Gilmore Wins in Alameda with Majority, Perata Loses in Oakland with Majority
Ancient Athenians are credited with ‘inventing’ democracy. But their system involved the winner getting the fewest votes, not the most. Athenians threw their negative or ‘bong’ style vote at the candidate they liked the least.
The result was some seriously milquetoast leadership that likely led to their downfall.
By contrast, modern American democracy has been more ‘wedge’ style or divisive in the late Lee Atwater (Bush Senior’s strategist) tradition, leading to a different kind of downfall because we keep electing leaders who win by dividing rather than coalescing, after they gobble up blocks of single issue and special interest voters enough to get to a plurality. It’s called “Ranked Choice Voting.”
The advantage of our new ranked voting system is that you need a bit of both Athenian and modern style appeal in order to win, but it has it’s downsides.
Marie Gilmore won the majority of the votes in Alameda, making her mayor. Perata won the majority of the votes in Oakland, making him… not mayor. Fact is, Don Perata was effectively the absolute last choice of 51% of the public, but he was not declared Mayor of Oakland.
Under Athenian democracy we certainly wouldn’t have ended up with him, and likely would have ended up with Kaplan or someone else totally below the radar. Yet with ranked choice voting, we end up with a leader who both stands out yet does not attract quite so much negativity along the way, in this case Mayor elect Quan.
Besides Perata, the real losers in this evolution of democracy are his political consultants. Tramutola, LLC certainly should have understood the basic math behind ranked voting, even if his client didn’t. And Perata needs to be praised for leaving the sore loser Tramutola notion of a lawsuit behind, and pledging his support to the new Quan administration.
Here’s a couple eye opening links on the consultant:
