We’ve made it to September! On the menu today: Last night, Alaska completed its special House election under the new ranked-choice-voting rules . . . and the Democrats came out the big winner, even though their candidate finished fourth in the first round of voting; a new study reveals that the learning loss during the Covid-19 pandemic and public-school shutdown was every bit as bad as you feared; and chewing over the challenge of originality in thrillers.
A Legitimate Electoral System . . . That Doesn’t Make Sense
Last night, Democrat Mary Peltola was elected to be Alaska’s lone member of the House of Representatives, beating Republican nominee and former governor Sarah Palin — even though in the first round of Alaska’s ranked-choice-voting system, Peltola finished fourth, with just 10 percent of the votes compared to Palin’s first-place finish of 27 percent.
It’s a free country, and the state of Alaska fairly and squarely changed its election rules from the familiar “first past the post” system — whichever candidate gets the most votes wins, even if you don’t win a majority of all votes — to its more complicated ranked-choice system.
But just because the system is legitimate doesn’t mean it was a good idea, and I don’t say this as a particularly big fan of Palin.
Under Alaska’s ranked-choice system, in each race, voters rank their choices in order of preference, and votes are counted in rounds. The Alaska Division of Elections counts all first choices. If a candidate gets 50 percent plus one vote in round one, that candidate wins and the counting stops. If not, counting goes to round two. The candidate with the fewest votes gets eliminated. If you voted for that candidate, your vote goes to your next choice, and you still have a say in who wins in the second round. Voters are allowed to rank as many or as few candidates as they like. If a voter skips a ranking, their next ranking moves up — in other words, not listing a second-place choice means your third-place choice is re-ranked as your second-place choice. But if you skip two or more rankings in a row, only the rankings before the skipped rankings will count.
If a voter’s first-choice candidate was not eliminated in the first round, their vote stays with that candidate in the second round. Votes are counted again, and the third-place finisher is eliminated. This process continues until there are only two candidates left, and the candidate with the most votes in the final round wins.
And then, if Jupiter is rising in Sagittarius, the second-place finisher has to make a saving throw against potions of elimination and then the third-place finisher has to beat the Wild Card candidate in a play-in round, in order to advance to the State Eastern Division playoffs, and then reduce their magic number to three, unless both candidates finish below 40 percent; in that case, all the candidates are entered into a blind-choice round-robin and the candidates compete in a potato-sack race on consecutive Sundays until a champion is crowned, just as in the Baseketball playoff system.
Okay, I made up that last paragraph. But the preceding two paragraphs are true, and if it seems a little complicated, that’s because it is. (For what it’s worth, Alaskans for Better Elections claims that 85 percent of Alaskans polled called it either “somewhat simple” or “very simple.”)
This system asks voters to have a strong opinion about who their third-, fourth-, and even fifth-favorite candidates are, because how they rank people beyond the bronze-medal level could have real consequences! Now, maybe in a presidential primary, you might have a strong and clear sense of your top-five candidates . . . but in every race?
The best aspect of a ranked-choice system is that it makes it impossible for some fringe candidate to win against a crowded field just by finishing with the largest plurality. The winning candidate must demonstrate at least some appeal to a majority of voters.
The worst aspect of a ranked-choice system is that the candidate who gets the most votes in the first round doesn’t necessarily win, and that’s what happened last night. The system effectively punishes a candidate who takes stances that are clear and bold, but potentially controversial. This also means the system effectively rewards candidates who are wishy-washy and inoffensive, and who avoid taking any stances that others might disagree with — mashed-potato candidates. A candidate’s best shot at winning is to be everybody’s second choice.
The advantage of the familiar “first past the post” system — besides that it is familiar — is that it forces voters to think about what they prioritize, and express one clear decision: “I like this candidate the best.” (Or alternatively, “I hate this candidate the least.”) Under “first past the post,” no one cares who you rank second, or third, or fourth. It’s an election, not a buffet table.
If a state feels it must get rid of the “first past the post” system, something akin to the runoff systems in Georgia and Louisiana make more sense to me — if no candidate gets 50 percent plus one on Election Day, the top-two finishers advance to a runoff. This ensures that the winner did win a majority, but no one spends much time worrying about whom they rank third, fourth, fifth, etc.
I’d like to see American politics get less angry, less belligerent, and less in-your-face. I’d like to see more debate about issues, policies, and ideas than personalities and incendiary rhetoric. I want entertainers to stay in the entertainment realm, and those who take governing as a serious and temporary responsibility in the governing realm. Leave the trolling to the hyperactive online malcontents. If you’re an elected official, you’ve got real work to do; if you’re a candidate for public office, you need to demonstrate that you prioritize your actual duties.
But I’m not sure an election system that effectively punishes the bold and rewards the bland is really the solution here. Every now and then, a state or a nation will reach “a time for choosing,” so to speak. You can move government policies to the left or to the right; to expand government or (allegedly) to shrink government. There is value in periodically telling the electorate, pick one, and be ready to live with the consequences.
For a long while, the most popular competing parties of continental European countries seemed not all that distinct; the policy differences between the center-right party and the center-left party didn’t seem to add up to much. And as we can see over there, if you keep giving people two boring options that represent minimal change from the status quo, eventually the electorate starts looking for dramatically different options that once seemed like the fringe.
There’s a strong argument that Sarah Palin was just about the worst kind of candidate for the GOP in a ranked-choice system because her fans loved her and her critics loathed her, and there weren’t many Alaskans who felt somewhere in between. After all the reality shows, her own television channel, The Masked Singer, etc., most Alaskans probably thought Palin was done with running for office — and it’s likely some Alaskans who might have otherwise been sympathetic to her worldview saw her as a quitter after her sudden resignation from the governor’s office.
The Pandemic’s Learning Loss: Just as Bad as You Think
We can argue about exactly when it became safe to send American’s schoolchildren back to school during the Covid-19 pandemic. Lawmakers can honestly state that in March 2020, they didn’t know what they were dealing with, and whether keeping schools open was a formula for an even worse public-health disaster.
But what is no longer disputable is that the decision to keep schools closed for an entire year or more across much of the country had a catastrophic effect on America’s kids:
Reading scores saw their largest decrease in 30 years, while math scores had their first decrease in the history of the testing regimen behind the study, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, a branch of the U.S. Education Department. The declines hit all regions of the country and affected students of most races. But students of color saw some of the steepest decreases, widening the racial achievement gap.
Everybody who argued that online learning would be almost as good as in-person instruction should take a vow of silence that lasts as long as their local public-school closure. Remember, lots of private schools had figured out how to reopen with masking and social distancing by the summer of 2020.
Some institutions prioritized the interests of children during the pandemic and figured out how to muddle through. In many cases, their students “flourished.” Other institutions dragged their feet on reopening until long after vaccines were available — and we will be living with the consequences of their actions for a long time.
ADDENDUM: How else can I make linking to the Amazon page and pitching my book interesting?
I keep an eye on what other thrillers are out there, and if you feel like some thrillers start to feel cookie-cutter-ish, I get it. I’m flipping through the other recently released thrillers, and sometimes I feel like you could make a bingo card out of the plot summaries: A desperate race to stop a madman. The world’s top assassin. The trail leads back to Russia. The hunter becomes the hunted. Haunted by the past. To bring the fight to the enemy. A geopolitical chess game, where the objective is survival. Dark truths uncovered. A ruthless killer. A shocking discovery.
So, does the Dangerous Clique series avoid these clichés? I hope so, and I like to think so.
Yes, my team of heroes works for the CIA, with help from the NSA, the FBI, the U.S. military, and, in Saving the Devil, the U.S. Treasury Department. Yes, the threat is usually mysterious, the stakes keep getting higher, and there’s a race against time.
But I don’t think any other series feature a protagonist who is a Burkari-Jewish immigrant, or protagonists who are new parents and deal with such complicated office politics. (In fact, I notice thrillers rarely feature protagonists who are married.) They’re exasperated by the intelligence community’s bureaucracy, but they’re not heavy-drinking, grim-and-gritty loners. And most of my heroes, for all their happy-go-lucky snappy patter and Dennis Miller-esque pop-culture references, are trying to feel their way through the intermittent professional need to kill someone who represents a threat to others with their desires to be good people. (Well, maybe not Ward. As a soldier, he worked out the moral complications about killing someone else in the name of protecting your country a long time ago.) If you kill a bad man, are you solving a problem, or planting the seeds of more problems down the road? Some of the characters periodically grapple with the heavy thought that God might have a plan for them.
Yes, there’s a lot of racing around the globe, but I try to find stranger-than-fiction locations you haven’t read about before — Snake Island, the Island of the Dolls, the Gates of Hell, the Tower of Skulls. (The world has a lot of real-life places that look and sound like something out of Lord of the Rings.) When I can’t find one of those, I pick a location associated with a favorite movie and try to have the action echo, and then reverse, what the reader expects.
Anyway, I think these books are neither boring nor cliché. But I’m very interested in hearing what you think — and remember, a good Amazon review helps an author in a multitude of ways, including influencing the Amazon algorithm.