A Critical Look at the Race for Mayor
By: David Coffee
September 19, 2005


After hearing the results of last week’s Mayoral Primary, I couldn’t help but feel frustrated. In the beginning of the race we had over eight candidates, many of whom were political outsiders who were simply interested in helping improve their beloved community. They entered the race simply because they felt an obligation to do their part to help all of Buffalo. After the primary we lost our inspiring candidates, and we found ourselves immersed in the same old political nonsense, complete with name-calling and devoid of issues. We need to free ourselves from ‘politics as usual’ and the way to do it is to change our voting system so that it more accurately reflects the will of the people.

The Buffalo news on Friday described the Brown-Helfer mayoral contest as a battle between “two political heavyweights.” Now I’m not a gambler but I’m willing to bet that nobody in this city would describe their ideal mayor as a ‘political heavyweight’. That says a lot about the trap that we find ourselves in. Our system has lead us down a narrow hallway, and at the end we find two candidates that nobody truly wants. The system is not working, so the responsible thing to do is change the system. I’m not talking about getting a candidate elected, I’m talking about changing the rules that we use to elect our public officials.

There are many ways to translate democratic intent into political representation, and statistically our Winner-take-all plurality system is the worst. Elections like ours use a very simple method to select the winner, the candidate with the most votes wins. This is fine when there are only two candidates, but with three or more there is a possibility that the most favored candidate will lose. A candidate who would normally win in a two-way race might have their votes ‘stolen’ by a third candidate and therefore hand the election to a candidate who doesn’t actually have the support of the majority. This is the dilemma that led Steve Calvanesso to drop out of the primary early. He didn’t want to steal votes from Kevin Gaughan thereby helping Byron Brown win the nomination. If we had used a system of Instant Runoff Voting this problem could have been avoided entirely, voters would have three choices, and they could vote for their favorite candidate without fear of helping their least favorite candidate.

It is very possible to deal with this problem. The most efficient and democratic way is through Instant Runoff Voting. It works like this: After the votes are cast, the least favored candidates are eliminated from the ballot until someone achieves a majority of the votes. Voters rank the candidates in order of preference, if their first choice receives the smallest number of votes and is eliminated from the ballot their second choice is used. This process is repeated until one candidate has a majority. If Brown Gaughan and Calvaneso were competing and Gaughan ended up with the least number of votes he would be eliminated and his voters would use their second choice vote instead. The result would truly express the will of the voters, instead of making them frustrated.

Unlike the Runoff election used in the New York City Democratic primary, Instant Runoff Voting is much less costly or time consuming. The New York City Runoff election requires everyone to come back and vote again if nobody receives a majority in the first round of voting. Instant Runoff voting allows voters to rank their candidates so that they only need to vote once. If a voters first choice is eliminated they will use their second choice instead.

Why does it matter? What difference will it make? In this case, Calvaneso wouldn’t have dropped out. And voters would have been able to choose freely between three candidates without worrying about ‘wasting’ their vote or ‘spoiling’ the election by allowing someone to win with less than 50% of the vote.

We could easily use Instant Runoff Voting in our Democratic primary, or in any City or County election. It doesn’t take a federal or state law to change our system of voting, our community decides how we want to elect our own officials.

Think about it, does our current system elect the candidates that people want? What would happen if voters could record their true preference, rather than strategically voting for the lesser of two evils because they were scared of wasting their vote on a third candidate? And what about the candidates, would more people run? With additional candidates, would we talk about other issues and hear more diverse solutions? And what would happen to Buffalo if we had a vibrant public discourse led by the many candidates in each election? And what if our citizens could vote for any of those eight candidates without fear of their vote not counting, would thousands more people turn out to vote? I’m willing to bet that the change would be dramatic.

It’s not that we don’t have honest, qualified people running for office, the problem is that they are squeezed out of the race before the general public gets a chance to vote for them. Or they show up on the ballot as a third party that nobody acknowledges because we don’t want to waste our vote. We are all tired of the political machines, empty promises, and incompetent public officials, but we can’t seem to overcome them. We have good candidates but our system makes them so hard to elect. The most important thing we can do to get ourselves out of this mess is to change the rules of the system.

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More info on Instant Runoff Voting

In response to e:Paul's request for pictures from the protest in the square. here they are.
Also I'd like to give a quick update on how terrible things are in Iraq. Not only are more people dying and more terrorist attacks occurring per day, but the whole constitutional process is ripping the country apart. And the sad thing is that America doesn't care. We are simply buddying up with the two oil rich tribes in the country, and getting ready to help them start a war against the Sunni minority. We abandoned the Sunnis and they abandoned the political process. they tried to be involved, I heard many reports throughout the past 2 years of Sunni leaders wanting to sit down with the Americans and talk about how they can be involved and fairly represented politically, but most of the time the Americans didn't even acknowledge their request. Currently the Iraqi congress is going ahead with a theocratic constitution that will legally marginalize the Sunnis and leave them isolated on a territory that has no oil. hmm... is this the way to get to world peace? Remove people from power and thrust them into poverty! because that really is what's happening in Iraq right now.
if you want to know how and why we should get out of Iraq here's some further reading.
Previous post on the 'Iraqi Peace Process'

Recent Article 'Anti-Terror Strategy in Doubt on 911'

Now for the Pictures, I couldn't go but luckilly Molly took some pictures.

Bushville in DC!!!! Where can the victims of hurricane Katrina and the governments incompetence find shelter? on the Mall in DC Damn it!!!

Imagine 10,000 Katrina survivors camped on Bush’s doorstep.
Camped in the seat of power and media.
In the Government’s face.
With endless stories for the press.

quick history, during the great depression many people became unemployed and homeless, the clustered together and built homes out of whatever they could find. This self made homeless settlement was called a . it was named after president Herbert Hoover who was in office when the great depression began and who did very little to address the problems of the victims of the great depression. he was overwhelmingly voted out of office and replaced by FDR who swiftly ushered in the New Deal, which changed our nation from 'survival of the fittest' to 'we are only as strong as our weakest link'.

I find the idea extremely compelling, innovative, profound. it would be a firm step toward taking a serious look at our failings as a nation.

Lately I find myself reading the NY Times online all day. Below is another article that inspires me to keep coming back and checking for updates. the Times has just recently regained my respect. The media's job is to keep an eye on government, to ask politicians difficult questions that they'd rather not answer, to investigate what is going on behind the scenes because we average citizens don't have time or the resources to dig for the information ourselves. I don't care who's in power, Democrat, Independent, Big Business, the media should be dragging information out of them all, especially when they don't want to share, that's why freedom of the press is mentioned in our constitution, that's why the press is important. the NY Times has apparently gone back to it's roots and remembered why it became a respected paper in the first place, because it asks tough questions and publishes informed and profound stories.

anyway, below is the newest reason to read the Times.

Here is a must read from 9-1-05 "Life in the Bottom 80%"

and here's a link to some stories that I've archived recently

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Osama and Katrina
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
September 7, 2005

On the day after 9/11, I was in Jerusalem and was interviewed by Israeli TV. The reporter asked me, "Do you think the Bush administration is up to responding to this attack?" As best I can recall, I answered: "Absolutely. One thing I can assure you about these guys is that they know how to pull the trigger."

It was just a gut reaction that George Bush and Dick Cheney were the right guys to deal with Osama. I was not alone in that feeling, and as a result, Mr. Bush got a mandate, almost a blank check, to rule from 9/11 that he never really earned at the polls. Unfortunately, he used that mandate not simply to confront the terrorists but to take a radically uncompassionate conservative agenda - on taxes, stem cells, the environment and foreign treaties - that was going nowhere before 9/11, and drive it into a post-9/11 world. In that sense, 9/11 distorted our politics and society.

Well, if 9/11 is one bookend of the Bush administration, Katrina may be the other. If 9/11 put the wind at President Bush's back, Katrina's put the wind in his face. If the Bush-Cheney team seemed to be the right guys to deal with Osama, they seem exactly the wrong guys to deal with Katrina - and all the rot and misplaced priorities it's exposed here at home.

These are people so much better at inflicting pain than feeling it, so much better at taking things apart than putting them together, so much better at defending "intelligent design" as a theology than practicing it as a policy.

For instance, it's unavoidably obvious that we need a real policy of energy conservation. But President Bush can barely choke out the word "conservation." And can you imagine Mr. Cheney, who has already denounced conservation as a "personal virtue" irrelevant to national policy, now leading such a campaign or confronting oil companies for price gouging?

And then there are the president's standard lines: "It's not the government's money; it's your money," and, "One of the last things that we need to do to this economy is to take money out of your pocket and fuel government." Maybe Mr. Bush will now also tell us: "It's not the government's hurricane - it's your hurricane."

An administration whose tax policy has been dominated by the toweringly selfish Grover Norquist - who has been quoted as saying: "I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub" - doesn't have the instincts for this moment. Mr. Norquist is the only person about whom I would say this: I hope he owns property around the New Orleans levee that was never properly finished because of a lack of tax dollars. I hope his basement got flooded. And I hope that he was busy drowning government in his bathtub when the levee broke and that he had to wait for a U.S. Army helicopter to get out of town.

The Bush team has engaged in a tax giveaway since 9/11 that has had one underlying assumption: There will never be another rainy day. Just spend money. You knew that sooner or later there would be a rainy day, but Karl Rove has assumed it wouldn't happen on Mr. Bush's watch - that someone else would have to clean it up. Well, it did happen on his watch.

Besides ripping away the roofs of New Orleans, Katrina ripped away the argument that we can cut taxes, properly educate our kids, compete with India and China, succeed in Iraq, keep improving the U.S. infrastructure, and take care of a catastrophic emergency - without putting ourselves totally into the debt of Beijing.

So many of the things the Bush team has ignored or distorted under the guise of fighting Osama were exposed by Katrina: its refusal to impose a gasoline tax after 9/11, which would have begun to shift our economy much sooner to more fuel-efficient cars, helped raise money for a rainy day and eased our dependence on the world's worst regimes for energy; its refusal to develop some form of national health care to cover the 40 million uninsured; and its insistence on cutting more taxes, even when that has contributed to incomplete levees and too small an Army to deal with Katrina, Osama and Saddam at the same time.

As my Democratic entrepreneur friend Joel Hyatt once remarked, the Bush team's philosophy since 9/11 has been: "We're at war. Let's party."

Well, the party is over. If Mr. Bush learns the lessons of Katrina, he has a chance to replace his 9/11 mandate with something new and relevant. If that happens, Katrina will have destroyed New Orleans, but helped to restore America. If Mr. Bush goes back to his politics as usual, he'll be thwarted at every turn. Katrina will have destroyed a city and a presidency.

Thankfully the cats have adjusted to each other very well, just in time to be left alone for the day. Dar, the older cat is now acting like a big sister. When I got home they were both sleeping but Dar came out to greet me at the door. when she heard the little one jump down from the bed in the other room, she pranced over to her and licked her tiny head a couple times. I could tell that they had been playing together all day, and at this point they are comfortable together. The new kitten has some goo coming from her brown eye and we have to wash it a few times a day with a cotton ball and salene. I think that seeing us care for the kitten like that has kicked in some of Dar's maternal instincts, and replaced the the confrontational, alpha-kitty instincts. here's some pictures,




Being cute again


Rev Playing with Dar