Give Instant Runoff Voting a chance by educating yourself about how to vote for three distinct candidates on your absentee ballot or in the booth election day. Help others to become clearer on the process. Demand any candidate you support explain their IRV strategy and ask them to produce a simple PSA explaining IRV, such as this:
IRV is an excellent tool because
1. it makes candidates seek alliance and coalition-building tactics
2. it makes voters learn more about more candidates and take greater responsibility for their vote.
3. it aids candidates interested in civic leadership but without finances by giving them a means to recognition
4. it eliminates the need for expensive runoff campaigns
5. the process reveals which candidate works best with others at large.
I want to be the Mayor for four years to reform the Office and civic sector in the face of deficit economy and then turn the office over to an elected Ed Lee, in 2015.
If elected I refuse to serve a second term and promise to hand the next Mayor, whomever it is, $500,000 and an SF Giveback Fund to supplement the General Fund in times of financial crisis (details in campaign promises).
This was been a depressing week in our once fair town: macho firefighters in mourning push the public defender around, crafty planning commissioners push to illegally draft Interim Mayor Lee onto the ballot via campaigning, and strike-threatening MUNI operators reject a contract for no good reason but a pissing contest about respect.
(sigh)
What happened to you San Francisco? There’s more information than ever. But the more information there is, the less caring and more conniving our politicians and newspaper editors seem.
A stageplay of theatrical poses substitutes for governance and media. A goofy, smiling happy face hangs like a thin curtain over a City with $850 million in debt and ballooning pensions and benefits schemes that are unsustainable.
The new politicians are like models – empty and to be filled by waiting interests. They have no guts.
People are suffering job loss and insecurity and snarky in-crowd attitude has replaced public service.
Parrots, who possess more than most of us, and can thus afford to produce new media, line up in factionalized flocks spitting insults and snide comments at one another as our town loses its grace. New blogs emerge and our San Francisco values are smoothed into the nothingness of pluralized media. The Bay Citizen launches an all out “NY1” or KRON4 style attack on the blogging media consciousness with $5million in startup money from Hellman, and now the new SF residents mistake it for media that has existed forever, a trusted SF news source, overnight. Not that it hasn’t been effective at coverage,but it imposes itself upon us, by its posture.
There are many new residents who’ve moved into overpriced SF housing built in the last decade at rates few of us can afford. More condos go up weekly to rent to imaginary future residents from elsewhere, with no one questioning why we “have to grow bigger and more dense” as a City before bridging deficits or working on infrastructure.
Some of these new residents are easily manipulated because they do not have history or context and can be herded like sheep through big money being spent to ensure the view of developers are perpetuated.
Twitter Giveaways and Treasure Island Boondoggles face no resistance because of an apathy by the populace, not because they are good ideas. The unenforcable and idiotic Sit/Lie Law is allowed to be tried because some of these new residents don’t make eye contact with anyone in the street, walk fast with headphones and diddling cel phones to avoid it.
When I arrived in this town decades ago, I tried hard to learn how to be a San Franciscan and was taught by this City. Can we not, as a City, ask these new residents to respect our famed tolerance and compassion? No? Why not?
Interim Mayor Lee and Supervisor Chiu would have us believe we cannot say anything to them for fear we might offend them and they would leave?
These newcomers are being used by interests and held ignorant of what has been lost, is being taken daily from us.
(cf. the Twitter Giveaway, these people just gave away $47million to Twitter that should have been in the General Fund. They did it smiling and crowing about jobs and one dared to call himself progressive!?)
Austerity Measures and Real Talk
The global economic reality is that we are in a serious downturn that shows no real signs of rapid recovery. We must change the attitude of state to one of concern, analysis, efficiency and solvency.
Interim Mayor Ed Lee’s proposed 5-year budgets (for the first time ever) are being sold by many interests as popular opinion, but in fact they represent the latest version of SF corruption: vested interests lining their pockets with long-term public funding.
Ed Lee is wrong on this one and we are in an economic situation that demands flexibility. I want to slow down development, compose flexible one-year budgets and make rapid changes to policies that don’t work in favor of those that do.
I propose a public and transparent method of austerity measures that gives respect where it is due and expects contributions from civic and private sectors in accordance with what it takes to right the ship of state, which lists, with no real captain since Mr. Newsom left.
Austerity measures are inevitable, but here in San Francisco we could do it completely differently from anywhere else in the world because of our culture and history as the most progressive major City in the U.S. We could generate income in totally new ways and respect our Labor by creating new schemes of reinvestment to curtail ballooning pensions and benefits schemes of the past which have incrementally become unsustainable.
All of this creativity and new methodology is only possible with new energy, and fortunately we have an instrument for the first time to allow that new energy to ascend to office: Instant Runoff Voting. IRV is a tool that could be used these next 4 months to create coalition government, but so far no one understands how to use it.
Instead of educating us about how to use Instant Runoff Voting (IRV) to help our candidates create coalitions and alliances, to seek out the best ideas of all candidates, The Chronicle and Guardian and Weekly and the blogs have done almost nothing to reduce confusion about Instant Runoff Voting. They and their “legitimate” candidates see it as a threat.
Hey, we voted for it – used properly it’s a good thing. It could force our politicians to be more collaborative if you in the media would just do your job. Compare its use elsewhere: Minneapolis voters seemed to understand it, while Oakland voters found it confusing.
What do you think the four months before election day were like in terms of explaining IRV in Minneapolis in comparison to Oakland? What kind of coverage and explanation have we been seeing so far? Our media and the City and the other candidates are failing us.
It feels like they want Instant Runoff Voting to fail so they can all clamor together about what a bad thing IRV is. I don’t believe they even understand it, but, visualizing it as threat from the get-go, have just turned full blast against.
Terry Baum will be the Green Party candidate for Mayor of SF, and with John Avalos in as a progressive Democrat, I am excited to say that I will, from today, be endorsing the following ticket as the best, really the only three choices for Mayor of SF, and in this order, guaranteed to turn this town around:
1. Karthik Rajan, first – the Independent outsider with super strong analytical and communications skills (read the site for details)
2. Terry Baum, second – a Green playwright who in 2004 ran for the United States House of Representatives as a member of the Green Party.
3. John Avalos, third – the Democrat, a progressive and insider
Keep Ed Lee as Chief Administrator – since he knows best where all the money has been going these last eight years – and we have the best administration for SF in 2012.
Neither John nor Terry can win outright. In Terry’s case, the Greens have been marginalized since Gavin Newsom outspent Matt Gonzales 23 to 1 and in John’s case, as a Democrat, within his party he won’t get the support – unless of course he compromises his vision to please the Party higher ups, which he won’t – and so he cannot win without a coalition.
But with your help – Democrats, Progressives, Greens, Libertarians and others – I can win. As an outsider with a clear message we can bring more groups of interests together. Read the site to see why – check out the FAQs and Campaign Promises. Mine is a different philosophy, exciting.
I am flexible, lucid, self-financed and unknown – unassailable. As an intelligent outsider, I can put all of the people our coalition wants into positions of power and only I can protect us from attacks, be strong in the face of the wealthy special interests and the cliquish cabals who have run our town into the mouth of the corporate sector.
I can analyze and document the system, do it transparently and scale back our economy. I have the ability and the agility and I have no interest in being a politician for life.
One year budgets for four years that are flexible, slashing the Mayor’s salary, taxing the right people at the right time, putting the resources toward sustainable growth and a healthy, solvent SF for years to come led by the knowledge of the Greens, the infrastructure of the Progressive Democrats and the personal and creative strength of an artist who cares not for money nor power, but for the betterment of our society.
Wow, sounds almost too good to be true – but it isn’t!
Just vote Karthik Rajan, Terry Baum and John Avalos first, second and third on your ballot for Mayor of SF on November 8, 2011.
Last year, I observed the Instant Runoff Voting [IRV] election for Mayor of Oakland closely. I studied the tactics of the candidates and the results. Oakland Mayor Jean Quan achieved something slow, steady and simple.
In addition to seeking supporters for her campaign outright, Mayor Quan created a coalition of interests for whom another primary candidate was their first choice. Through sound campaigning she convinced this coalition of disparate interests to select her second on their ballots.
Because of a lack of effort by the media and the City to properly explain IRV in advance of the election, many people ignorant of the math or the method never understood it and felt cheated. For these, and others, the idea that “everybody’s number two” won the election persisted. It is imperative we explain what IRV is and why it’s better democracy.
In fact, if traditional voting had occurred and a runoff had been held between Jean Quan and her nearest opponent Don Perata, it would have been a six-week long, expensive affair. Likely, Perata would have outspent Quan even as the supporters of Rebecca Kaplan, Joe Tuman and other candidates tilted to Mayor Quan. That is what IRV showed us: it used basic, smart, weighted statistics to allow the right decision to happen on election day, preventing the expense to the City of a second election and preventing the purchasing of such a runoff by monied interests.
Mayor Quan won because she covered more ground and was more present to more people than any of the other candidates and it paid off in a statistical advantage. That’s good democracy.
The opponents of IRV struggle to rename it Ranked Choice Voting because it implies something that smells bad.
The loudest in opposition to IRV are:
1. people who think the voters are too stupid to know how to use it and
2. those whose interest it threatens, namely big parties, monied candidates and
3. those who use the traditional way of doing things: buying the election.
In fact, IRV is an excellent tool because
1. it makes candidates seek alliance and coalition-building tactics
2. it makes voters learn more about more candidates and take greater responsibility for their vote.
3. it aids candidates interested in civic leadership but without the finances to use media by giving them a means to recognition
4. it eliminates the need for expensive runoff campaigns
5. the nature of the process reveals which candidate works best with others at large.
Instant Runoff Voting is complicated and somewhat hard to explain. What our politicians ought to be doing is explaining it in clear terms and helping voters use it to elect our leadership. Instead we see them resisting what threatens them.
My strategy is somewhat different. I believe I’m the best candidate to run the City. I hope you will gather this to be true by election day and vote for me first, but if you don’t, I hope you will see that it only makes sense to include me as a reformist, by voting for me second or third on your ballot. You can trust my promises, which are unique among legitimate candidates.
I will slash the Mayor’s salary first and then ask City employees to help me to do the same before making cuts. I will create a Giveback Fund to encourage the San Francisco value of sharing and community. I will audit and evaluate every department before raising any new revenue from taxation and eliminate waste that has run rampant. I will make the hard calls on pensions and benefits and help come up with creative means to generate revenue to avoid harsh austerity measures.
It’s in our best interest to elect me because I am not a politician. Rather, I’m a regular citizen concerned about waste, solvency and rampant and unchecked growth. I will function transparently and without attachment to special interests.
I can creatively cut costs, reduce waste and lead us to a more efficient San Francisco in which we pay less for a better quality of life. You can trust me to analyze and reform our City’s broken and corrupt system transparently, to save the City money doing it, and to create solvency and a surplus economy from the myriad wonderfulness of our City’s inherently talented and multilingual community.
As a one-time, reform candidate, Karthik Rajan is a smart second or third choice for voters and a great first choice to be the next Mayor of San Francisco.
MTK The Writist 