Remarkable editorial in the Chron today on the mayor’s race. The point seems to be that there are too many candidates:
If most of this herd stays in the race, no door knob, mail slot or voice-mail queue will be safe.
Too many people running for office. Too many choices for the voters. Imagine how awful that could be. And to what do we owe this tragic set of circumstances? Ranked-choice voting and public financing.
. Public financing and ranked-choice voting both won voter approval, though it’s fair to say that this season’s prospects were never imagined. Now comes the hard part of living with the results.
There’s nothing in the editorial that says why more democracy is bad, except that San Franciscans will get a lot of campaign fliers and voice mails. And I think the Chron is utterly wrong: this season’s prospects were exactly what supporters of those two progressive refroms had in mind.
Public financing means a wider range of candidates, with a wider range of perspectives, can enter the race. When it was all about who could raise the most money, nobody really had a prayer of getting elected without a million dollars — and there’s no way all eight of the current serious contenders could have raised that kind of money. So a candidate with less proven fundraising ability (say, David Chiu) would be pushed aside by someone like Leland Yee, who has been around longer, has statewide fundraising capability and brought in a huge war chest for his last Senate race. Without public financing, the race would come down to a small number of candidates; the voters would have fewer choices. The current system opens the election to a wider and more diverse group of candidates — that was the whole idea.
Same goes for RCV. Under the old system, some would be arguing that with three Asians in the race — Yee, Chiu and Phil Ting — the Asian votes would be split and diluted and none of the three would win. With RCV, the opposite’s likely to happen — three Asian candidates means more Asian voter interest, and all three candidates benefit from that.
There may be more candidates; nothing wrong with that. Except that the San Francisco Chronicle doesn’t seem to like democracy.