…should resign. If he does so soon, Burlington could even elect a mayor in a required special election using IRV, before the legislature would approve the charter change just passed by voters.
I’m not a Burlington resident, so he aint my mayor. But as of this week, the turmoil surrounding this mayor has started to impact me – and that impact is only going to get worse.
Here’s what I’m talking about. Politically, there have been several problems with the pro-IRV effort in Burlington. It was poorly organized. It didn’t seem to take the election seriously. And then there’s the ongoing oozing condescension issue of proponents refusing to respectfully acknowledge and address wavering voters concerns – even other liberal voters. That right there is just so many flavors of self-defeating dumb, I can’t emphasize it enough. Kurt Wright was largely correct when he said “Now, they want to talk about having a fuller understanding and trying to educate and re-educate the public but you know what? What people reject WAS a system where you need to educate and re-educate the public..” Too many supporters openly scoffed at the challenge that perspective created.
But despite all those dynamics, IRV did pass in the first place – and it wasn’t about to be challenged. What tipped the scales in this case was an angry electorate determined to express what little power and control they felt they had in the face of a city hall openly contemptuous of rules, transparency, dissent, and possibly legality – and a city council that vascillated between disinterested passivity and ineffectual noisemaking.
But mainly it was focused at Bob Kiss. Anger at Kiss is what really tipped the scales against IRV. No one disputes that – except, apparently, for Bob Kiss, who still – still – will not accept any responsibility. And every time he refuses to offer even the slightest degree of humility or introspection one might expect – he makes it all worse.
And now he’s dragged IRV down with him.
What that means is that all of us in Vermont who have a stake in IRV and other progressive policies have a stake in this. If not for the Mayor’s intransigence, Burlington would still have IRV. Period. Even some of his fellows in the Progressive Party have tentatively begun criticizing him in public – and for the Progressive Party institution, that’s nothing short of a revolutionary act.
And now that there’s a glimmer of hope for the publicly owned Burlington Telecom, Kiss’s refusal to make changes will likely put the nail in its coffin as well. When half of my prediction – that an anonymous donor would step up to bail it out – came true, it did so in a way I didn’t mean at all. The donor was not anonymous, or Progressive Party connected, it was a group of investors that included BT visionary Tim Nulty and former Kiss nemesis Andy Montroll, who will bail out the utility if they are given the reins. After reading this excellent, comprehensive history of BT from 7 Days’ Kevin Kelley this week, I can’t imagine anything better for renewing the sense of enthusiasm and mission among BT employees – thus reinvigorating the entire operation.
But it already seems clear that Kiss & Jonathan Leopold’s pride will not allow them to consider the option. At some level, one wonders if they’ve taken a “if we can’t have it, no one can” attitude.
So I imagine another progressive accomplishment will soon go down in flames.
Look, I understand that Mayor Kiss is a nice guy with a good heart. Everybody says so. And my own personal judgment of a person always comes down to whether or not their heart is in the right place, and I have no doubt whatsoever that Kiss’s is. But he has some problems in this office. As I see it, those problems are not simply impacting Burlingtonians anymore.
The first step is supposed to be to acknowledge you have a problem. Kiss won’t even take step one. Whatever other issues there are of governance and the running of City Hall aside (and there are many kicking around that the public hasn’t even heard about – at least from what’s reaching my ears – and believe me, we’re looking into them), Bob Kiss has started setting back progressive policies by decades. If he cares more about those policies than his own pride, if he’s not willing to completely change his tune and approach, he should do the honorable thing and step down before he leads us all back into the Dark Ages.
I agree. I like the idea of him resigning while IRV is still in effect and maybe we can find a fiery Progressive who is a competent and accountable mayor. We just by a handful of votes in Ward 2, to the guy that prosecuted my friends for standing up for education last year. Now IRVs gone. I’m pissed. Thank god for march 4th.
… or of the Progressive Party or progressive agenda.
In my opinion, IRV and the Electoral College have qualities that are comparable. We can let out our breath and feel okay and say “The Electoral College method did okay” when the E.C. elects the same candidate as the popular vote. Indeed the E.C. doesn’t do too bad when it agrees with the popular vote which is most of the time, but when it doesn’t, then there is trouble. We feel it made a mistake and a majority of voters (at least a plurality) feel like the wrong candidate was elected and that we got screwed. It begs the question that if all the E.C. can do is either nothing (it elects the same as the popular vote) or, when it is effective, it never adds legitimacy to the election result, only dubiousness. Then why have it in the first place? Any argument to keep the E.C. is really only to one’s short-term political advantage.
Essentially, while the 2006 mayoral election worked out okay, the “beats-all” or Condorcet winner (as well as Plurality winner) was elected with IRV. But this was not the case in 2009.
Now, with the reactionaries, if they’re candidate was the Plurality winner, they will use that fig-leaf to dispute the legitimacy of the elected candidate. But the whole point of adopting the Ranked Ballot (that, unfortunately, had the IRV tabulation method attached to it) was that sometimes we know that the Plurality winner is not the majority supported candidate in a context with active 3rd parties and credible Independent candidates. So IRV could very well be doing what it was meant to do, to elect someone other than the Plurality winner. If it were to always agree with the Plurality method, there was no reason to investigate and adopt IRV in the first place.
But the problem with IRV is that by the very same metric that IRV decided that Bob Kiss was preferred by Burlington voters over Kurt Wright (by 252 votes), upon examination of the ballots (a public record), that same metric also said that Andy Montroll beat Wright by a greater 930 votes and, more saliently, Montroll beat Kiss by 587 votes. Montroll would have beaten any other candidate in the IRV final round had he been in the final round.
When IRV advocates claim that IRV elects the candidate with the “true majority”, they need to consider what they mean. Which majority is the true majority? Is it the majority that Kiss had over Wright (4313 to 4061)? Why? They wouldn’t say that the majority that it’s the 3971 to 3793 majority that Wright had over Dan Smith and declare Wright the winner of the election. The reason is that Wright gets beaten by someone else, both Kiss (the result that is published in the IRV final round) AND Montroll (a majority that IRV didn’t care about). The same can be applied to Kiss’s “true majority” over Wright (because Kiss also gets beaten by someone else).
The problem is that although Montroll beats every other candidate when the electorate was asked to choose between the two, the stupid IRV method decided that the election boiled down to being between two losers, Wright and Kiss. Imagine a tournament that does that: prevents the champion from getting into the finals and puts two lessor contestants into the finals where whichever one of them wins, is declared the “champion”, and receives the medal.
So, in order for the beats-all candidate to not win IRV, that candidate must be kept out of the final round. Then imagine if some numbers were hypothetically adjusted that allow that candidate to get into the final round, then the result of the election will be changed. This is at the root to three other known pathologies of the 2009 mayoral election. Those pathologies are:
Spoiler Effect. Despite the claims of the IRV advocates, Kurt Wright was a spoiler: had he not been in the race, Andy would advance to the final round and beat Kiss.
Punishment to a voting group for not Voting Strategically. If 372 “GOP Prog-haters” had anticipated and accepted that their favorite candidate would not win, they could have insincerely ranked Montroll above Wright and kept Kiss from winning. So, if IRV had survived, what would these people be thinking when they go to the polls in 2012? Could it be (if they’re savvy): “In this town full of liberals, I gotta choose between Liberal and More Liberal, because when I vote for the guy I really like, More Liberal gets elected.” That choice has got to make some people unhappy. It is precisely the burden of strategic voting we were trying to avoid by adopting IRV in the first place, but rather than eliminate it, IRV only transferred that burden from the liberal majority (who didn’t have to make a painful choice between Montroll and Kiss, just to keep the GOP from beating a divided majority) to the GOP Prog-haters.
Non-monotonicity: If 744 Wright voters had decided that they actually liked Kiss better, and changed their vote on the way to the polls from Wright to Kiss, they would have kept Wright from advancing to the IRV final round, with Montroll advancing instead. And we know what would happen if Montroll gets into the final round: Kiss would lose. Voters don’t like it when their vote for a candidate does not positively help that candidate and can plausibly claim that they have a right to have their primary vote (the first choice on a ranked ballot or the only vote on a traditional ballot) not decrease the chances or ability of that candidate to be elected.
None of these problems would have occurred if IRV elected the same candidate as the Condorcet “beats-all” method. Like the Electoral College, IRV doesn’t do too bad when it elects the Condorcet winner. And that happened in Burlington in 2006.
But the 2009 mayoral election in Burlington is a classic case study of the failure of IRV to accomplish the very goals for which it was adopted. It should be considered an object lesson.
Another known problem with IRV (that is not a problem with the Condorcet method) which happens in any IRV election, even the ones that do not have anomalies, is that IRV is not “precinct summable”. It must be centrally counted (and recounted after ballots are transferred between rounds). There is no practical way for precincts (or “wards” in Burlington) to perform subtotal counts done locally (with results publically transmitted to the media and interested candidates or parties at the ward level who can then check wider election results by adding the same numbers that the City Clerk does). This is important to prevent possible problems or questions regarding election integrity. Even though it uses the same Ranked Ballot, the Condorcet (“beats-all”) method is fine with precinct summability.
Just in case anyone is wondering, I voted NO on Question 5 and am greatly disappointed in the result. If Q5 had failed, but barely, the Ranked Ballot would be retained and maybe a coalition of folks on both sides could have gotten a ballot question together for 2011 and changed the tabulation method to something less stupid than IRV. But now, all is lost for at least a generation. Even though Q5 passed by just 300 votes (out of 7700), the “One vote” folks are swaggering down Church Street (like W did in Washington in 2001) like they own the place. Now we must just accept that God herself ordained the “traditional” ballot, less information will be collected from voters than was collected with the ranked ballot, and we’ll never even know if the True Majority winner was denied election or not.
Ignorance is bliss, I guess.
robert bristow-johnson
(who lives in the far north end in Burlington)
It pains me to agree with this. I actually thought his incredible ignorance of popular politics would be a plus as mayor. I thought he’d be someone who could focus on the issues in a unique way given his attitude towards politics. In his non-response to the BT controversy and his response to Tuesday’s vote that ignorance is starting to look like disrespect for the voters.
Mayor Kiss needs to make some sort of strong statement that shows he is in touch with reality or he needs to step aside.
I would be incredibly satisfied and encouraged if Jonathan Leopold would leave City Hall. Whether or not Leopold is guilty of misleading anyone, the perception is that he is. Perception is important in politics. Bob needs to show he understands that.
I think it’s almost entirely Leopold. Bob is incredibly humble. Leopold exhibits hubris. The fact that it looks like they both have a problem with pride is a reason to dump Leopold.