[EL] Finding a "winner" out of the Iowa caucuses

Sun Feb 9 08:36:08 PST 2020

(My apologies, but my keyboard sometimes gets away ahead of me in hitting
"send" to email . I'll finish this email below where that happened
earlier.... There were a couple annoying missing elements to it!   - Rob)

On Sun, Feb 9, 2020 at 10:28 AM Rob Richie <rr at fairvote.org> wrote:

> Adding to this point, "winning" with well under 30% can more a product of
> dumb luck of votes happen to be split than realtive performance. Even with
> Iowa having a horse-and-buggy form of ranked choice voting that makes more
> votes count for delegates, it doesn't enable a true "instant runoff" where
> we would have seen who would have won head-to-head in a contest between
> Buttigieg and Sanders.
>
> The media does tend to treat these as winner take all contests, but of
> course they're not. This year is going to be fascinating, as the Bloomberg
> campaign has called the 'bluff"  of the early states being determinative
> and instead  saying, "Look, nearly all the  actual delegates are allocated
> in the contests after the first four in February, so that's where we're
> going to focus." His campaign will have far more money than any other
> campaign (with the possible exception of Steyer) and is spending heavily on
> field as well as TV, so we will see what it means, especially if more than
> two of the current frontrunners keep running after South Carolina.
>
> There's a lot of timely reform conversation going on that I suspect will
> come with real changes before the 2024 nomination process. Last weekend, I
> presented on building ranked choice voting into the presidential nomination
> process at the excellent Shambaugh conference
> <https://clas.uiowa.edu/polisci/Shambaugh-2020Caucus>organized by
> Caroline Tolbert of the University of Iowa. Nearly all the national parties
> now use RCV to pick their leaders in Canada and the United Kingdom, and the
> idea is getting more support here. A few associated links:
>
> *  Dan Pfeiffer of Pod Save America calls for using ranked choice voting
> in winner-take-all primaries
> <https://crooked.com/articles/iowa-fix-broken-primary/>
> * This Chicago Tribune oped
> <https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct-opinion-iowa-new-hampshire-primaries-fair-20200131-kyrpgilryzdptak53fjyr65e6i-story.html>
> of mine as widely picked up on a comprehensive reform of the nomination
> process
> *  I was on Matter of Fact with Soledad O'Brien
> <https://matteroffact.tv/is-it-time-to-get-rid-of-the-electoral-college/> this
> weekend  on The Young Turks
> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=7&v=AZgHo8U_u6M&feature=emb_logo> on
> Thursday.
>
> Rob
>
>
>
> On Sat, Feb 8, 2020 at 3:43 PM Levitt, Justin <justin.levitt at lls.edu>
> wrote:
>
>> I can see the point when it comes to naming a single occupant of a
>> particular office.  If one person gets the most overall votes and somebody
>> else is given the office, that’s fruit for a discussion about whether the
>> system is operating as we want.
>>
>>
>>
>> (Though there’s another big caveat: strategies change based on the rules
>> of the contest, and I wouldn’t expect the person who wins the most votes
>> when that’s not the metric for awarding the office to *necessarily* be
>> the person who wins the most votes when it is.  In Super Bowl 52, the
>> Patriots had 613 total yards while the Eagles had 538.  The Eagles ended up
>> with more points, and won.  If it were clear from the outset that the team
>> with the most yards would have won, I don’t know that either team would
>> have played the same game, and I don’t know that the Patriots would have
>> ended up with more yards.  In Iowa, if the popular vote mattered more than
>> the delegate apportionment, I don’t know that the candidates would have run
>> the same campaigns or used the same organizing strategies.)
>>
>>
>>
>> But my point is a little different.  It appears that the popular vote and
>> delegate count were both quite close for Buttigieg and Sanders.  And we can
>> have plentiful discussions about whether the system for awarding the
>> delegates makes sense.   But we’re not choosing the nominee based on the
>> Iowa caucuses, and the difference between the delegates awarded to
>> Buttigieg or Sanders in Iowa (or any lingering uncertainty over the exact
>> number awarded to each) is *exceedingly* unlikely to affect the outcome
>> of the Democratic nomination by the time we get to July.  It seems there
>> are a lot of people exercised about who “won” Iowa – and in particular, I
>> was reacting to the story about the AP’s inability to “call” the race.  And
>> I guess I’m asking whether this problem is an actual problem or a problem
>> of our own making because we need rigid winner/loser narratives and
>> misunderstand what the Iowa caucuses are designed to do.
>>
>>
>>
>> To return to the football metaphor, I think the rough equivalent may be
>> trying to assess who “won” the first six minutes of the Super Bowl.  I can
>> fully understand the effort put into deciding the accuracy of ruling on
>> every incremental opportunity to accrue points, and even in debating the
>> individual rules deciding when points can be accrued and under what
>> conditions.  But asking who “won” the first six minutes seems like a
>> question that’s entirely beside the point of the Super Bowl itself, and
>> only relevant to a prop bet that might itself be destructive if allowed to
>> become more important in the popular mindset than the actual rules for the
>> contest.
>>
>> Justin
>>
>>
>>
>> *From:* Lonna Atkeson <atkeson at unm.edu>
>> *Sent:* Saturday, February 08, 2020 12:17 PM
>> *To:* Levitt, Justin <justin.levitt at lls.edu>
>> *Cc:* Rick Hasen <rhasen at law.uci.edu>; Election Law Listserv <
>> law-election at uci.edu>
>> *Subject:* Re: [EL] Finding a "winner" out of the Iowa caucuses
>>
>>
>>
>> This is about small d democracy—if who wins in that scenario is
>> different from who wins the delegates then the system is unfair/rigged.
>>
>>
>>
>> This isn’t about the rules of the process per se, it’s about the fairness
>> of those rules. This is, in part, why Sanders folks insisted on this info
>> after 2016.
>>
>>
>>
>> What is the distortion is an interesting and relevant question.   Who got
>> the most votes and whether it is fair seems particularly relevant to
>> Democrats  who are advocating the elimination of the electoral college and
>> pushing for more democracy.
>>
>> Lonna
>>
>> On Feb 7, 2020, at 4:55 PM, Levitt, Justin <justin.levitt at lls.edu> wrote:
>>
>> 
>>
>> *  UNM-IT Warning:* This message was sent from outside of the LoboMail
>> system. Do not click on links or open attachments unless you are sure the
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>>
>> The formula for awarding delegates in the Iowa caucus is unquestionably
>> complex (and I’m no fan, for that and other reasons), but it’s my
>> understanding that that process turns on proportional levels of support
>> precinct by precinct, and later county by county, but not statewide.  If
>> I’m mistaken about that, I’d welcome the correction.  But if it’s true that
>> delegates are awarded based on local results, is there any point to
>> branding a statewide “winner” of the Iowa caucuses beyond the need to fill
>> in the blanks on an artificial narrative?
>>
>>
>>
>> Put differently: assume that Buttigieg won either 12 or 13 delegates to
>> the national convention, and Sanders won either 12 or 13 delegates to the
>> national convention, and that we eventually know for sure whether the
>> answer for each candidate is 12 or 13.  Real question: why does it matter
>> whether the AP is able to tell us who “won,” beyond widespread public
>> misunderstanding of the significance of what it means to “win” in this
>> context?  Imagine it was a precise tie, and each candidate got the same
>> number of delegates, so that neither “won.”  I understand full well why
>> that matters in the perceptions horserace … but the lack of a “winner”
>> would have zero significance in terms of progress toward picking a
>> nominee.  Is the inability to “call” a winner the problem, or is it our
>> need to have a clearly branded “winner”?
>>
>>
>>
>> Justin
>>
>>
>> AP Unable to Call Winner in Iowa Democratic Caucus Due to Closeness and
>> “Irregularities” <https://electionlawblog.org/?p=109388>
>>
>> Posted on February 6, 2020 3:51 pm
>> <https://electionlawblog.org/?p=109388> by *Rick Hasen*
>> <https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>
>>
>> Wow
>> <https://apnews.com/4f9044fe46f551d397d48dd8ca3d58db?utm_medium=AP_Politics&utm_campaign=SocialFlow&utm_source=Twitter>,
>> it’s this bad:
>>
>> *“The Associated Press calls a race when there is a clear indication of a
>> winner. Because of a tight margin between former Mayor Pete Buttigieg and
>> Sen. Bernie Sanders and the irregularities in this year’s caucus process,
>> it is not possible to determine a winner at this point,” said Sally Buzbee,
>> AP’s senior vice president and executive editor.*
>>
>> Posted in Uncategorized <https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=1>
>>
>>
>>
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>
>
>
> --
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> Rob Richie
> President and CEO, FairVote
> 6930 Carroll Avenue, Suite 240
> Takoma Park, MD 20912
> rr at fairvote.org  (301) 270-4616  http://www.fairvote.org
> *FairVote Facebook <https://www.facebook.com/FairVoteReform>*   *FairVote
> Twitter <https://twitter.com/fairvote>*   My Twitter
> <https://twitter.com/rob_richie>
>
> Thank you for considering a *donation
> <http://www.fairvote.org/donate>. Enjoy our video on ranked choice voting
> <https://youtu.be/CIz_nzP-W_c>!*
>

-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Rob Richie
President and CEO, FairVote
6930 Carroll Avenue, Suite 240
Takoma Park, MD 20912
rr at fairvote.org  (301) 270-4616  http://www.fairvote.org
*FairVote Facebook <https://www.facebook.com/FairVoteReform>*   *FairVote
Twitter <https://twitter.com/fairvote>*   My Twitter
<https://twitter.com/rob_richie>

Thank you for considering a *donation
<http://www.fairvote.org/donate>. Enjoy our video on ranked choice voting
<https://youtu.be/CIz_nzP-W_c>!*
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