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Topic: Wanna see who's running for mayor?  (Read 25824 times)

cyclopeantrash

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Wanna see who's running for mayor? #15
What the heck is in your water supply down there?
kal-elk, November 05, 2013, 01:34:05 pm

Freedom and Liberty.

fluffy

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Wanna see who's running for mayor? #16
Maybe the non-GMO crowd is on to something when they decry fluoridated water.

Emperor Jack Chick

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Wanna see who's running for mayor? #17
A DFL candidate, Stephanie is a 48 year old Cargill executive and a lesbian.
Lemon, November 05, 2013, 12:55:42 pm

And an engaging public speaker!

Lemon

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Wanna see who's running for mayor? #18
So, it turns out that the election results were actually less climactic than everyone was hoping for. People were super excited talking about Instant Runoff "rounds" (how IR works is every time you can't pick a winner, you kill off a loser and the remaining candidates eat his votes), and how the system will go down. With 35 candidates there might be 20 rounds! We might not have a mayor until Christmas!

These predictions ignored the fact that about 30 of these candidates were crazypants, and there's a very limited number of people who arrive and depart their polling place going "Tee hee hee" the whole time, and so the election map ends up looking like every election map does...



All that green there is Betsy Hodges. How Midwest is Betsy Hodges? This is her victory photo.


Which is also great news for the future. There was some very serious discussion of trying to add additional barriers to getting on the Minneapolis ballot (as a reminder: It currently takes $20 and nothing else) which was troubling, but the results here were clean enough that I don't think those talks will continue. The current process allows one upper middle class lobbyist to run against another upper middle class lobbyist while still being surrounded by a circus tent to keep the whole thing entertaining.

The race hasn't been called yet, for reason of pointless formality (a plurality of votes needs to be achieved before you can call a winner), but Hodges is beating her closest opponent 36% to 24% and he's already unofficially conceded the race twice.

But that's enough about the serious candidates, let's see how the lunatics did!

  • "Only Republican On The Ballot" Ole Savior managed to net himself an impressive 1%, which is only 0.3% less of the vote than the woman who stripped naked and wrapped herself up in clingfilm.
  • Captain Jack Sparrow did pretty good for himself, pulling in 0.3% of the vote, with 2.4% putting him down as their third choice. Kurtis Hanna (the other pirate candidate) also got 0.3% for himself, making me wonder what great political things they could accomplish if they would put their differences aside.
  • Jeff Wagner ended up at 0.2%.  He did a couple videos in the weeks running up to the election where he begged voters to put him as their second choice (not for any reason, just "vote for who you want and put me down as #2") and yes since you ask he did make several "number two" jokes in the process. This strategy didn't work for him at all.
  • John Charles Wilson is officially the Least Popular Candidate. He got 0.0% of the vote, and I don't know how many decimal places you'd have to go to see a number that isn't a zero there, but I do know that he got less votes than the other candidate with 0.0% of the vote. I guess somehow the Edgertonite bus service just didn't resonate with the public.

Anyway, here's the full results if you want to see how your favorite did. I will now leave you to the rest of your internet life, where you will hear the name "DiBlasio" another six thousand times.
Boots Raingear

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Wanna see who's running for mayor? #19
It might seem stupid to allow basically anyone to get on the ballot, but here in Georgia we take it to the other extreme with the most restrictive ballot requirements in the nation. So I think you guys are on the right track. IRV is the future, I hope. I actually have a bunch of ideas on how to make voting in America work better, and if you guys don't mind me going on a bit I could write up a good post on 'em.

chai tea latte

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Wanna see who's running for mayor? #20
It might seem stupid to allow basically anyone to get on the ballot, but here in Georgia we take it to the other extreme with the most restrictive ballot requirements in the nation. So I think you guys are on the right track. IRV is the future, I hope. I actually have a bunch of ideas on how to make voting in America work better, and if you guys don't mind me going on a bit I could write up a good post on 'em.
Runic, November 06, 2013, 05:31:31 pm

mixed member proportional is where it's really at.

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Wanna see who's running for mayor? #21
Yeah, but you'd have to redo pretty much the entire American electoral system to make that happen, and I don't see that happening any time soon. Frankly, just about anything is better than First Past the Post.

chai tea latte

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Wanna see who's running for mayor? #22
Yeah, but you'd have to redo pretty much the entire American electoral system to make that happen, and I don't see that happening any time soon. Frankly, just about anything is better than First Past the Post.
Runic, November 06, 2013, 10:12:45 pm

Well, yeah, for sure.

🍆

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Wanna see who's running for mayor? #23
Since this is a Minnesota-related thread, I feel it's as good a place as any to mention the Pioneer Press sports page the other day had a gigantic headline that just said "F+" (referring to the current Vikings season). I would have snapped a picture but I was sleep deprived and exhausted so I just stared at it and giggled stupidly.

Lemon

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Wanna see who's running for mayor? #24
Terrible news, the Filing Fee ballot initiative (scroll down to Minneapolis City Question 1) passed by a healthy margin. This means you can't just bring $20 into a clerk's office and get yourself on the ballot, which means Minneapolis may never see an election that fun again. Plus side is that you can waive the filing fee if you have enough signatures, but that still means closing the ballot to people without any structure or motivation, but who have $20 and want to see "Party Pary Party Party Party Party Party Party" on everyone's ballot.

nigeline

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Wanna see who's running for mayor? #25
Terrible news, the Filing Fee ballot initiative (scroll down to Minneapolis City Question 1) passed by a healthy margin. This means you can't just bring $20 into a clerk's office and get yourself on the ballot, which means Minneapolis may never see an election that fun again. Plus side is that you can waive the filing fee if you have enough signatures, but that still means closing the ballot to people without any structure or motivation, but who have $20 and want to see "Party Pary Party Party Party Party Party Party" on everyone's ballot.
Lemon, November 05, 2014, 11:23:31 am
I wonder if they have to be Minneapolis residents or if we could get some stupid reddit dicks to sign off on Jack Chick's candidacy.

Lemon

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Wanna see who's running for mayor? #26
DANCE, SKELETON THREAD!

Tomorrow morning I'll be getting up early to vote in the local election. This time around, there is only a shameful 16 candidates available for Instant Runoff voting. I have my three selected, but here's a few people I won't be voting for...

Ian Simpson is running from The Idea Party
Sounds exciting, doesn't it? I'm sure you'd like to hear some of these ideas, wouldn't you? Well, that's gonna be difficult, because Ian's site is just a paragraph of text that literally ends with "Ok bye!"  But it seems that Ian's candidacy is simply an awareness campaign for the ideas of the idea party, which has four ideas. Unfortunately, none of them are interesting enough to be F+ worthy, but I'd put it to Ian that we've already tried the plan of putting low income citizens in large concrete structures and that's how we created the Prison Industrial Complex.

Anyway, I'm already bored of Ian. Let's move on.


L.A. Nik (independent)
Now we're talking!!! Hey Nik, what are your views?

NSFW content. Click to show.

Interesting. Are you endorsed by any well-known candidates or organizations?

NSFW content. Click to show.

Hey Nik, spending in Minneapolis has been in the news as people wonder who
NSFW content. Click to show.
Okay, have a good day Nik!


Perennial candidate Captain Jack Sparrow is running again, but this time around he's got a platform! Sort of! Captain Jack Sparrow (who still has not seen any of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies) is running from the Basic Income Guarantee party.  I could summarize his position on basic income, but I'd probably misinterpret his words so I'll just quote the man himself:
Another way to prevent violence, is to stop glorifying the purveyors of violence, those from the past, as well as those in the present. In Europe, the Vikings went on a rampage, where they would attack undefended villages, killing everyone, including the women and children.
Right, I... what now?
Even the clergy were killed in the name of Odin.  They were also in the Americas, initiating the genocidal activities towards the Native Americans, which was then continued after the arrival of Columbus, some 500 years later. The Vikings left a legacy of murder, rape and slavery wherever they went.
Why are you
I am calling for the elimination of  the word "Vikings" in the name of the Minnesota football team.
Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, gotcha. Okay, moving on.


What's the socialist candidate up to?
Amnesty for all immigrants, the end of the economic embargo against Cuba, expropriation of drug companies, prosecuting and jailing cops guilty of killing and abuse, a massive public works program to employ millions of workers at union-scale wages, and the organization and unionization of workers.

Uh huh. I look forward to you enacting all of this as Mayor.


Finally, John Charles Wilson isn't on the ballot this year (I suspect due to the filing fee mentioned earlier in this thread), but there's another candidate named David John Wilson. Let's learn more about him


Oh, fuck off.
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« Last Edit: November 06, 2017, 11:58:48 pm by Lemon »

Lemon

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Wanna see who's running for mayor? #27
And now, a (sort of) brief explanation of why Instant Runoff Voting totally rules and should be adopted everywhere

The 2017 Minneapolis Mayoral Election had 17 candidates on the ballot. 9 of them were for the Democratic Party (it's called Democratic Farmer Laborer up here), 1 of those was the incumbent, a couple of those we'll get to in a minute. The remaining candidates were a hodge-podge of parties: the Socialist, the Libertarian and several made up parties, including "Rainbows, Butterflies, Unicorns" party which isn't at all infuriating. There was no Republican on the ballot, although L.A. Nik said he was running as a Republican but forgot to mention that when he put himself on the ballot because, and I'll let you in on a little secret here, L.A. Nik is pretty dumb.

Aaaaaaaaaanyway, the major issue for this specific election was about the Minneapolis Police shooting people. Specifically the separate incidents wherein Philando Castile, Jamar Clark, and Justine Diamond were shot dead by police. There's plenty that could be said about this, but I wanna stay on the topic of Minneapolis mayoral candidates, so...

All of these shootings happened under during the term of our current mayor Betsy Hodges, (a Democrat in the current model),there were questions raised in her handling of the police department. Eventually, Hodges "asked" the Minneapolis police chief to resign. But, nobody's really satisfied with the changes to the MPD currently. This includes the Blue Lives Matter crowd, as Betsy's most frequent response to police violence has been strong statements condemning specific actions, which they see as a sign of weakness.

So here's where we introduce Tom Hoch, a Downtown Rich PersonTM who is retiring as the CEO of the Hennepin Theater Trust and is now looking for something else to do. So what abouuuuuuutttt.... Mayor? Hoch runs as 1 of 9 DFL candidates in the race, has no trouble fundraising about $800k for the election, turning it into the most expensive mayoral election in the city's history. Tom Hoch, who is gay and running as a DFL candidate, definitely isn't a Republican, despite what his voting record, donation record, and the words that he says would lead you to believe. No, he's simply the "Law & Order" candidate. Because crime in Minneapolis has spiraled out of control. He's the man to fix it. Other candidates are (to coin a phrase for probably the first time) "soft on crime". Also Tom Hoch has absolutely no idea where all these suspiciously funded hitjobs are coming from. Dishonest Facebook ads? Misleading websites? Dunno what that is, he certainly never paid for them though.

On Betsy's other side is a candidate named Jacob Frey, a Democrat in the more traditional Midwestern sense (Teamsters, AFSCME, other employee unions) who makes Police Reform his central issue: A failure in police/community relations is the fault of the mayor, and Jacob's got himself nearly a million dollars to keep saying that.

Another DFL Candidate, Raymond Dehn (a Democrat more in the Bernie model) takes it a step further: Police shouldn't have guns. Take guns away from cops. The media asks him if he wants to retract that statement and he tells them to fuck themslves. He's a progressive who has some unkind words to say about our current mayor, but not as many as Nekima Levy-Pounds, former President of the Minneapolis NAACP who stated that Betsy Hodges is the problem with the city.

So there's the 5 major candidates, whom I've drawn in broad strokes, because I want to take us all to the actual result. You can either look at This table on Wikipedia or this animation to get a picture of how the thing works, but...

IR Voting tries to declare a winner, and it will eliminate losers until it does so. Each time a loser is eliminated, IR goes through those ballots and gives those votes to 2nd (or 3rd) choices. And then repeats the process again and again until either...
  • It finds a candidate with a winning number of votes (50% + 1)
  • It's eliminated every other candidate but one
Here's what Round 1 looks like...

Jacob Frey25%
Tom Hoch19.3%
Betsy Hodges18.1%
Raymond Dehn17.3%
Nekima Levy-Pounds15%
(everyone else)~5%
Christopher Robin Zimmerman (Libertarian)literally 1 vote

Okay okay, so this looks like a pretty much set race. And in round 1, when we take out everyone with <2% of the vote, it's still pretty much the same.

Jacob Frey25.6%
Tom Hoch20%
Betsy Hodges18.6%
Raymond Dehn17.8%
Nekima Levy-Pounds15.5%

At this point though, we have to remove someone substantial from the list, so the next round removes Nekima and distributes her votes.

Jacob Frey28.2%
Raymond Dehn23%
Betsy Hodges22.5%
Tom Hoch21.8%

This changes the race considerably. Dehn eats up more Nekima votes, and all rest get shuffled around to anyone who isn't Tom Hoch. Now Hoch is on the bottom, and needs to be eliminated.

Jacob Frey37.7%
Raymond Dehn26.2%
Betsy Hodges25.7%

Really, if there was one consistent truth in this whole election, it's that no matter what, Betsy Hodges deserves to be in 3rd place. Still without a winner yet, so let's see where her votes go...

Jacob Frey44.7%
Raymond Dehn33.5%

In this particular case, the system never got to it's goal of 50%+1, but it kept eliminating candidates until it found a winner. Jacob Frey is the new mayor-elect of Minneapolis, and got there in a really crowded field with lot of different takes on the same issue. With negative campaigning and dark money being a thing that happened in this election, it wasn't able to create the idea of a "Splitter" candidate. Nobody was bullied into going against their voting impulses because you have to vote against a bastard. You made 3 choices and the system picks from there. I'm not gonna say this completely fixes the idea of smear campaign politics, but it does a lot to help.

For the most dramatic example of this, I want to show you the results for Minneapolis, Ward 3. For this particular election, there were four candidates.

  • Ginger Jentzen (Socialist)
  • Steve Fletcher (Democrat)
  • Tim Bildsoe (Democrat)
  • Samantha Pree-Stinson (Green)

Early results had a lot of people calling the election for Ginger, who had a commanding lead in the first round.

Ginger Jentzen3,297
Steve Fletcher2,709
Tim Bildsoe2,552
Samantha Pre-Stinson1,007

However, when the Green candidate got removed...

Ginger Jentzen3,598 (+301)
Steve Fletcher3,103 (+394)
Tim Bildsoe2,734 (+182)

...those 2nd choice votes were distributed more-or-less equally, rather than the expectation I'd have, which is that the Socialist would be most of the 2nd choices for the Green Candidate. But this means that when you remove another candidate...

Steve Fletcher4,861 (+1,758)
Ginger Jentzen3,844 (+246)

The people who voted for the one democrat voted for the other democrat afterwards and Steve beats Ginger handily. I fully expected her to win, but that's not how people voted.

One of the most constructive parts of this process is reënforcing the idea that people don't fit neat little stereotypes. A lazy commentator would say "All Nekima votes will go for Dehn, since they're both involved in the Black Lives Matter movement" and be very proud with their rightness until you actually look at the results and realize that, while more votes went to Dehn than any other candidate, they were spread a lot more evenly than that, and more of those votes went to Betsy Hodges than to Frey and Hoch combined.

We like to build really simplistic strawmen to describe most voters but, when you give them honest-to-god choices, people are a lot more complex than that.

In addition to all that, you still get to have silly candidates running and the system works well enough to deal with them appropriately. They can run (which they should) and lose (which they should). If the silly candidates fuck up the system, the system itself is brittle.

In summary: Instant Runoff voting is totally the best, and all elections should be done this way.



(and for the record, Betsy Hodges was my third choice too)
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« Last Edit: November 09, 2017, 01:40:19 pm by Lemon »

Emperor Jack Chick

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Wanna see who's running for mayor? #28
betsy hodges is everyone's third choice.

Lemon

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Wanna see who's running for mayor? #29
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