The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Sarah Palin’s Setback Can Be Not A Bug, But A Feature

Posted on | September 2, 2022 | Comments Off on Sarah Palin’s Setback Can Be Not A Bug, But A Feature

by Smitty

There’s been little for me to add to the blog the last couple of years, but Ranked Choice Voting is the Devil’s ballot. I hope that Sarah Palin both:

  • recovers in November, and
  • we nip this evil in the bud.

“The Devil’s ballot” sounds pejorative. It is meant in the diabolical sense of something that seems a positive thing, but ends up proving a Faustian bargain.
Politics is an attention tax we pay to externalize functions that we can’t accomplish on our own. Ours is an egalitarian, anti-aristocratic system. The Founders warned of “factions” (parties), because they anticipated the Constitution not as a spectator sport, but one in which all would participate, in the fashion of college sports.
So why has this post come to bury Ranked Choice Voting, not to praise it? Because, like college sports, we’re all here to learn the rules of the game, play along with it a modest amount, but mostly get on with life. Americans trust in the Lord, not in Politics.
In contrast, Rank Choice Voting presumes that we’re tuned in to politics 24 monkey-fighting hours a day, know the entire pattern of life of all of the candidates, and have enough information on what everyone else is thinking to optimize our ballot.
Who has time for that?
Why, those for whom politics is a religion. Which brings us to the spectacle of a candidate with 40% of the vote winning in Alaska. Outstanding. We need to have the idiocy of Ranked Choice Voting rubbed in peoples’ faces.

  • You want a contest that reflects the will of the many, not the cunning of the few.
  • You want a ballot that can Answer The Famous Question readily, cleanly, and without ambiguity.
  • You want simple rules that don’t require a three-hour college course to grasp. If you want to tart up the election for Dog Catcher seven ways from sundown, fine. Let that Poli-Sci Master’s Degree candidate put out the most Byzantine rules imaginable in the name of being “more perfect-er”. Don’t do it on a state-wide or national scale.
  • You want a close race to admit “the race was close” and have a run-off. This gives voters a moment to reflect on the issues; to review late-breaking candidate information; to consider how gracious the candidates are under the weird natural experiment of a near-(political)-death experience. Watching these ballots slosh around and deliver a result risks a gut feeling of illegitimacy.
  • You want a system that doesn’t support a Denial Of Service attack. By this I mean a party flogging the rules to put a slate of NPCs on the ballot such that no one can carry the decision in the first round, forcing all of the action into the 2nd and 3rd choice columns, which favors those NPC deadbeats who do nothing productive with their lives, and just pencil-whip elections. It would be less objectionable if these NPCs were delivering improvement, and not just parasitic behavior.

Hopefully this Alaska setback proves a cautionary tale. Conservatives need to understand that the cockroach-like tenacity of the Left is only exceeded by its termite-like hunger for power.
Ranked Choice Voting is a tool for “fundamentally transforming the United States of America“, and not in wholesome ways.

Down With Ranked Choice Voting

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