MONTPELIER – Barring a legal challenge Paul Poirier will be heading to the House come January and, for the first time in eight years, Leo Valliere will be staying home.

A recount that was requested by Valliere last week today dashed the four-term Republican lawmaker’s long-shot bid to retain his local legislative seat in Barre. The final tally, according to the hand recount wrapped up shortly before 3 p.m., was Poirier, 918, Valliere, 893.

At first glance it does't sound like good news. Yesterday, Bush had a ceremony at the White House to honor the two composers of such insipid works, I hesitate to call them music, as “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and even the execrable “It's a Small World”.

So where's the good news here? If you don't see it, you may be looking at it wrong. Just think. If Bush had realized back in 2001 that he could play president by handing out awards like these two vandals, how much trouble could we all have been saved?

You can thank me later for not directly linking to any of the so-called music these guys produced.

It's Saturday, it's kind of quiet, and we've just come through a tough election fight. How about something a little lighter?

With gratitude to PZ Myers, here's our first edition of “Crash This Poll”.

Today's poll: “Should terrorists have the same rights in U.S. courts as “regular” criminals?”

 There's so much wrong with this poll question, from the assumption that we already know that somebody charged with a crime is a terrorist (or even a “regular” criminal), to the assumption that it makes us safer to ditch our civil liberties, that this poll seems amply deserving of crashing.

Also, there are only 14 votes so far, so we can make a difference.

I think we've had some excellent discussions on GMD this week. Set aside the hostility, hurt feelings, and recriminations, and people are genuinely engaged in the real questions, including how we get more liberal candidates elected to office in Vermont. I'm starting up a new thread to try to move the discussion along.

A couple of initial thoughts.

First, I know that calling someone a “spoiler” hurts some people's feelings. You might think that this alone means we shouldn't use it, but I disagree. I think there are definitely occasions where it is appropriate and meaningful (anyone here remember Ralph Nader in 2000, or Paul Poirier in 1988?).  The fact that I'm calling someone a spoiler doesn't mean I'm “stealing your vote” either.

Still, it's blindingly obvious that there was no spoiler in this year's gubernatorial election. Any time the winner takes 55% of the votes, neither losing candidate deprived any other losing candidate of enough votes to win.

Second, although the party bosses (see how I was able to type that with a straight face?) don't control everything, I do think David has a point that if the two parties could coordinate our efforts more we could avoid electoral conflicts that harm our common interests. After all, we've been known to be at least a little critical of their decisions to run candidates who turn out to be nothing but spoilers, so they could do the same to us.

The question, then, is how we can move forward on our common goals without asking the members of either party to abandon their identity or just cave on demand, and I have a couple of ideas for that.

When Anthony Pollina was saying he was considering a run for governor, and saying that he wanted the support of the Democratic Party, I suspect I wasn't the only person who pointed out to him that the most straightforward way to do it would be to enter the Democratic primary and win.

He wasn't willing to do this, in part because of 17 V.S.A. § 2353(b). It says, “A person's name shall not be listed as a candidate on the primary ballot of more than one party in the same election.” This means that if he had run in the Democratic primary he would have been prohibited from running in the Progressive primary, and at the time this was not an acceptable choice to him.

If it had been possible this year Pollina could have run in both the D and P primaries, probably won them both, and he would have gotten his wish–a head to head race against Douglas. We could accomplish by repealing this section. It's only been on the books since 1977, and as far as I can tell it's never been cited in any reported decision of the Vermont Supreme Court or any other court. This change also wouldn't take a constitutional amendment, so it should be easier to accomplish than instituting IRV. What it would do, though, is create the conditions for fusion candidates, generally between D's and P's in Vermont, but potentially involving other third parties.

I'd like to see legislators from both the Democratic and Progressive Parties get behind legislation to repeal this section, preferably during the first year of the coming biennium, so that we can get at least the possibility of a head to head race between Douglas and the strongest liberal candidate, whether that's Pollina, Zuckerman, Racine, or somebody else.

Next, I like the idea of moving to a system in which there are no minority winners for statewide elections (and potentially for legislative races as well), whether IRV or some other system. Why are people so heavily invested in IRV? Why not set up a runoff election, the way they do in some states, if no candidate receives a majority?

Although I'm not an expert in voting theory, the reading I have done suggests that IRV might set up some circumstances in which a less popular candidate defeates a more popular one, which we would presumably want to avoid.

As I understand it, the main arguments in favor of IRV instead of a runoff election are cost and the dropoff in turnout that would be expected in a second election. I'm not convinced that either of these is a really good argument against it, though. With regard to cost I would say that getting a democratic outcome is more important than the incremental cost of holding a second-round election.

I'm also probably less concerned about a dropoff in turnout than some people, mainly because I don't care that much about protecting the electoral positions of people who can't be bothered to come out and vote. They're not disenfranchised, just lazy, uninformed, or unconcerned. If they don't vote, they've made the choice to let the rest of us decide who will govern them.

These two changes, eliminating the one-primary rule, and allowing for some kind of runoff, won't fix everything. They won't, for example, guarantee that a single ambitious individual won't run for office even when the party leadership prefers to stay out of a particular race. What they will do, though, is create the possibility for the supporters of a primary loser to line up behind the primary winner, potentially after extracting commitments from the winner, and united to defeat a candidate that the supporters of both chalengers agree is the greater of two evils.

Because really, the clearest thing you can say about two candidates, one of whom got 21.3% and one of whom got 21.7%, is that they both lost.

Once again, David Broder displays his infallible ability to parrot the conventional wisdom while failing to question his conservative interlocutors.

The occasion here is the column today about Republican governors. The headline created for the column by the Free Press was Broder column: Governors like Douglas offer hope. 

There was actually only one paragraph in the column about Douglas, but I guess you can't blame them for emphasizing the local angle. Still, what he says about Douglas embodies the credulity that is one of the hallmarks of Broder's writing:

When I asked Vermont's Douglas how he explained it, he said that his fellow governors “put progress ahead of partisanship, as I've done here. We have generous social programs, but we also have fiscal responsibility. We're the only state without a constitutional requirement to balance our budget, but we don't need it. Our deficit is zero.” 

Now anyone who knows what has happened in Vermont these past six years knows that Douglas's claim to put progress ahead of partisanship is, simply put, a lie, but you would never get any hint from Broder's column that another interpretation of Douglas's administration.

As I say, this is a good example of high Broderism: nothing really changes, the power structure stays in control, and if you want to know what's really happened, just ask The Dean. In this case, disregard the seismic shift in the election: we had slave states voting for a black President! We had the majority of under-30 Cuban-Americans in Florida voting for a Democrat! But, according to the immutable tenets of high Broderism, the controlling center controls, and always will.

Even if it takes an effort worthy of Procrustes to fit the story.

1. Fill in the blank. The countries in NAFTA are: _______________________.

2. Africa is a:

(a) continent

(b) country.

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Now that we know who won, we also know that our Democratic electors will be the ones to cast Vermont's three electoral votes for Barack Obama.

To recap, our three electors are:

Euan Bear (Windsor Franklin County Chair)

Sen. Claire Ayer (Addison County)

and Kevin Christie (Windsor County–also an Obama delegate to Denver).

They'll be meeting in Montpelier on December 15. It's purely ceremonial, but in a historic year like this, a little ceremony is certainly in order.

Cross posted at Rational Resistance:

 There is lots of great feeling today, and with good reason. I do think it's worthwhile, though, to keep in mind what the Obama haters are saying. It tells us what we'll be up against in the coming four or eight years. I assume there are any number of places to find this information, but I'm going back to the old reliable Facebook group, Anti-Obama and Damn Proud of it.

One particular point comes from the morning of Election Day, from the status line of a member's page:

[User] is disgusted and not optimistic about todays outcome.

Now think about this for a minute, and consider what it means. “Unhappy”? Okay. “Worried”? Why not? But “disgusted”? What would give rise to a feeling of disgust or revulsion? It seems pretty obvious to me that a policy disagreement can't make you disgusted. A visceral reaction like disgust comes from something else, and if it's not disagreement with Obama's political positions, what is left? That's right, the reaction that someone “disgusting” like him has no business getting elected president. This really seems like a pretty blatant expression of racism.

But that's just one person. Let's see what some of the rest of them are saying:

I doubt he will make it through his first term, let alone a second term. I'm hoping for an early Christmas present this year, if anyone knows what I'm thinking.

🙁
our country is fucked in the ass, we arent gonna have any rights left, im not racist but osama obama is gonna fuck this county up, we're gonna be as important as canada soon

There are more bright spots than dark ones. Still, the fact that these people are willing to talk about the assassination of our newly elected president, or seceding, demonstrates that we have a long road ahead of us.

220 Electoral votes.

California has 55.

Do the math.