With 100% reporting, CNN has Norm Coleman ahead of Al Franken by less than 600 votes out of nearly 3 million cast — a margin of about .02%. AP, the only news outlet that had called the race for Coleman, has rescinded that action. A statement by Al Franken says that
Under Minnesota state law, we will now enter into an automatic statewide canvass and recount…. The process, dictated by our laws, will be orderly, fair, and will take place within a matter of days. We won’t know for a little while who won this race, but at the end of the day, we will know that the voice of the electorate was clearly heard.
In other potential recount news, the great state of Washington shows an excruciatingly close race between netroots favorite Darcy Burner and incumbent Steve Reichert in WA-08 — with only 41% reporting, Burner has a tiny lead of under 1,000 votes (out of some 140,000 counted so far). (Happily, the WA Governor’s rematch between Christine Gregoire (D) and Dino Rossi (R), which was incredibly close four years ago, was not close this time — Gregoire won easily.)
UPDATE: It appears to be settled that Georgia Republican Senator Saxby Chambliss did not receive the required 50% of votes (Georgia requires candidates to win a majority) to keep his seat, requiring a runoff between him and Democratic challenger Jim Martin. Saxby leads 49.9% to 46.7%. Here’s hoping that President-elect Obama can find some time to make this race a priority.
The exit polls showed that 30% of those who voted for Dean Barkley, the third-party candidate in the race, would have voted for Franken if Barkley wasn’t in the race, and 24% would have voted for Coleman. Given that Barkley over 437,000 votes, in a runoff one could expect Franken to gain at least 26,220 more votes from Barkley supporters than Coleman would, far more than Franken would need to win. Even better would be to use Instant Runoff Voting, so the voters wouldn’t have to trudge out for yet another election and the state wouldn’t have to spend millions to administer one.
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p>Interestingly, IRV was passed as a ballot measure in Minneapolis. It has also been passed in numerous other cities in towns, including yesterday in Memphis, TN. The Minneapolis measure is currently held up by a stupid court case pushed by its opponents, but if IRV prevails, as I’m sure it well, then it will hopefully spread throughout Minnesota, so that they won’t have to experience another case of a winner who lacks a majority.
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p>I hope Franken pulls in front during the recount, but with IRV, he would have been a clear victor today.
If there was IRV, all people who voted might have done something differently. Hell, Barkley might have won outright with both mainstream candidates chosen as a 2 to a Barkley 1.
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p>You can’t hypothetically change the rules and then project an outcome assuming that the 3 million people wouldn’t have changed their outcome with different rules… not to mention the idea that the 3 candidates would have run different campaigns if it were an IRV race.
My concern with IRV, though, is that it’s complex to administer.
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p>We can’t even run a good “choose 1” election in this country.
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p>IRV is nice in theory, but I prefer range voting, or at least “pick 1 or more” as a better, practical alternative to “choose 1”.
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p>(Let the IRV/range voting flame wars resume!)
Various jurisdictions around the U.S. run IRV elections without significant problems. The big problems with our election administration, like lack of paper trails and the fact that we have partisan administrators, are largely orthogonal to the particular algorithm we use to tally the ballots. Yesterday, Pierce County in Washington used IRV and it prevented the two Democrats from splitting the vote with one another in a key County Executive race. San Francisco used it again as well. IRV isn’t only nice in theory, it’s nice in practice, with a track record of success to here and around the world.
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p>In contrast, Range has no track record in public elections, of success or otherwise. I don’t see how one can recommend a system that’s not in place in any public election in the world, and little empirical data to study from the few private elections. Moreover, it’s extremely vulnerable to strategic voting, including the nasty “Burr dilemma.” Finally, it doesn’t respect the most fundamental criterion of any single-winner voting system: in a two-candidate race, whoever is preferred by a majority should win.
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p>These reasons help explain why IRV is the preferred single-winner voting method of every major electoral reform organization in the world.
There’s a bizarre trend among IRV advocates. They lie and even make things up.
http://scorevoting.net/Irvtalk…
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p>To respond to Greg a bit out of order, I will address the common argument that score voting is “extremely vulnerable to strategic voting”. This is simply a fabrication, contradicted by the best available Bayesian regret figures.
http://scorevoting.net/StratHo…
http://scorevoting.net/TarrIrv…
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p>Greg implies that various voting problems are unrelated to using IRV, but IRV causes spoiled ballots to be 7 times as frequent (whereas score voting experimentally reduces them):
http://scorevoting.net/SPRates…
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p>And IRV cannot be sub-totaled in precincts (unlike score voting), so it’s especially vulnerable to centralized fraud.
http://scorevoting.net/IrvNonA…
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p>And (unlike score voting) IRV cannot be used on ordinary dumb totaling voting machines, so it’s potentially conducive to the increased use of new and more complex (electronic!) voting machines – which are also more susceptible to fraud.
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p>So it is simply a distortion to say that IRV “works well”. On rare occasions IRV can avert a vote-splitting problem like the one Greg mentions. But that occasional benefit is diminished by the problems noted above.
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p>Greg is simply lying when he says score voting has not been used in any real public elections. It was used in Venice for hundreds of years for example. And its simplified form, approval voting, has even been used in the United States.
http://scorevoting.net/Approva…
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p>But even if that hadn’t happened, why would Greg argue against using something that has never been used before? That argument would imply that IRV should never have been adopted in Australia, for example. Greg is a hypocrite in this respect. Moreover, score voting advocates today have the advantage of extensive election simulations and experimental data that overwhelmingly favors score voting (and finds IRV to be essentially the worst major alternative voting method). We therefore have a much stronger case for adopting score voting than the first IRV advocates had for adopting IRV.
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p>Greg’s final claim is preposterous. The “Center for Range Voting” is by far the world’s most advanced and authoritative election science organization, and they absolutely do not favor IRV. The vast majority of election methods experts (e.g. S. Brams, W. Smith, F. Simmons) consider IRV to be extremely poor and ridden with problems. Here’s more about the consensus of organizations which use advanced voting methods:
http://scorevoting.net/Consens…
I agree with syphax. We can’t be sure, but we can make a very educated guess since we have the vote totals and the poll numbers. But maybe you also don’t believe that if Nader hadn’t run in 2000 we’d have had a President Obama succeed a President Gore?
“We can’t be sure”
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p>and
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p>”with IRV, he would have been a clear victor today.”
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p>I don’t like conjecture to be confused with fact. It’s like nails on a chalkboard. I hypothesize that it’s probable that Franken would have won with IRV, and that it’s probable that Gore would have won had Nader not run. But its loony toons to suggest certainty. Had Nader not run, perhaps those Nader voters stay home. Perhaps lazy Democrats wouldn’t have been motivated by a fear of Nader splitting the vote and stayed home themselves instead of voting. Perhaps Nader’s involvement helped encourage more people to vote all around, and he not on the ballot would have reduced the number of voters for all the candidates.
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p>To answer your question, had Gore won in 2000 I believe we’d not have a President Obama elected in 2008. That’s not a knock on Obama — but America has been so shaped by George Bush’s policies over eight years that we’d have an entirely different set of circumstances and I believe different politicians would have risen to the top over that time period.
In a very strange way, it lessens the grief of what GWBush and Co. have put us–menaing the U.S. and the world–through these past 8 years…
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p>I support IRV although I’ll admit I get confused when various alternatives such as “range” and the thing that was on the MA ballot a couple years ago are brought into the discussion. What I do know is that the dominant stranglehold of our moneyed 2-party system is not good for democracy as it discourages many voters from participating at all.
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p>Even if IRV was enacted here we’d still need campaign funding reforms such as public financing for candidates who agree to spending limits. For more on this see http://www.massvoters.com/MVFE…
Score voting (aka range voting) is superior to IRV in essentially every way.
http://scorevoting.net/CFERlet…
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p>If you think the “moneyed 2-party system is not good for democracy”, then you don’t want IRV.
http://scorevoting.net/TTRvIRV…
You’re right, I can’t make the claim with 100% confidence, because changing the voting system can change how the candidates campaign. I make the claim with, I’d say, about 90% confidence.
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p>Your scenario of Barkley winning is very far-fetched. As far as how the campaigns were run, IRV would have probably made the candidates more diplomatic in their criticism and dampened the mud-slinging. If anything, I think that would have been of greater benefit to Franken.
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p>The basic layout is that one candidate represented the status quo (Coleman) and the other two were running to replace the status quo (Franken, Barkley). Given that layout of the candidates, I think Barkley draws a bit more from Franken, regardless of what happens.
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p>Thus, I’m very confident, though you’re right that I can’t be 100%.
…just have an open primary, top two vote-getters (regardless of party) move on to the general election. We need some way to compensate for the demise of the state GOP and still have meaningful elections.
Similar to what they have used extensively in Louisiana? That might not be a bad idea; however, there is a slight issue: The Supreme Court ruled in Foster v. Love(1997) that the Louisiana system ran afoul of federal law. Then again, the problem with the Louisiana system was that it often declared candidates elected either before or after the standard Election Day, which is mandated by law for national elections. So I suppose you could have the nonpartisan blanket primary at the usual primary date, then have the general election runoff similar to municipal elections. However, that could only work with ballot-access reform in place (elimination of restrictions on signatures, introduction of alternative ballot methods, etc.).
If anything, I think primaries should be closed. A political party is a collection of people with similar ideological goals and interests and the primary election should be for each party to put forth their preferred candidate.
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p>You have a choice to join or not join a political party. If one chooses not to enroll in my party, then why should that person have a role in selecting my party’s nominee for the general election?
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p>I think it’s the increase in the number of unenrolled voters that has diminished the two party system, because the moderates, for the most part, run as Democrats, leaving the right-wing as the face of the MassGOP. The result is that both parties have moved to the right in a state that is left-of-center.
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p>Close the primaries and maybe the Democratic Party can root out some of those “DINOs,” the Republican Party can be a viable “loyal opposition” and, who knows, a lot of those unenrolleds could move to a 3rd party, such as the Libertarians or Greens.
So we have one vote for no recount….
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Even if it’s unlikely to change the result, the recount should proceed. It would be an excellent check on the accuracy of Minnesota’s electoral process.
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p>Does anyone here think Sonia Chang-Diaz should have waived her right to a recount two years ago, even though the recount actually increased her opponent’s margin of victory?
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p>As they use paper ballots.
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p>Now that we can’t be accused of sour grapes, can we start talking about how to run an accurate election in this country?
Too bad they use poor-quality optical scanners, so a recount really is necessary…
And a liar. There’s no way in hell that Coleman would do what he says he’d do if he were down by 570 votes out of 3 million.
Chambliss has 49.8% of the votes cast. Unless Democrats who didn’t vote for Obama are going to come out to vote for Jim Martin, and be accompanied by the majority of Libertarian votes, this thing is safely in Chambliss’s hands. Is it worth the run-off?
It’s not a question of “worth the runoff”, it’s just what happens in that state when no candidate gets a majority.
If Georgia had to have it in the wake of a Martin concession, then do it anyway. But the odds are so overwhelming, it makes me wonder if the cost of pursuing it is greater than the very slim possibility of a Senate seat.
not about money. Georgia subscribes to the philosophy that the winner must win 50% + 1. So, they basically have an elimination tournament which guarantees that outcome. Hence, runoff.
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p>The cost of the election from the perspective of the state is fairly low, and it’s a pretty rare event. I see no problem with Georgia spending a few extra bucks to ensure that their elections run their way.
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p>
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p>Now, if you’re talking about costs to Democratic donors, to Martin, to the Dem party… that’s a different story. I’m hoping that some other senate seats get resolved quickly and Dems in FL, AL, SC, and NC will be so motivated by the success of Obama and the DSCC that they’ll come to Georgia and GOTV. The power of incumbency, especially in the Senate, is quite strong. Getting the Dem in now might help ensure we’ve got the seat for the next 18 years or so.
… and I’m frequently not… =-)
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p>In Georgia, the run-off is between the top two vote getters. In effect, this is just a ‘re-do’ of the vote without the third-party candidate (Buckley)… who, it is believed, siphons votes from Martin.
turnout will be a small fraction of the Nov 4 turnout, so that stat is less relevant. It will come down to turnout. GOTV commence!