration, lacking a 60 vote majority in the Senate, used it fourteen times to roll back late Obama era regulations (see the list above). The Biden administration has used it three times.
P.P.S. We will all be pardoned if we missed the significance of McMorris Rodgers vote and missed her speech on the topic. The issue was poorly covered in the media probably because story was so complicated. A rule by the Obama EPA regarding a gas (methane) some had never heard of (even if they burn it daily in their stoves and furnaces), a Trump EPA rule overturning the Obama EPA rule, and a law under the Biden administration using the CRA that overturned the overturning. That is the sometimes arcane manner in which government works—and the reason that Representatives like McMorris Rodgers can pretend she is paying attention to science and working in our best interest.
City council, school board, fire district, and judgeship positions are up for election this year in November. In preparation for November we have the top-two primary election coming right up on August 4th for most voters in Washington State. Ballots will be mailed out next week. Democracy only works if we do our homework and vote.
Our civic duty is not fully discharged by voting. Every ten years, in a process mandated in the U.S. Constitution, state constitutions, and governed by law, we adjust the voting basics by “redistricting”. When redistricting is properly and equitably done, it insures that people (that’s everybody, not just those who vote) have equal representation in national, state, and local governments. Voting district boundaries are adjusted or redrawn to account for changes in population documented by the decennial census (recently completed).
Redistricting sets the voting boundaries we live by for the next ten years. Each state sets its own rules for the process. In many states it is simply up to the state legislature. In 2010 such states with a Republican majority legislature used computerized gerrymandering (REDMAP) to solidify Republican control.
Since passage of a 1983 initiative, redistricting in Washington State is done by a balanced bi-partisan commission, so, at least theoretically, no single party has the upper hand regardless of what party is in the majority in the legislature.
For residents of Spokane County this year are two similarly structured, but entirely distinct redistricting committees. One committee at the State level is responsible for redistricting of Congressional Districts and State legislative districts (see map) and another, at the County level, is responsible for establishing the five new county commissioner districts where there have been only three, a change mandated by State law. The newly mandated and formed Spokane country redistricting commission is closely modeled on the Washington State redistricting commission.
All of which brings me to this: We owe it to ourselves to take an interest in this process. This opportunity to learn about and take part in redistricting is the bedrock of our governance. The more of us attend, learn, and provide input the more likely we will achieve an equitable outcome. It is the observers as well as the participants that make transparency in government worth having.
Plan to attend the information session tomorrow and the public hearing on July 19—for details see the notification below from the Spokane League of Women Voters.
Keep to the high ground,
Jerry
Spokane County Redistricting
Spokane County Redistricting Committee Meetings: Public Information Session #1 Saturday, July 10, 2021 West Central Community Center, 1603 N. Belt Street, Spokane 11:00 am – 1:00 pm Virtual connection: 1-877-853-5257 (Audio only. No Zoom available.) Meeting ID: 899 6873 2955 Participant Code: 616859
Public Hearing #1 Monday, July 19, 2021 Spokane Veterans Memorial Arena, 720 W. Mallon Avenue, Spokane. 5:30 to 7:30 pm
Public Information Session #2 is scheduled for Thursday, August 5, 2021. (Details TBA.)
For more information about Spokane County’s redistricting process, public meetings, committee meetings and more, visit www.RedistrictSpokaneCo.com
LWVWA is hosting more listening sessions to help you understand the maps in certain areas and help build a comprehensive state solution. LWVWA will plan to submit mapping solutions for congressional and legislative districts to the commission. See current input to LWVWA.
Click the links below to register. You will be sent a unique link to enter each meeting. All are welcome.
The fires are starting again. Evacuation orders issued to households between Cheney and Spokane. Precipitation is nowhere in the forecast, the landscape is parched. The hay crop is a quarter of the usual. Hay prices are soaring. We take shelter in our homes trying to avoid the blazing sun and the highest temperatures ever locally recorded in an outdoor environment considered mortally dangerous.
Something is wrong. It is wrong where we live. It is not just some faraway glaciers melting. The problem has come home to roost. Politicians who ignore this reality ought to pay attention. (More on that in a later post.)
Doug Muder, the author of The Weekly Sift (highly recommended) writes of our plight in the Northwest to suggest this is all getting very real. I have reproduced Mr. Muder’s post from Monday, July 5 below. It is well worth sharing.
When it’s 116 in Portland and 108 in Seattle, something is wrong.
For a long time, you could only see global warming if you knew what you were looking for. It wasn’t something that announced itself in your everyday experience.
Wherever you might live, it continued to be warmer in the day and cooler at night, hotter in summer and colder in winter — the same as it ever was. Whether summers had been hotter or winters colder years ago was a topic for old people’s boring stories about the Blizzard of ’78 or the Drought of ’54.
You had to be a statistician — or trust statisticians whose work you couldn’t check — to get any coherent view of the trends in global temperature. Think of the millions of measurements, and thousands of adjustments to those measurements, necessary to produce a graph like the one below. Who made those measurements? Who compiled those statistics? Why should you trust them? If you had the resources and the will, you could find your own way to parse the data so that it said something different. Why shouldn’t you do that, or decide to trust somebody who did, rather than trust NASA or NOAA or some international consortium of scientists?
The situation was even worse if you tried to look to the future, because then you were dealing with computer models. What were they assuming? Who did the programming? Again, the graphs looked very impressive and scary. But if you didn’t want to believe them — and who did, really? — nobody could make you.
And without predictions decades into the future, climate change was no big deal. Maybe it was already a degree or two hotter than in your grandparents’ day, but so what? Life went on, people adjusted. The climate was always changing.
What it came down to, for a lot of Americans, was one more example of people with advanced degrees telling them what to do. And that might be fine if they were telling you to do something you want to do — like get a good night’s sleep, or spend more time in the sunlight. And it’s even OK if their advice is unpleasant, but matches your common sense — compound interest means you should start saving for retirement when you’re young, smoking isn’t good for you. But here the eggheads were telling you to stop driving and flying and running the air conditioner, or even to close down the mines your town depended on, the one that had employed your family for generations. And the evidence was all stuff you couldn’t touch: Look at this graph and don’t ask too many questions about how I made it, or else the world will be a hellscape after we’re all dead.
Americans already had religions based on things they couldn’t see that made threats and promises after death. They didn’t need another one.
And then visible things started to happen, maybe, sort of.
Right around the time Hurricane Katrina mauled New Orleans in 2005, you might think you were starting to see climate change in anomalous weather events. But what is “anomalous”, really? When Superstorm Sandy hit New York City in 2012, we all had a gut feeling that hurricanes aren’t supposed to go that far north. But weird weather events have been happening forever. What about the Great New England Hurricane of 1938?
The Midwestern floods of 2019 were so intense, and so close to previous major floods, that they drove the phrase “hundred-year flood” out of our vocabulary. Nobody knows what a hundred-year flood is any more. And sure, that’s strange, but is it proof? Maybe we’re just in some kind of weird flood cycle.
We got used to these kinds of arguments, to the point that they became almost ritualized: The weather would do something incredible — a big wildfire, an intense hurricane season, or a heat wave in Siberia — and somebody would immediately say: “See? Climate change.” But then somebody else would say, “You can’t really say that about one event. It could just be bad luck.” Then either people would start yelling at each other, or the conversation would bog down in the technicalities of probability — neither of which accomplished anything. Everybody continued to believe whatever they had started out believing.
The series of weird weather events should have chipped away at climate-change-deniers’ skepticism, but in fact it did the opposite. Once you’ve explained away Katrina and Sandy, it gets easier, not harder, to shrug off Harvey and Irma and Maria all happening the same year. The weather gets weird sometimes; that doesn’t mean the world is ending.
For decades, climate-change deniers have derided activists as “scare mongers” who made “apocalyptic” predictions. But you know what? Those fires in Australia looked pretty apocalyptic.
Wade Crowfoot, California’s secretary for natural resources, pressed Mr. Trump more bluntly. “If we ignore that science and sort of put our head in the sand and think it’s all about vegetation management, we’re not going to succeed together protecting Californians,” he told the president.
This time, Mr. Trump rejected the premise. “It’ll start getting cooler,” he insisted. “You just watch.”
“I wish science agreed with you,” Mr. Crowfoot replied.
“Well, I don’t think science knows, actually,” Mr. Trump retorted, maintaining a tense grin.
Well, it’s a year later now, and guess what? It’s not getting cooler.
Monday, it was 116 in Portland, Oregon, beating the previous all-time record (set in 1965 and 1981) by nine degrees. The heat wave covered the entire Northwest: 108 in Seattle, 109 in Spokane, 116 in Walla Walla, and 117 in Pendleton. Strangest of all was the small town of Lytton, British Columbia, where the heat wave peaked at 121 degrees, an all-time record for the nation of Canada.
121 in Canada. That’s not right.
Heat and drought have set the stage for another bad wildfire season, and it’s already starting in Canada and Washington and Oregon and Idaho and California. On the other side of the country, the Atlantic is already up to its fifth named storm of the season, Elsa. We’ve never gotten to E this fast before, and the previous record was set last year.
It’s happening. Global warming is here. It’s not just statistics and computer models any more. You can see it. You have to work not to see it.
That doesn’t mean things go straight to hell from here. The western heat wave finally broke. Today’s predicted high in Portland is 86. Next winter, it will get cold in lots of places, and if some oil-financed politician wants to bring a snowball to the floor of the Senate, he’ll be able to find one. “Damn,” one cold person will say to another, “we could use a little of that global warming about now.”
And while the quantity of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will continue to go up every single year, not every year will be hotter than the previous one. 2016 and 2020 were the hottest years on record, but so far 2021 isn’t quite so bad, at least not globally. Fossil fuel spokesmen, including the politicians the oil companies pay for, will tell you that means it’s all over. Global warming ended in 2020, they’ll say, just like they said it ended in 1998.
For a long time, believing what the scientists said about the climate required trusting in the invisible, and the future horrors they predicted seemed too far away to take seriously.
Not any more. Global warming is here. It’s visible. It was 116 in Portland Monday.
A third to a half of all Americans get all or most of the “news” they absorb each day through social media. Social media like Facebook and Twitter are engaging. They help us keep up with the lives of our friends and relatives. Best of all, unlike traditional print media, social media is “free”. There is no subscription fee. All we need is a connection to the internet. But there is no free lunch. We pay with our attention—and our attention is sold algorithmically to purveyors of merchandise and propaganda, peddlers who may or may not be worthy of our trust. Judd Legum, one of the writers I follow on Substack ($50/year and worth every penny), details the pervasiveness of right wing media sources on Facebook in an article entitled, “How Facebook’s algorithm devalues local reporting” from June 22.
The Daily Wire takes another outlet’s reporting, excerpts it, and gives it an inaccurate or incendiary spin.
For this minimal effort, The Daily Wire is rewarded with massive engagement on Facebook while the source of the journalism, quite often a local media outlet, gets a tiny fraction of engagement.
The key is the sensationalist, incendiary, spin that attracts clicks that feed the algorithm and plants headlines of misinformation in the minds of less than careful readers. News outlets like the New York Times, the Washington Post, and, yes, the Spokesman Review maintain reporters who do original work, e.g. this excellent video documentary dissection of the January 6th insurrection from the New York Times that came out June 30. (The Daily Wire will not be spinning that video on Facebook.) Doing original reporting and publishing a print newspaper is expensive—and print ad revenue is migrating to the internet. It is a financial squeeze of which The Daily Wire, The Daily Caller, and other right wing propaganda sites take advantage by playing the ad algorithms while subscriptions prices for mainstream print media present a barrier to accessing primary reporting.
There is another model. Below I have copied a short essay by Chris Best, one of the founders of Substack, an online platform for writing and publishing newsletters founded in 2017 (and the current platform for this email). My former platform, Mailchimp, founded in 2001, is primarily designed for online marketing. Mailchimp charges a fee based on the number of emails sent. Substack takes 10% of any subscription fees the writer collects. If the writer does not ask for or require a subscription Substack publishes the newsletter (email) without charge.
Substack is growing. There are now a number of authors who make a living from the material they research and publish on the platform. Some have a very wide audience, like Professor Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American, who offers an optional paid subscription, was reaching 350,000 subscribers already in December of 2020 (and likely many, many more people as her work is shared. Judd Legum of Popular Information, whose article is referenced above in the first paragraph, also publishes on Substack, is widely read, and is often quoted in other media.
One sad result of the Trump administration is that many Americans fed on Trump’s call of “Fake News,” find themselves unsure of what is true. Substack offers a platform for writers to gain the trust of a loyal following by consistently providing well-referenced material and perspective often not available elsewhere.
I recommend you read Chris Best’s article reproduced below. Don’t hesitate to check out Substack and the writers I referenced above.
Keep to the high ground,
Jerry
The ad-peddling model that dominates the internet and hijacks our minds is costing us too much by being “free”
For nearly two decades, social media giants have showered us with content while accepting nothing in return – other than our engagement. Now, with the normalization of online vitriol, the skyrocketing rates of mental distress linked to social media, and the surrender of intimate information to unaccountable corporations, it has become obvious that we are massively overpaying – so obvious that even Big Social is now branding its old offerings in new flavors. But a minty fresh cigarette is still a cigarette.
For a while, it felt like we were getting a great deal. Social media giants gave us rekindled friendships, family photos, even the occasional uplifting story or useful insight. But too much of what we’ve received has been toxic gruel, tube-fed (through aptly named “feeds”) by sophisticated algorithms designed to exploit our worst impulses and keep us agitated, excited, engaged.
The marks of this new and uglier world are everywhere. We have become conditioned to accept that viciously tearing down complete strangers online is normal and admirable, and that it is right and proper for a bad tweet from decades ago to ruin someone’s life. A new vocabulary – “doom-scrolling!” “hate-reading!” – is now necessary to capture how dysfunctional online activity has become. Even worse, these poisonous dynamics have leached into our offline lives, in the form of broken relationships, decreased attention spans, and damaged mental health.
This doesn’t mean that social media cannot be used in productive ways, that ads and algorithms are evil in themselves, or that we users don’t bear responsibility for our own behavior. Rather, all of it shows that we are paying in the wrong currency, with devastating consequences. When platforms make their livings by harvesting and selling our attention, they achieve that by shoving unsolicited junk into our minds, while we obediently scroll down and down and down.
One day, we will look back on this early era as a dark age, when we wrongly assumed that no one would pay for great writing on the internet, that writers could be valued only by how much attention they could command, and that readers could be played for suckers. The good news is that there is finally a clear way out.
It all starts by paying with a currency we can understand and measure: money. This is how we take back control.
With money, you know exactly what you’re paying and to whom, and you can cancel payments when you want. Transactions become transparent, and incentives become properly aligned. While platforms that depend on ad sales must harvest attention any way they can, platforms that depend on people’s willingness to pay must foster trust and satisfaction. Writers succeed only if readers are happy, and in turn platforms succeed only if writers are happy. In this world, users are finally at the table rather than on the menu.
For writers, this means being able to control their relationships with their audience instead of being mediated by fickle corporations whose algorithms decide what gets the most attention. It means independent writers can be well paid by the people who value their work instead of having to play hunger games for a share of an advertising pie where the biggest slices always go to the platforms. And when they answer to their readers instead of to the platform, writers are free to do their best work.
For readers, the effect is just as profound. It means having more control over what you put in your mind. When an engagement-based algorithm isn’t prompting you to scroll just a little further down the feed, you are free to make content consumption decisions thoughtfully and intentionally, based on what you find trustworthy.
We know it can work, because it already does. Creator-focused companies such as Teachable (courses and coaching), Clubhouse (live audio), and Substack are subverting the attention economy by putting people, not platforms, in charge. These companies are all young, but they already account for millions of daily active users and hundreds of millions of dollars of economic activity, the majority of which accrues to the creators. In fact, this model is working so well that even the social media giants now are dabbling in it – a welcome development, albeit one that evokes Joe Camel offering you a Nicorette.
Still, the ad peddlers will continue to claim that their product is “free,” and that the memes, trolls, and hot takes on their platforms are minor side effects rather than the active ingredients. But we now know that the lower the price, the more we’re paying.
We all thought we had lost our minds, but it turns out we just pawned them. Now it’s time to buy them back.
