Blue Mass Group

Reality-based commentary on politics.

Don’t Be a Schmuck, Give Your Guy the Bullet – WITH POLL

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You have four votes. Use one and give it to your at-large candidate.

Don’t be a putz and waste the other votes by using them. Help out your candidate the best way you can. With a Bullet!

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  1. I don’t mind the post itself. By all means let Ernie have his fun. But why did this get promoted to the front page?

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    p>You know some of us live in Boston and actually care who gets elected to City Council.

    • even if phrased in a … casual way.  If you think he’s wrong, explain why.  His point is that by using all four votes, you are weakening your support for the one candidate you really want to win.  What’s wrong with that?

      • And you promoted it for its “funny” poll not because it made a particularly cogent point. Front paging this cheapens the election, and quite frankly, your own reputation.

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        p>If you want to post or promote a thoughtful discussion of bullet voting, by all means do so, but this ain’t it.

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        p>Regarding this race, there is no reason not to vote for multiple people as long as you believe that your first choice is already more popular than your other choices. For instance, if you wanted to vote for Ayanna, who appears to have strong backing, you might not vote for one of the two incumbents but shouldn’t be too concerned about adding any of the others to the list.

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        p>

        • Are youy saying that using less than four votes is not a valid and ethical exercise of a person’s voting rights?

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          p>Are you saying that my suggestion is not a serious one.

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          p>What makes an opposing view “offensive” HR? Why would David’s action’s of promotong this post be “offensive”.

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          p>What I read you saying is the idea of not using four votes is offensive. Is that what you mean HR?

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          p>Please explain and defend your use of the term “offensive”.

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          p>You have yet to do this.

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          p>

        • before they hatch.

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          p>Strange things happen in politics. Candidates who are “strong” lose all the time. Just look at the Mayoral preliminary in Lynn: a long-time incumbent lost to a write in who was outspent 10:1 and only got in the race 7 weeks ago. If there’s a candidate you really, really like, you should absolutely bullet that vote.  

    • As I have said in the past, EB3 has the best stuff in town.  I don’t know what his stuff is but I assure you that it is the best in town.  I enjoy his stuff immensely and appreciate his humor and his reservoir of political insight.  If you do not like his stuff then you should not read it.  If you have a problem with it being promoted don’t worry.  In one or two days it will be so far down on the page that no one will see it.  As far as your beef with David all I can say is “Cry ‘Havoc!’, and let slip the dogs of war.”

    • the words “putz” and “schmuck” or the practice or using votes sparingly?

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      p>Or are you immature and can’t handle the yiddish words for, well, for putz and schmuck.

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      p>Or, are you so obtuse caught up with your own self-rightous politics that you cannot accept an idea or opinion contary to your own and therefore must lash out and claim offensiveness.

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      p>Or is there a third explanation?

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      p>BTW, You disapoint me Fredo, I mean Judy

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      p>Make it good.

      • Apparently not. Your post is not offensive in itself. It’s funny. No doubt it is much funnier for those of you who don’t actually care about the election, but funny nevertheless.

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        p>However, some of us do care, and it is is the fact that David front paged it that I find offensive. It gives me the very strong impression that David thinks the Boston City Council race is no more than an amusing diversion.

        • I don’t care if I don’t use all four votes?
          I you kidding me? Is that what you believe? A person is not ethical if he does not use four votes.

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          p>That’s pathetic.

          • I said no such thing. In fact, I don’t think I have ever actually used all four votes in the past.

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            p>Please stop beating on a straw man.

        • He raised an important issue, if you feel strongly about one candidate, the best way to help him or her is to give her or him a bullet vote.  He then made up a pithy poll to address what to do with the uncast votes.  I don’t know why EB’s very cogent diary about using bullets and his funny poll does not warrant being on the front page.  I can’t think of anyone else on this blog who can measure up to EB3.  That is saying a lot what with all of the talented writers who post here every day.  But EB is special.  I would wager that his diaries register more hits than most if not everyone else here.  Maybe I am alone here but this place would be gloomy as hell without Ernie.  

        • I find it astounding that you find it “offensive” that I front-paged a post that (a) is funny, and (b) actually does raise a legitimate argument about voting practices, however much you may dislike the way the point is made.

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          p>This is a blog, not an academic journal.  We like to talk about politics, but we also like to have some fun.  If you can’t handle that, well …

    • You find Ernie’s post “offensive”, because you “actually care who gets elected to City Council”. You certainly don’t like it being front-paged. Yet you 4-rate (“needs work”) my observation that Mayor Menino’s “humor” about criminal conspiracy, obstruction of justice and venal corruption is offensive to those of us who care about corruption in local government.

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      p>What would you have us conclude about your values, based on this information?

      • I gave you a four because while I thought you made a good point, I felt that you were overreacting. I am sorry if that injured your ego.

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        p>Why can’t people read? I said I found it offensive that the post was front paged. Not the post itself.

        • I think I read, and understood, both of your comments just as they were written.

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          p>I don’t know why David decided to front-page the poll, but I certainly don’t find anything “offensive” about either the poll or the decision to promote it.

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          p>I think your criteria for what is and is not offensive humor is influenced far too strongly by your agreement or disagreement with the target of said humor.

    • It’s a legitimate strategy, and people use it all the time. It’s like giving your favorite candidate four votes.  

      • Maybe you just mean psychologically.

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        p>In terms of gamesmanship, it’s like giving every other candidate negative one vote.

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        p>

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        p>Most folks on BMG will agree: in a multi-vote race, each candidate has to earn the vote.  If I get to vote for four but zero, one, two, or three candidates have earned my vote, then I vote for zero, one, two, or three candidates.  It’s that easy.  It’s that ethical.

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        p>Complaining about promoting a diary encouraging bullet voting is like complaining about a diary encouraging the basketball team down five points with a minute left to foul, or about a diary encouraging the baseball team down two runs in the bottom of the ninth to use a power hitting pinch hitter with two outs and a runner on first, or… well, you get the jist.

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        p>The goal is to win while playing within the arbitrary constructs that are the rules.  If bullet voting is the way to maximize your chance to obtain the preferred outcome, you do it.  If it were a five candidate race and one was a real stinker, I might vote for all the other four just to reduce the chance that the stinker wins… even if I really liked one candidate and was ho-hum on the other three.

        • I have no problem with bullet voting, but the diary is just making a joke, not making a rational argument about the merits of bullet voting.

          • You are correct.  This diary is not making a rational argument for bullet voting.

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            p>Instead, it’s topical (Boston election, voting strategy) and funny.  Why isn’t that enough to warrant a front pager?

          • My God man.

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            p>In simplest form;
            suppose 4 positions available among five candidates. Suppose only 20 registered voters. I want my guy to win.  More than any other. By giving him a vote and not usng other 3 I give him a +3 vote advantage over 3 other candidates.

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            p>Simple enough

            • but that is not what you said, is it?

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              p>Of course, if you like 3 candidates equally well, there is no reason you should not vote for all of them.

            • In your context, by bullet voting you give him a +1 advantage over the 4 other candidates.

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              p>Had you voted all 4 of your votes, you’d be giving him a +1 advantage over 1 of the other 4 candidates.

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              p>There’s no “+3″… that part doesn’t hold up.  Of course, the key requirement for bullet voting is a voter for whom the other candidates are equally bad.  If the voter loves Alice, likes Bob, is indifferent to Charles and Dottie, and hates Enid, then bullet voting may not be the ideal strategy.

  2.  Leaves no doubt as to the voter’s intention. Then there is a runoff vote, which again, leaves no doubt as to the voter’s intention. This is the law. I see no reason to change it.

    • We are talking about the Boston City Council election where there are four “at-large” seats and voters get to choose up to four people on the ballot. We are not talking about the IRV proposal.

  3. At-large voting gives a mathematical advantage to incumbents.

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    p>Let’s say there are 4 people in office, and one of them has done something very stupid. By doing so, they lost the support of 75% of the voters. In other words, 75% of the voters want them out of office.

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    p>Problem is, those 75% will probably not unanimously agree who they want to replace the incumbent with. Worst case, there are 4 strong potential replacements, and the 75% splits evenly among them.

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    p>That means that each of those potential replacements will receive 18.75% of the vote, and the reviled incumbent will win with 25% of the vote.

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    p>It is worse as the number of at-large candidates goes up. In Springfield, we had 9 (we now have 5 due to a charter change). That means if 80% of the people hate one candidate, but split their votes among 9 challengers, the challengers can’t overcome an 80% disapproval rating.

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    p>In reality it doesn’t quite play out this way — there are almost never 4 (or 9) viable challengers, and most candidates don’t get 75% of the voters hating them. However, there is still an advantage to incumbency particularly in a crowded field because voters are rarely educated enough to know why they are voting for each candidate, and many voters are voting because they’ve “heard that guy’s name” — as I did when I was 18 years old and voting for the first time.

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    p>I’m not sure if “bullet voting” is a better strategy than picking a full slate of candidates. I tend to think it isn’t — after all, if I vote for 4 and you vote for 1, I’ve given a boost to 3 more candidates than you. You’ve thrown away all opportunity to influence the other candidates on the thought that you don’t want to take the chance that your candidate loses to someone else you voted for by one vote.

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    p>It seems to me that a better approach would be for two candidates to team up and get their supporters to vote for both candidates. That way you get twice the votes and there is no need to try and finesse things.

    • If you look at the results of past Boston City Council elections you will see that there is more turnover in at-large spots then there are for the district spots.

      • That’s somewhat encouraging for me to hear. Springfield went to a 9-member at-large system to a 8-ward, 5 at-large system.

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        p>Prior to this, in the last 20 years, there have been exactly 4 incumbents voted out of office. We have had elections where incumbents who withdrew several weeks prior to the election but still appeared on the ballot still got about half the number of votes than the winners — 5 and 6 thousand votes for non-candidates, with many challengers receiving less.

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        p>I’m excited to see more one-on-one races. Prior to the switch, every campaign was mediocre, because they weren’t running against a distinct other person, they were running against 17 other people. So we got a lot of people who were “in favor of public safety, supported the schools, and were in favor of economic development”. It was impossible to even have a debate, the “opening statements” would take 90 minutes.  

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