Left In Lowell

As mentioned previously, we’ve been working on putting together comprehensive information on our endorsement process. It takes time to do all of these things and I hope you’ll have patience with us. The full write up of our process is now on our website. Though the last thread on this got heated and such, it does appear that a lot of people are interested in what is going on, and that is a great thing.

The endorsement process employed took a LOT of time, effort, and grunt work - including following up with candidates to give them as much chance as possible to respond; gathering the responses, candidate literature, websites, and other campaign paraphernalia; pouring over the last two years of Council votes to determine which were pivotal; working out the fairest process to weigh incumbents and challengers equally; testing the scoring to be sure the process worked well and fairly; and of course, there were the hours put in by the endorsement committee to actually do the scoring.

There were no preconceived ideas of who would get endorsed going in - in fact, it quickly became clear that it was “anyone’s guess” who would come out on top, before the process began in earnest. Each member of the committee independently produced their scores on their own before coming together.

The most fascinating part to me was the consistency of scoring once the committee brought their scores together to average. This to me indicated that, despite the disparate backgrounds and ideology of the members of the committee, that our scoring system worked well. The largest portion of the score came from the questionnaire, so it really came down to the candidates’ understanding of the issues and their ideas for Lowell. To quote the website:

With regard to the internal consistency of the process, the overlap between individual committee members’ top 9 scorers before averaging, and the top 9 endorsed in the end, was considerable. While no one subcommittee member had all of their personal top 9 scorers (before averaging) represented in the final list (after averaging), three members had their top 8 candidates endorsed the other member had their top 7 endorsed. Furthermore, every candidate in the final endorsement list but one had at least 3 subcommittee members rate him/her in the top 9. The one exception candidate was represented in all four committee members’ top ten scoring.

I find that to be a very good outcome indeed.

For all the work the candidates did sending in their questionnaires, thank you so much. I know our list of questions was long and we didn’t make it easy for you! We do sincerely wish there wasn’t a cut off and that we could endorse more than nine without diluting the impact we could have.

I would like to make one thing clear, we will not be releasing individual scores. We are not interested in preferring any candidate on the slate over any other, and our list will be alphabetically, as they are on the ballot.

Jackie has a great post about the recent choice voting article in the Lowell Sun; how it took Gail Cenik of the Election and Census Commission out of context and, in effect, made her look like she said something she didn’t. (Anyone know much about this new reporter, Erin Smith? She’s off to a bang of a start continuing the Sun editor’s tradition of bias it would seem.)

Jackie actually sounds like a real reporter in her post, going into Cenik’s actual context and quoting her. Maybe Erin can learn a thing or two?

What else is great from that post is the comment Jackie posted later on, quoting Victoria of One Lowell on choice voting (bold mine):

There will be voter education prior to our first election with Choice Voting and by law, voters are allowed to have up to 3 ballots if they make a mistake. When a ranked voting system was implemented in 2006 in Burlington, VT, the validity rate was 99.9% for the first election and it went up to 99.99% for the second election.

When people refer to the complexity, they generally are talking about the vote tabulation. In the United States, unlike most democratic countries, the winner take all system is used for almost all elections. In that kind of a system, vote tabulation simply requires counting one at a time. Anything other than that will be more complicated.

Voters do not need to know the details of the tabulation, as the optical scanning equipment will be programmed to do that. However, if they want to know, we have a short video and other information on our website: http://www.fairvotelowell.org.

What voters do need to know, though, is that they can trust that the vote tabulation equipment and software are programmed correctly so that they can have confidence that their votes are accurately counted, same thing they need to know with our current system. It is important to be clear that the same people who run Lowell’s elections now, and who do so accurately and impartially, will continue to run and monitor Lowell’s elections in the future, no matter how the scanning equipment is programmed to count votes. If you have faith and trust in our current election officials, you should be assured that those same folks will continue their diligence with whatever voting system we have in place in Lowell.

Here’s the key point: one, that a lot of other places, and whole countries, use this system. Contrary to popular opinion, the US is not the only democracy in the world. Two, that all we, the voters, need to remember is how to count, 1 to 9, in order of preference. Easy as pie. And three, that this system produces fairer RESULTS. More minorities will be given a better shot to be represented on the City Council and School Committees. Given how discouraging the past couple of elections were to all our minority voters, can we sit by and keep allowing our system to shut them out? Think about how much support Mehmed Ali had in this city two years ago. Is he sitting on the Council? He would be, if we had proportional voting in 2007.