Accountability for Obstruction of the California State Budget: Recall of Senator Denham and How the Process Can Be Made Better

I believe there will be plenty of unpaid signature gatherers within the 12th District in the effort to recall Mr. Denham. I do not believe Mr. Denham realizes how many voters within his district are upset with his failure to approve the state budget. I also expect my fellow voters will replace Senator Denham with Wiley Nickel. Nickel received almost 42% of the total vote when he lost to Denham in 2006. I think it will be easy for Nickel to attain over 50% the next time he runs for office.

I think the Democrats are onto something here!

But I don't think a single recall goes far nearly enough.

I think that we need a constitutional ammendment, made via the initiative process, that would require a budget, on time and that requires a special election for every member of both houses in the following January, if the deadline is missed.

The problem is not the super majority requirement for budget passage. It is, instead, the use of hard ball politics by the majority party during budgeting to force tangentially related issues that should have been been resolved by other means onto the minority party. Both Republicans and Democrats have been guilty of this. It also causes very real problems for constituents is disingenuous in two respects:

• It is a way to end debate and force acceptance of measures not on the basis of their merits; but, rather on the basis of hard ball politics.

• It is also a convenient way to discredit the super majority requirement that constituents placed in the constituion to prevent free wheeling, unchecked spending by a legislature that has a proven propensity to overspend.

Forcing the legislature to pass the budget on time, with the super majority requirement still in effect, would force them to forego the ploy of budgeting for items that they want to force the minority party to accept them regardless of expense. It would also both enforce budgetary restraint and end the hardship caused by protracted post deadline haggling, arm twisting, politicing and lobbying, year in and year out.

Frankly, I think most Californians are pretty sick of this little side show every year. That's why polls show that whorehouse piano players enjoy higher approval ratings than California state legislators, as a group.

Cressman is right to support better voting methods, but wrong to think IRV is the answer. There are a huge number of public myths and misconceptions about IRV. Better and simpler methods exist - and IRV is lethal to third parties, because it makes voting for a non-major-party candidate statistically more likely to hurt you than help you. The world needs Range Voting or its simplified form of Approval Voting. Here's why.

Consider this hypothetical election using IRV.

#voters - their vote
10 G > C > P > M
3 C > G > P > M
5 C > P > M > G
6 M > P > C > G
4 P > M > C > G

C is the clear Condorcet (condor-SAY) winner, meaning he is preferred by a landslide majority over all his individual rivals. C is preferred over G, P, and M all by an 18-10 margin.

But... M wins, even though he also has fewer first-place votes (6 voters) than C with 8.

Also:

1. P is preferred to M by 22 of the 28 voters, yet he's the first candidate eliminated.
2. G also has more first-place votes (10) than M's 6.
3. So M either loses pairwise to, or has fewer first-place votes than (or both) every rival, but still IRV elects M.

The example above was intended to be "realistic," perhaps somewhat resembling the situation in the (now evolving) 2008 US presidential race with G="Green", M=McCain, C=Edwards, and P=Paul. But if you are willing to drop realism and construct artificial election scenarios, then this demonstrates how to construct arbitrarily-severe election examples of this kind: http://rangevoting.org/IRVamp.html#bad

IRV sounds initially appealing, because people picture a weak third party candidate who loses in the first round. The myth is that this takes away the fear of voting for your sincere favorite candidate, and gives third parties a fair chance to grow; but if that candidate or his party ever grows to be a contender, he is statistically more likely to hurt the party closest to his own than to win. It doesn't matter how unlikely you imagine the above scenario to be - it's still _more_ likely than the odds "Green" will win. And so third party voters will learn to strategically vote for their favorite major-party candidate, because it will more often be a good strategy than a bad one. You don't have to buy my math; you can look at decades of IRV usage in Australia's house, and Ireland's presidency. Both use IRV, and have been two-party dominated. So much for the myths that IRV allows you to "vote your hopes, not your fears", and eliminates spoilers. Now you can see why the Libertarian Reform Caucus calls IRV a "bullet in the foot" for third parties, and why Australian political analysts at AustralianPolitics.com say that IRV "promotes a two-party system to the detriment of minor parties and independents." Ironically, most of the many countries in the world who use a genuine _delayed_ runoff have broken free of duopoly. Yet third parties just worked to help replace that system with IRV in Oakland, CA. This can be chalked up to a result of massive public ignorance, largely perpetuated by groups such as FairVote and the League of Women Voters (http://RangeVoting.org/Irvtalk.html).

Electoral reform advocates (especially third parties!) should be demanding Range Voting - score all the candidates and elect the one with the highest average. Its simplified form, Approval Voting, is probably the most feasible to implement. It simply uses ordinary ballots, but allows us to vote for as many candidates as we like. Consider the benefits:

* More resistant to strategy: As we see above, IRV strategically "forces" voters not to top-rank their sincere favorite; the general strategy with IRV is to top-rank your favorite of the front-runners (typically the major party candidates). But with Range Voting and Approval Voting, this _never_ happens. The worst a voter may do is exaggerate his sincere scores to the max and min scores allowed. But with Range Voting, a vote for your favorite candidate can never hurt you, or the candidate, whereas with IRV it can hurt both. -- http://RangeVoting.org/StratHonMix.html

* The previous fact helps to explain why IRV results in two-party duopoly, just like plurality voting. -- http://RangeVoting.org/TarrIrv.html

* Spoiler free: Whereas IRV merely _reduces_ spoilers. -- http://rangevoting.org/FBCexecSumm.html

* Decreases spoiled ballots: Since voting for more than one candidate is permissible, the number of invalid ballots experimentally goes down with Range and Approval Voting. But IRV typically results in a seven fold increase in spoiled ballots when we started using IRV. -- http://rangevoting.org/SPRates.html

* Simpler to use: In 2006, the Center for Range Voting conducted an exit poll experiment in Beaumont, TX. There were 5 gubernatorial candidates, and voters were allowed to rate them 0-10 (or "abstain"). They all seemed to find the process as simple and intuitive. There were no complaints of complexity, or any questions for clarification. And the fact that spoilage rates go down with Range Voting, but up with IRV, shows that there is some objective sense in which RV is simpler. Voters literally make fewer mistakes.

* Simpler to implement/tabulate: A simple one-round summation tells us the results, whereas IRV's potential for multiple rounds can cause long delays before the final results are determined. A positive side-effect of Range Voting's simplicity is that it makes the necessary transition to manual counting, and away from voting machines, more feasible. And Range Voting can be conducted on all standard voting machines in the interim. Whereas IRV's complexity leads most communities implementing it to purchase expensive and fraud-conducive (electronic!) voting machines, the fraudster's best friend. -- http://RangeVoting.org/Complexity.html

* Greater voter satisfaction: Using extensive computer modeling of elections, a Princeton math Ph.D. named Warren D. Smith has shown that these methods lead to better average satisfaction with election results, surpassing the alternatives by a good margin. But IRV turns out to be the second _worst_ of the commonly proposed alternatives. This mean that all voters will benefit from the adoption of either of these superior voting methods, regardless of political stripe. -- http://RangeVoting.org/vsi.html

* Reduces the probability of ties: While they are not extremely common, they do happen. IRV statistically increases them, but Range Voting decreases them. -- http://RangeVoting.org/TieRisk.html

* In case you're going to say, "But IRV has more _momentum_ than Range Voting", you should consider this. -- http://RangeVoting.org/IRVsplitExec.html

* In case you wonder why groups like FairVote and the League of Women Voters support IRV, maybe you should consider all the misleading and even patently false claims they've made about it. -- http://RangeVoting.org/Irvtalk.html

Get the facts at RangeVoting.org and ApprovalVoting.org

And if you're in the market for a better system of proportional representation (http://RangeVoting.org/PropRep.html) than the antiquated STV system, check out Reweighted Range Voting and Asset Voting.

http://RangeVoting.org/RRV.html
http://RangeVoting.org/Asset.html

Clay Shentrup
San Francisco, CA
415.240.1973
clay@electopia.org

Uh why pick on one Senator?? Throw all the bums out. Why didn't the Democrats agree to a temporary spending bill?? We could go back and forth on all aspects of the budget. But the bottom line is we don't have one. I say can em all and start over, what a farce!!!

Fred

The passing of an annual budget is arguably the single most important job of the legislature since everything flows from that action. There is a simple but impossible remedy to this budgetary impasse problem.

The simple part - if all legislators and their staffs were to feel the burden they impose on everyone else by also having their paychecks suspended until there is an approved budget in place, do you believe we would ever see this problem occur again?

Why impossible? For this to be enacted these same people would have to agree to experience the pain of the delay they are imposing on so many others.

Simply impossible.

Legislators and their staff are the ONLY state employees NOT being paid.

Legislative staff live on loans offered at no interest by local Credit Unions.

Send good old Jeff Denham and email to let him know your plans to impeach. I did. Let him know that his and his counterparts actions will not go unoticed and that he is accountable.

Send good old Jeff Denham and email to let him know your plans to impeach. I did. Let him know that his and his counterparts actions will not go unoticed and that he is accountable.

California can't even count regular votes correctly, right?

IRV depends on complicated algorithms to figure out for you who gets to win. It re-allocates your votes from your losing choice to your second choice.

Why not get regular elections right - that ought to take you at least 10 years.

This boutique style voting is a ridiculous fad, and I have to wonder who is behind the push, and why people are suckered into it.

It seems like another way to muck up elections.

While I am not ready to change voting methods just yet - Range Voting advocates amaze me with the facts and clear cut unemotional reasoning favoring their voting system.

The ease in which Range Voting advocates rebutt the many arguments and misinformation of IRV is impressive.

Its amazing the out and out incorrect information that some IRV proponents are spreading.

When someone puts out so much BS, it makes you wonder if their system is any good at all.

http://rangevoting.org/Irvtalk.html

Wow.

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