This particular problem seems to be becoming an epidemic around here. First, Dianne Wilkerson had to win a write-in vs. write-in campaign to beat Sonia Chang-Diaz in the 2006 state Senate primary (of course, Wilkerson later lost to Chang-Diaz in 2008 when both names were on the ballot). Then, in the 2008 primary, Carl Sciortino waged — and won — a write-in effort to keep his seat against challenger Bob Trane.
And now, in 2009, long-time Cambridge City Council incumbent Marjorie Decker will have to wage a write-in campaign to keep her seat, having failed to submit the required 50 signatures to get her name on the ballot.
Decker’s task is complicated by Cambridge’s proportional representation system, in which voters can name first, second, third, and as many more choices as they like. Candidates can of course win by getting enough #1 votes, but they can also win by getting some #1 votes, plus enough #2 and #3 votes to put them over the top. In Decker’s case, however, it seems very unlikely that someone would go to the trouble of writing in her name in order to vote her #2 or #3, so she will essentially have to win with a lot of #1 votes.
And, based on recent elections, that may be a tall order. In 2003, Decker received 1,378 #1 votes (69% of the total votes needed), and was elected after another 631 were transferred to her to get her to the threshold of 2,009 votes. Probably most of those were #2 votes; maybe a few were #3. In 2005, she did a bit better, receiving 1,524 #1 votes (95% of the total needed), only a few shy of the election threshold of 1,608, which she again made up with transferred votes. But in 2007, she showed less well, getting only 1,069 #1 votes (78% of the total needed), and making up another 295 in transferred votes to get to the election threshold of 1,364.
The point is that Decker has never gained enough #1 votes to win election. She came close in 2005; she fell back a bit in 2007. And in both cases, that was with her name on the ballot. Now she will have to get all the people who previously voted her #1, and some people who in the past only voted her #2 or #3, to not only vote her as their #1 choice, but to do so by going to the trouble of writing in (or stickering) her name on the ballot.
It won’t be easy. But she told the Globe she sees “a clear shot” to victory. Do you?
By the way, the guy taking potshots at her in the Globe article, Robert J. La Trémouille, is very interested in geese. Seriously. What a funny place Cambridge is.
Yep, that’s Cambridge, MA, home of the kooky geese guy. At least we know that Cambridge being a nuclear-free zone, when the missles are launched our way, the geese won’t be killed in the thermonuclear blasts.
It’s easy and fashionable to laugh at Bob La Tremouille because of his fixation on the white geese. However, if you can stop your laughing long enough to listen to what he has to say about things other than the geese, you might learn something. He’s smart and he knows what he’s talking about, and he always backs up what he says with credible sources. I wish he wouldn’t go on about the geese, but only because that obscures the important things he’s saying about everything else. I have never caught him in a factual error. I don’t know you, but I’d be surprised if I could say the same about you or very many other people.
David–While the Globe lags behind, BMG bloggers are already jawing about this silly goose’s write-in campaign and even juicier matters concerning Councilor Marjorie Decker, including her improper financial ties to her political ally John “Spare Change” Buonomo–the indicted and dethroned Middlesex County Registrar of Probate who stands accused of larcenously dipping into his campaign funds as well as the coin-operated copy machines at the Registry.
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p>The five-term city councilor deserves to lose her seat because she’s obviously Playing Without a Full Deck.
I really take exception to your first link. The only person to whom that applies is YOU. Every other comment on the thread you linked either defended Decker or slammed you for such an obnoxious hit-and-run post. I have no stake in Cambridge city politics, but your behavior has been shameful.
Nobody “forced” anything. Nobody held a gun to her head. All wounds were self-inflicted. As you point out, these things happen from time to time.
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p>It’s also not clear that Cambridge’s voting system raises any bar for her. Cambridge voters, at least those who vote in municipal elections, are very knowledgeable about the process, and there isn’t much difference between posting a Decker sticker at #1 versus #2.
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p>Proportional representation is not just the transferable-ballot, nos. 1 through 38. It is also proportional. You only need a ninth of the votes to win (plus one). Consequently elections are very centrifugal. Candidates cultivate a narrow but dedicated slice of the electorate. Decker just needs to mobilize her base.
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p>One task that every city council wannabee faces is how to punch through the clutter, with octabajillion candidates all saying, “Vote me #1!” On that score this error could actually boost her campaign. You can bet everybody is talking about it, and it’s given her tons of visibility. (“There’s no such thing as bad publicity.”)
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p>No question, its better to be on the ballot than not. But yeah, she has a shot.
You don’t think so? I do. I’d wager that she won’t get more than a handful of votes at #2 or below. 100 tops.
She was a councilor who missed most of her meetings, missed most votes, routinely was ignorant of the city council’s rules and procedures, had no knowledge of how city government worked, and was openly combative with her colleagues. Its a wonder she got five terms-but in Cambridge one merely needs to pass empty resolutions condemning the Iraq War and otherwise appeal the far left to get re-election. Had she actually cared about keeping her job she would’ve either gotten the signatures, or got one of her 40k a year staffers to do it for her. She was arrogant enough to consider a challenge to Capuano from his left. Anyway at least the geese guy gets his signatures and actually asks for votes in person at the various precincts. And at least the geese issue is a real and local one unlike the Iraq War or Guantanamo or any of the other national issues Majorie Decker has grandstanded on in her undistinguished ten years.
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p>
Councilor Decker has served for almost 10 years and during that time she did not miss most of her meetings or most of her votes and if anything was too knowledgeable about procedures and the workings of city government. She is a huge Capuano supporter and friend and never considered running against him….you may not personally like her for whatever reason, but your facts are not correct.
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p>I am sure no one is more upset with Decker than she is with herself. Missing that deadline was a big mistake which she will have to make up for in hard work to win an election that was pretty much certain a few weeks back.
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p>But, I think if only a quarter of the local people she has helped with their constituent requests over the past 10 years are willing to use a sticker for her, she may have a shot. If all you noticed about Decker in 10 years was her statements on three national/global issues, I think you missed what she was up to 95% of the time: answering calls for help from Cambridge people who viewed her as the most accessible councilor and the one who would actually try to get something done for them (whether she had to be confrontational with someone or not to get it done)
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p>She has a tough challenge here…we’ll see what happens.
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p>
I was at the joint Marc McGovern/Majorie Decker victory party in 2005 because I am a big Marc McGovern supporter. I overheard Decker and her aides talk about a potential congressional run and the Chronicle also ran stories talking about that. Since Capuano is our congressman I was presuming she was planning to run against him-unless this was back when he might run for Governor and then she would run for his seat. I will make that concession that perhaps it was an option she was considering if Capuano was not running for re-election. But she was definitely anticipating leading the #1 vote count, becoming Mayor, and openly talking about a Congressional run and that struck me as arrogant considering how she was nearly dead last in 05.
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p>Also if you go to Robert Winters great website you will see on the side where it says Council orders that Decker made 107 orders this year commenting on foreign policy-the most of any councilor-nearly 60% of her total resolutions. In 2008 she made an absurd 296 orders regarding foreign policy which constituted nearly 80% of her resolutions. After foreign policy she makes the most orders asking for rules clarifications, which after 10 years she should be very intimately familiar with council rules. Early last year she insisted that the Council vote on her resolution even though their was no quorum, when the City Clerk Margaret Drury, one of the nicest and mot capable non-partisan public servants we had, told her they could not vote, Majorie stormed out of the Council chambers and did not return for the meeting and did not even vote on her resolution when their was a quorum. The Chronicle also documented this extensively. Working with her on the lower the vote initiative, which I am glad she supported, she was incredibly ignorant of the procedure for a home rule petition (that it had to go to the State House) and either did not understand the substance of our resolution or lied to us high school students to make us more optimistic about our chances, when we all knew the city resolution was merely a first step she presented it as the final step.
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p>Winters site also shows that she has the worst attendance record missing nearly 8 meetings this year, or 1/3 of all the meetings. If an employee missed work 1/3 of the time and then spent 60-80% of the time they did go to work on pointless endeavors that did not advance your company forward you would fire him/her. The fact is Decker has shot herself in the foot and basically fired herself for the Cambridge voters and for that I applaud her.
depending on how many candidates show up… if you put Decker 4 but your 1, 2, or 3 ranking is used to elect someone, that you put her as 4 doesn’t matter… your ballot sticks with a higher rank. It’d be interesting to see the distributive rank of the “sticky” vote — what percent of ballots “stuck” at their #1, their #2, etc.
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p>P.S. The Cambridge proportional system sucks. I really like IRV, but there’s a real problem with the Cambridge system — randomness actually impacts the outcomes. Why? Once somebody has their threshold, their remaining ballots are re-distributed. For example, if the threshold is 2,501 (see link in diary) and the candidate gets 3,000 #1 votes, than the first 2501 are used and the remaining 499 get redistributed to whomever is listed as #2. This is crazy. If we shuffled the ballots and re-counted, we’d end up with a different 499 redistributed… and possibly a different result!
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p>Am I misunderstanding? Can anyone with an intimate knowledge of Cambridge’s system please tell me (1) if the redistribution process is as I described it (and appears on the link), and (2) how the order is determined.
I hate the PR system for a variety of reasons and think it should be scrapped or at least significantly reformed since it disenfranchises thousands of citizens a year. I was once a part time worker at the election commission and am intimately familiar with how the system works.
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p>So essentially each voter is voting for ONE councilor and is putting down their preference for who they want that councilor to be. The ballot is only valid if the person makes at least ten choices, merely marking your first and second choices disqualifies your ballot. If your first choice fails to make quota your vote is then transferred to your second choice and so on. Typically at least ten candidates will reach quota before the fifth round so really your first five choices are the ones most likely to be your final vote.
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p>The remaining 499 that you mentioned get redistributed to those individual voter’s second choice. Historically certain candidates would piggyback on the votes of other candidates. For instance Maher was often the ‘#2’ of Galluccio supporters and he ended up losing when Galluccio was no longer on the ballot although he has since consolidated Galluccio’s base and now is one of the top #1’s.
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p>Similarly Toomey would often piggyback after Sullivan and had his worst showing when Sullivan was off the ballot.
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p>What’s even worse is recounts. For the 2002 school committee election there were three different recounts that produced three different results. The final hand recount, which was the final say according to state law, then produced a fourth outcome which was the final outcome electing newcomers Richard Harding and Nancy Walser to the Committee and resulting in the defeats of Susan Sagat and Fred Fantini who had initially been elected in the three computerized recounts, albeit with different totals.
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p>Galluccio first got on the council during the midway point in a term when an incumbent died unexpectedly. Rather than hold a special election, in Cambridge they simply recount the ballots from the previous election distributing the dead guy’s votes to the candidate that won. While Galluccio had made it 13th on the final count in total votes, he ended up winning the seat since he was the #2 for most of the dead guys #1’s.
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p>Similarly, when Galluccio resigned to become state senator David Maher got back on the council even though Sam Seidel had more votes in the final count. Seidel got on the council when Sullivan quit and his votes transferred to Seidel. Also Larry Ward was put on the council when Brian Murphy’s votes transferred to him ‘skipping over’ the 11th and 12th ranked candidates in his year.
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p>That’s not according to the Cambridge website (see diary), which states:
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p>Mark your choices by filling in the numbered ovals only. Fill in the number one (1) oval next to your first choice; Fill in the number two (2) oval next to your second choice; Fill in the number three (3) oval next to your third choice, and so on. You may fill in as many choices as you please.
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p>Now, let’s say I fill in my ballot as:
1. Sally Schmoe
2. Gary Guy
3. – blank –
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p>and, in the course of the count, Sally and Gary both reach their threshold number of votes before my ballot comes up. Then, there’s nowhere to redistribute my ballot and it doesn’t add to the tally. However, if my ballot were to be counted sooner in the process (before Sally or Gary met the threshold), then mine would go to Sally or Gary’s pile, and some other ballot would be redistributed instead.
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p>So, merely marking your first and second choices appears to NOT disqualify the ballot, but the ballot may find itself neutered if all of the choices selected have already met their threshold with other counts.
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p>
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p>That’s useful, but still I’d bet that a large portion of ballots terminate at their #1 or #2 choices. The less of a “landslide” in the first round, the fewer the number of ballots get to a 4th or 5th slot I’d think.
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p>
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p>I thought so too. My question: (1) how is the order of the ballots determined? (2) is the order maintained for a recount or is a new order determined? These seem to be critical, and I’ve seen no information on these two procedures.
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p>Wrong. Galluccio replaced a very live incumbent (and council ally) who met his political death when he was indicted, went on the lam as a federal fugitive, but ultimately stood trial, was convicted of bank fraud and perjury, and then was sentenced to federal prison and stripped of his council seat by the Supreme Judicial Court.
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p>The crook’s good friend Mayor Ken Reeves testified (to little avail) as a character witness at the federal trial of his beleaguered but living, breathing colleague, whom the Cambridge Chronicle memorably dubbed “the felon councilor” when he refused to relinquish his council position upon conviction.
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p>The name of this live wire whose plug was pulled? William H. Walsh–the colorful, boisterous rapscallion and multimillionaire wheeler-dealer affectionately known as Billy, who while “serving” in public office was privately dealing quick-buck condo investment opportunities and making undisclosed loans to fellow councilors, Cambridge police officers, and other city employees, including the current city solicitor, Donald Drisdell, and former mayor and present Middlesex County Clerk of Courts Michael Sullivan.
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p>Though disbarred as a felon, Walsh is back in business peddling influence at City Hall as a real estate hustler and financier providing suspicious loans and shady luxury condo benefits to his crony Councilor Marjorie Decker, who uses her official position to reward his business and development partners, fund public memorials to his parents, and enrich herself and her husband’s family through acts of patronage, nepotism, and abuse of campaign finance regulations and ethics laws.
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p>Notwithstanding the intricacies of PR elections, Councilor Decker won’t be returned to office even if she hides behind the skirt tails of her mentor Rep. Alice Wolf–because Marjo is Playing Without a Full Deck.
Just to emphasize what stomv said: that is absolutely not true. You need only vote #1, if you want, or you can vote #1 and #2, or you can vote as many choices as there are candidates, or anything in between. As long as you only vote each number once, you’re fine.
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p>Of course, as stomv points out, there’s no actual guarantee that your ballot will be counted, but that’s a different topic.
isn’t a ballot that is not counted disqualified? this is all an argument of semantics and I really strongly resent Bob’s comments.
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p>A ballot that is not counted is in many respects a vote that is disqualified, it is a voter that is disenfranchised. That is the real danger we should all be in agreement about. Not whether or not ‘throwing out’ ‘disqualifying’ are the same as ‘not counting’.
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p>The ballot is not considered and is not counted on the first count if it is not fully marked so the vote can be transferred. This is an intricate and complex system that is difficult to explain but I would appreciate that people respect the fact that I do have intimate knowledge of how PR works based on my time being Teresa Neighbors assistant, and she did use the term disqualify just as much as I have, in a colloquial rather than legalistic sense, and this is far more expertise than ‘Bob’ ever has had since I doubt he has the experience I have had.
With due respect, the difference between not counted and disqualified is substantial, and given the technical context of the discussion, quite important.
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p>Parts of my ballot are nearly always not counted — I often undervote. To my knowledge, my ballot has never been disqualified. Keep in mind, you wrote
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p>That’s flat out wrong. Not only is the word disqualified wrong, but you falsely claim that the ballot is invalid if fewer than 10 choices are made. That’s just plain wrong. That’s not a matter of semantics. Also flat out wrong — a ballot that is not counted because their wishes are being respected (in this case, all of their ballot choices being elected) is not a voter who is disenfranchised. That too is flat out wrong.
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p>The fact is, sometimes a ballot with only a 1 and a 2 is not counted; other times it is counted. Disqualified != not counted any of the time.
I trust it’s clear by now that this is not just an “argument of semantics,” unless by “argument of semantics” you mean “I meant to say X, but I used words that any normal English-speaking person would understand to mean Y.” You misstated the way the system works; just own up to that. Furthermore, factual errors, confidently stated on blogs, frequently lead to jovial teasing such as Bob’s comment that you “really strongly resent.” You’ll have to get used to that if you want to enjoy blogging. The best way to avoid comments like Bob’s is to get your facts right the first time.
On Bob-its not jovial teasing to argue that I seriously endangered the fairness of an election or was incompetent at my job-that’s slander
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p>Secondly to stomv and david I would agree that I used a poor turn of phrase, but the phrase disqualified on the first count would be factually and semantically correct. But simply saying they are disqualified was an error. Furthermore this is the terminology used internally at the Election Commission so if it is really that objectionable you should take it up with them not me.
It is extremely worrisome if you were, as you claim, an election commission employee since as noted there is no minimum vote requirement for a valid Cambridge ballot. I wonder if any valid ballots were discarded under your tender attentions.
In addition to the inaccuracies others have already pointed out, let me add that municipal elections happen in odd years, state and federal elections happen in even years, i.e., there was no 2002 city election.
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p>Assuming you meant the 2001 election, in which the school committee recount was quite amazing, you’re really wrong about the results. According to Robert Winters’s Cambridge Civic Journal (www.rwinters.com), which is the authority on everything having to do with Cambridge elections, Fred Fantini was the second candidate to make quota (after Alice Turkel). The last two seats came down to a seven-vote margin separating Nancy Walser, Richard Harding and Susana Segat, with Ms. Segat on the short end. The recount did not change the results.
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p>I am curious to know how ten candidates could make quota when there are only nine seats on the city council and six seats (plus the mayor, who is named later) on the school committee.
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p>I share your disdain for Marjorie Decker and will be thrilled if she loses, which I expect to happen. But I don’t share your iffy relationship with actual facts, and I expect people to point out to me any time that I do get things wrong.
Points of clarification:
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p>I am glad no one has refuted my ‘dissing’ of Decker since it is based on the facts.
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p>Also I wrote about the Galluccio, Seidel, and School Committee recounts on the basis of recollection since I did not want to sift through Mr. Winter’s great website. I meant to say 01 and I do not think that minor slip up invalidates stomv’s and my criticism of the recount method. Furthermore yes there are nine seats which is why I specifically mentioned that the tenth candidates always seem to get passed over since they are not piggy backing with #2’s on someone else’s #1’s. Also I did not realize Mr. Walsh had suffered a different kind of death, again I was quite young at the time and my recollection was based on an article I remember reading several years ago and I thought the vacancy was due to death. Considering that the writer was Douglas Trumball perhaps he meant it ironically and that irony was lost on my 6th grade mind.
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p>As to David I meant disqualified since if your vote cannot be transferred it is thus not counted and thus disqualified. Perhaps that is not the proper terminology but from a strategic voting standpoint it is not wise to only mark your first choice.
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p>As to Bob, you can disagree with my phrasing without insulting my intelligence, integrity, or the integrity of the Cambridge Election Commission who are some of the most dedicated professionals working in our city. What I meant to say was that those ballots are thrown out if someone has already reached quota. i.e if a candidate is already elected finding a ballot like that, which cannot be transferred, forces us to not to consider that ballot in the initial count. To have a speedy count the ballots are taken as they come in, so if a ballot that only specified a #1 vote was for a candidate that already reached quota it would not be counted since it cannot be transferred and no more additional votes can be given to a candidate who reached quota which is why it is vital people fill out their ballots as far down the line as they can.
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p>I apologize for using the term ‘thrown out’ as it implies the ballot is literally thrown out. It is not, it is merely set aside. It is not counted in the first count but could be counted in the event of a recount and is usually counted on the final counts but is irrelevant to a candidate winning a position. Also for the record, during my brief time of employment (it was a temporary job that ended before the November) i have not personally counted any votes so I hope that assuages Bob’s concern as the Monday morning election commissioner. But I did ask questions for the then director Teresa Neighbor who basically described the process to me as I have described it to you. I was astounded that a vote could be disregarded like that but this is just one of the many follies of the PR system that make it undemocratic and that disenfranchises hundreds a year.
Unless your intent is to denigrate the rest of the people who work for the city, which I might agree with you on in a lot of cases, I would say instead that the Cambridge Election Commission has made major gaffes in recent elections: removing the Boy Scouts’ collection boxes from the polls (during the primaries? I can’t remember, but it was recently) and then giving incomplete voting lists to the precincts last fall, an election with unprecedented turnout (in my experience). In addition, if Teresa Neighbors didn’t know the difference between a disqualified ballot (i.e., one that does not count as a properly cast ballot because the person who cast it did not follow the rules) and a ballot that did not count towards quota for one of the winning candidates, and that is what you consider one of the “most dedicated professionals working in our city”, words fail me.
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p>As to the ten candidates reaching quota issue, I suggest you reread your own words: “Typically at least ten candidates will reach quota before the fifth round so really your first five choices are the ones most likely to be your final vote.”
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p>Amazingly enough, I can consider you hopelessly wrong about how proportional representation and other election matters work in Cambridge and still heartily agree with your assessment of Ms. Decker. So I would really rather focus on how and why she will become former Councillor Decker.
I don’t have time at the moment to correct all the mistakes, but let me at least outline what really happens during each round of a Cambridge PR election.
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p>Initially ALL ballots are assigned to the candidate with the highest (generally #1) ranking on each individual ballot. The election quota for City Council is 10% (rounded up) of all ballots having at least one valid choice. This is the lowest number guaranteed to elect no more than the number who are supposed to be elected (9). Some candidates may surpass this threshold in the first round, though most will not.
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p>If any candidate surpasses quota, starting with the candidate with the most votes, that candidate’s “pile” is reduced down to quota by pulling ballots containing additional valid choices and transferring those ballots to the next available choice. If, for example, the quota was 2000 and this very popular candidate had 2200 ballots (hence 200 surplus ballots), then every tenth ballot would be pulled to be transferred. If a pulled ballot has no additional valid choices, it is passed over and remains with the #1 choice and the process continues until exactly a quota of ballots remains. During this “surplus distribution” every ballot will be credited to one candidate and none will be “exhausted”.
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p>If there are additional candidates who surpassed quota in the initial count, the same procedure is carried out in order of how they initially finished. At some point, none of the candidate will have more than a quota of ballots and no one will yet have been defeated.
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p>Easily the most problematic aspect of the surplus distribution is the fact that if a different set of ballots had been pulled, they would likely have been transferred to continuing candidates in a somewhat different way. Because every nth ballot is pulled (called the Cincinnati Method) sequentially across all precincts of the city, there is little bias toward any one part of the city. In practice, pulling a different set of ballots in this method generally yields a very similar transfer pattern.
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p>I wish we could do this somewhat differently, but the law requires that we use a method that was in use somewhere in the USA in 1938, and this limits what we can do without going to the state legislature to ask for a Special Act. So we live with it. Honestly, the only serious problem with it is how we have to handle recounts since the law requires that “every ballot shall be made to take the same course that it took in the original count unless the correction of an error requires its taking a different course”. There is at least one better method (often called “fractional transfer”) that is independent of ballot order, but it’s not currently legally available for us to use.
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p>Once all the surplus ballots have been redistributed, the next round is where all candidates with less than 50 votes are defeated at once and their ballots transferred to the next continuing choice (excluding any candidates who have been either elected or defeated at that point). Only from this point onward can any ballots be “exhausted” (or as some have called it – “disqualified”) if there are no other continuing candidates ranked on such a ballot.
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p>Then you look and see who is dead last and declare that candidate defeated. Ballots credited to that candidate are then transferred to continuing candidates next ranked on each individual ballot, or exhausted if there are no additional valid choices. Then you see who is now dead last and repeat the procedure. This series of runoffs continues until the field has been reduced to the number of candidates to be elected.
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p>The great majority of exhausted ballots occur when the field is reduced to 10 candidates and the 10th candidate defeated and his ballots transferred. At some point during this last round, except in rare cases, all 9 remaining candidates will reach quota and all subsequent ballots will be exhausted because 9 candidates will have been elected.
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p>It’s important to note that in a plurality election, typically nearly half of all ballots (or more if there are more than two candidates) will be “exhausted” in the sense that they will not be credited to any winning candidate. In this sense, ballots “count” a lot more in the Cambridge system than in just about any other election method.
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p>I’ll add that in the 2007 Cambridge City Council election, 79.5% of all valid ballots saw their first choice elected; 93.6% of all valid ballots saw either their first or second choice elected; and 96.3% of all valid ballots saw either their first, second, or third choice elected. That’s a pretty good measure of voter satisfaction.
To remove 200 ballots from a total of 2200 requires taking every eleventh ballot, not every tenth.
You are quite correct, but this provides an opportunity for further clarification. If, for example, the quota were 2000 and a candidate had 2150 #1 votes (150 surplus), we would divide 2150 by 150 and get about 14.3. The rule is we round this to the nearest integer (up or down), so we would then pull every 14th ballot.
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p>There’s really no magic to it, but you gotta have rules and this succeeds in getting a pretty good sample taken from throughout the city rather than concentrated in just one or several precincts. It is, of course, somewhat dependent of where most of the surplus candidate’s #1 votes are concentrated, but this is as it should be.
First off thanks for clearing up these misconceptions and I am glad most of us are in agreement about how Majorie Decker is unqualified (pardon the pun) to hold high office.
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p>Secondly though isn’t this sad that several educated people who have all had experience living in Cambridge got the facts wrong and we need a sage like yourself to come in an explain this to us? A system with such a high degree of voter education, especially when no one in the city bothers to educate the voters on how it works, especially in the public schools, to me is a system that is inherently elitist and undemocratic. I think the complex system not only leads to several hundred disqualified ballots a year (for david and stomv we are relying on the fullest definition of disqualified there as in improperly filled ballot) not to mention ballots that go uncounted. If professionals at the election commission not to mention city councilors have a difficult time explaining how the system works it seems that this system not only depresses turnout and creates voter confusion but it is also sets a very high bar for civic participation that sadly most citizens don’t have the inclination or the education to meet.
To vote in a Cambridge PR election, you choose which candidates you like and then rank them from most favorite (#1) to least favorite. This doesn’t require a Ph.D. to understand and almost all Cambridge voters do it with neither pain, suffering, nor confusion.
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p>Regarding the claim that many ballots are disqualified, in the 2007 City Council election there were 13,721 ballots cast of which only 88 were invalid. Of these, 58 ballots were blank and just 30 were invalid due to overvotes (giving the same rank to two or more candidates) with no additional valid choices. With just 30 invalid ballots (excluding ballots intentionally cast blank) out of 13,721 cast, this translates into an error rate of just 0.2%. That’s a remarkably low rate.
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p>Some voters will either accidentally or intentionally give the same ranking to two or more candidates somewhere on their ballot (overvote). I just examined all of the 2007 City Council ballots and there were only 73 ballots with an overvote somewhere on the ballot. If anything, this is evidence that Cambridge voters understand very well how to vote a PR ballot.
‘m a resident of East Cambridge. I’ve never had an issue voting. The instructions are clear and concise and the poll workers are more than willing to help if you have questions. Nor have I heard anyone besides you claim that hundreds of ballots are disqualified each year.
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p>Your claim that the system is “inherently elitist and undemocratic” is patently false. We have one of the most representative City Councils I’ve ever encountered.
will do and I will relish I’ll be sure to relish it as much as you do