Minnesota bill would remove local control and IRV

[Clay Shentrup]

https://twitter.com/FairVoteMN/status/973660861842755587

Stone cold crazy.

[Jack Santucci]

But precedented. This is how STV was removed from West Hartford, CT in the early 1920s -- and therefore banned from further adoption in Connecticut. (A 1939 adoption effort in Waterbury required special permission from the legislature.)

In CA and MI, it was the courts, removing STV from Sacramento and Kalamazoo. In OH, on the other hand, the courts were favorable.

In MA, the legislature eventually repealed the STV local option. As far as I can tell, this is because support from breakaway Democrats evaporated. Cambridge survives via grandfather clause.

In other states (RI and I think NJ), PR was preemptively banned via constitutional amendment.

In 1938, New Yorkers defeated a constitutional amendment to remove STV from NYC and ban all further PR implementations, of whatever form. I have not yet analyzed those returns, but stories suggest it was the partisan balance of forces that defeated the proposal: the ALP and NYC Republicans versus NYC Democrats and Republicans from upstate. See: Zeller and Bone (1948).

The MN bill is the work, so far, of three Republicans and one Democrat.

What endangers IRV in Maine are the votes of 11 Democrats in the lower chamber, who broke with their party on October 23 and joined Republicans to postpone implementation. The division was 68 for, 63 against.

On Wed, Mar 14, 2018 at 12:54 AM, Clay Shentrup <cshe...@gmail.com> wrote:

https://twitter.com/FairVoteMN/status/973660861842755587

Stone cold crazy.

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[Jack Santucci]

And there is no pattern in the Maine roll-call record that suggests a Democratic faction opposed to IRV.

It may be that district interests explain it -- a perception that IRV would not be helpful to those Democrats in their districts. But I have not tested that explanation.

[Phil Uhrich]

There is zero chance the current governor would sign it. The next governor (no matter which party wins) just might.

[Phil Uhrich]

"1.15 (b) For purposes of this section, "ranked-choice voting" means any election method in​
1.16 which a voter ranks or assigns a numerical value to candidates for an office in order of the
​1.17 voter's preference"

https://www.revisor.mn.gov/bills/text.php?number=HF3690&version=0&session=ls90&session_year=2018&session_number=0&format=pdf

I'm no lawyer but that might just leave enough wiggle room for Score. It might not.

[Ciaran Dougherty]

I would argue it does leave room for Score (and all Cardinal voting methods), because they neither rank, nor necessarily denote an order (because of the validity of equal scores allowing for alternating orders). 

That, along with the fact that that is written as the definition of ranked-choice voting, means it should be a pretty solid argument that the "assigns" clause is intended to close the "Reverse the numbers, and they're no longer ranked!" loophole.

...as such, the "virtually no one considers cardinal ballots" problem may actually save us from that particular prohibition.

It's still a totally BS bill, though...

[Phil Uhrich]

Well, on the off chance it does look like it will go through I'll get a hold of the guy on the minneapolis city council I know to start drafting a bill for STAR. I just worry the crappy Mayor we just elected might not go for it, especially since it would threaten his job security. In which case we would have to get signatures and put it on the ballot, but that would probablly be easy enough with all the outrage.

[Clay Shentrup]

Note that the two Democrat (DFL) sponsors dropped their names from it.

https://www.revisor.mn.gov/bills/bill.php?view=chrono&f=HF3690&y=2018&ssn=0&b=house#actions

Leaving only the three remaining R's supporting it.

[Ciaran Dougherty]

Actually, I'm going to have to walk back my claim, and say that it wouldn't apply to purely cardinal methods.

You might have some trouble with the hybrid aspect of STAR; the runoff step is specifically designed to use assigned numbers to determine order of preference between the top two.

By all means, I think you should try, though I would recommend any such proposal be written in such a way that if the runoff step is found to be in violation, that step can be dropped, and it simply turns into Score.

On Mar 15, 2018 21:43, "Phil Uhrich" <philu...@gmail.com> wrote:

Well, on the off chance it does look like it will go through I'll get a hold of the guy on the minneapolis city council I know to start drafting a bill for STAR.  I just worry the crappy Mayor we just elected might not go for it, especially since it would threaten his job security.  In which case we would have to get signatures and put it on the ballot, but that would probablly be easy enough with all the outrage.