#toptwovoting #election #fail #california If you think that worry about an all Republican general election for statewide office is overplayed, take a look at the state controllers race last time around. The top candidate was a Republican (and doesnt that say a lot about the validity of first past the post, plurality based elections) and less than 30,000 votes separated the fourth place candidate, David Evans (a Republican), from the second place and third place candidates (both Democrats). If the third Democrat in the race or the Green had done just slightly better, we could easily have had a choice that left the majority of voters without an acceptable candidate. ... and, to be clear, the two Republican candidates combined totals (24.8 and 21%) were almost EXACTLY what the Republican candidate obtained in the fall election: 46% (almost no switching across party lines occurred in the general election). What an undemocratic result that would have been! ...but almost worth it, as I suspect it would have killed Top 2 dead right there. It still righteously pisses me off, as an electoral reform advocate, that, of all the god forsaken electoral reforms the Democratic majority in California Legislature could pick to let itself be blackmailed into putting on the ballot, they picked the one single system that no electoral reform advocate would be caught dead advocating, that would be #21 on a list of the top twenty alternative voting systems wed be advocating for. Why not IRV, or PR, or, screw it, almost anything else? Controller Votes Percent Ashley Swearengin, REP 1,001,473 24.8% Betty T. Yee, DEM 878,195 21.7% John A. Pérez, DEM 877,714 21.7% David Evans, REP 850,109 21% (just barely 28,000 votes behind #2 candidate) Laura Wells, GRN 231,352 5.7% Tammy D. Blair, DEM 200,532 5%
Posted on: Sun, 25 Jan 2015 22:55:36 +0000