You may recall that Rush Limbaugh was lambasted in the non-conservative media when in March of 2008 he launched Operation Chaos. Rush directed his zombie followers to vote in Democratic primaries for Hillary Clinton to stop Barack Obama from clinching the Democratic nomination early and to maximize the chances of a messy Democratic nominating convention. In 2016, Rush declared Operation Chaos, The Sequel open for business. He instructed the Dittoheads to vote for socialist Bernie Sanders, whom none of them would consider voting for in a real election even if someone was pulling their fingernails out with pliers to make them Bernie Bros. Instapundit, Newsbusters and other rightward sites cheered Operation Chaos II on. As Ethics Alarms concluded at the time, “Conservatives are no more ethical than progressives, it’s just that their lack of ethics expresses itself in different ways.”
Or the same ways, in some cases. Trump Derangement, after all, justifies anything and everything, so Democrats in New Hampshire pulled off their own version of Operation Chaos (and didn’t even give credit to Rush, since departed to that Big Talk Show in the Sky, for their inspiration).
Exit polls in the New Hampshire primary indicated that 70% of Nikki Haley’s votes came from from non-Republicans who, at least one analyst surmised, had no intention of voting for her in a general election. They would be Biden voters, presumably, and some said so. More non-Republicans voted for Haley, in fact, than Republicans. (Also, Haley got more votes than the President did, but you had to write in Joe’s name, so that may not mean much.) Haley received a paltry 40,938 Republican votes compared to Trump’s 172,202, but the Left’s version of Rush’s unethical stunt allowed the mainstream media to spin the results into a “Trump is weaker than he thought” narrative.
In 2016, I wrote that “Rush’s steaming pile of depraved Machiavellianism is not worth my composing a new brief against it.” Then, I reprinted part of what I had written about Operation Chaos the first time. For the sequel, I substituted Bernie for Hillary. This time, I’ll use Nikki Haley, and I also have to replace “Republicans” with “Democrats” and strike the references to conservative pundits like Mark Levin who were cheering on Rush’s stunt.
And yes indeed, it is satisfying that the GOP and conservatives were hoisted by Rush Limbaugh’s stinky, unethical old petard.
Here’s an ethics tip: if you think of a way to accomplish something by appearing to do the opposite, it’s probably unethical.
Of course, the clever people who [have decided] that persuading [Democrats] to vote for [Nikki Haley] in [Republican]primaries is the perfect way to maximize the likelihood of chaos at the [Republican] convention may not care about such niceties of right and wrong. After all, how can it be unethical to cause trouble for [Republicans] ?
Such is the sad state of politics in America… [T]heir trick [is] grossly unethical, unfair and profoundly un-American.
Simply put, [this is an] attempt to sabotage the Republican primaries and nominating system by creating a result based not on voter preference, which is what elections are supposed to measure, but on a desire to make the system break down. That is wrong, dirty pool, malicious, and cheating. A political party has the right to hold an orderly national nominating process for its presidential candidate without having to endure efforts by people not in the party to cause it to malfunction. The votes for [ Nikki Haley] being solicited by the [Left] [are] not intended to express a preference for her candidacy over that of [Donald Trump], or a desire to see [her] elected president. They [are]a tactical device to try to prevent the [GOP] from arriving at a consensus for as long as possible, and to increase the chances of a divisive [Republican] Convention. That’s not democracy, and that’s not politics. That is mischief-making. Voting in American elections is a constructive act, a right that Americans have fought and died to protect. This trick transform[s] the cherished act of voting into something dishonest, disrespectful, cynical, perverse, and destructive.
You can say that again.
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Source and Graphic: Newsbusters
Ethics Alarms 
It’s not much different than people being urged to move into Georgia to get an address there so they could vote. The dirty tricks continue unabated.
“Exit polls in the New Hampshire primary indicated that 70% of Nikki Haley’s votes came from from Democrats who had no intention of voting for her in a general election. They would be Biden voters, and said so,”
1. Precisely zero of Nikki Haley’s votes came from registered Democrats, who are not allowed to vote in the Republican primary. Those votes came from independents, who make up the plurality of NH voters. And Democrats would have had to “undeclare” their affiliation months ago to be eligible to vote in the GOP primary.
2. The article you link says nothing about Haley voters saying they’d vote for Biden. What’s your source for that statement?
3. I have little doubt that some of the independents who voted for Haley did so with the intent of subverting the system. The question is how many; you seem to have decided it was most if not all all of them. I doubt that. It’s perfectly reasonable that an actual independent (as opposed to a Democrat masquerading as one) might choose Haley out of the available options, or that such a voter might assume the Democratic nominee was already decided but the Republican nominee might not be, so they voted for the GOP candidate they’d prefer. That’s going to happen every time there’s an incumbent, and the motives need not be linked to some organized strategy.
4. It’s a strange system. Either a party holds a closed primary, meaning that a substantial number of voters who might vote for that party’s nominee in the general election are closed out of the process, or they hold an open primary, allowing the system to be subverted in the way you describe. I guess the mix of some open and some closed primaries is about as good as we can hope for.
1. I wrote “Democrats” for “non-registered Republicans.” Obviously, that was misleading. Thanks.
2. Careless reading (on my part). The source I had included anecdotal statements from Haley voters who said they would vote for Biden, and wrote, “a whopping 70% of Haley’s votes were grudge votes from Democrats according to exit polls.” But the stats to that effect were not included or footnoted, so you’re right. I think the calculation is correct that a lot of Haley’s support came from unregistered Democrats (just as Operation Chaos sought non-registered and de-registered Republicans), and we were told weeks ago this this was afoot. But as with Rush’s stunt, getting accurate data is hard.
3. I don’t how many. Those who did, worked to undermine democracy.
4. I think the primary system is hopeless.
5. I made the appropriate repairs in light of your critique. Thanks again..
This tomfoolery won’t work in PA, due to our closed primaries. [If you’re registered Democrat, you can only vote for a Democrat candidate in primary election.]
I think that is much the better system.
Combining open primaries with ranked-choice voting works better than open primaries alone, because it reduces–if not eliminates–the advantage of voting for a candidate you don’t like. Under ranked choice voting (particularly Final Five voting), voting your honest preferences is simply more effective at getting your desired results than voting dishonestly to try and set up weak competition for your favored candidate.
Ranked choice voting is not going to be perfect, but it has no significant disadvantages compared to our current first-past-the-post system. Dishonest voting is not a reliable approach under Final Five voting. Final Five voting will create much better incentives for politicians and for voters than the current system. It would be foolish to let the perfect be the enemy of the good when the status quo is so self-defeating.
I was just thinking of you and your advocacy of ranked choice voting. To me, RCV just encourages voters to game the system, just in a different way.
With RCV, attempting to game the system can’t reliably work better than just voting honestly as the system assumes people will do. I ran some scenarios and did the algebra for Final Five voting, which limits the ranked choice to five candidates. As far as I can tell, there isn’t a way to change which candidate wins the majority by changing which trailing candidate gets eliminated first.
Did you have in mind a way people might try to game ranked choice voting?
I have to disagree about ranked choice voting. What I’ve seen when it was used in Maine and Alaska was that it produced a result contrary to the desires of the majority of the electorate. I’d rather have a real runoff than the mathematical machinations of ranked choice voting.
Where did you get the idea the results in Alaska and Maine were contrary to the desires of the majority?
To use Alaska as an example (because I remember it better), if the majority had preferred both Republican candidates over the Democratic candidate, they would have indicated the Republican candidates as their first and second choices, and a Republican candidate would have won.
The reason the Democratic candidate won instead is because many voters preferred the Democratic candidate over one of the Republican candidates.
I wouldn’t say it’s complicated enough to call it a machination.
Under ranked choice voting, a candidate doesn’t win unless they receive a majority of the votes–or at least a majority of the ones that are still in play. If a person doesn’t rank all the candidates on their ballot, and all the candidates they rank are eliminated, the ballot is removed from the equation. If enough people do that, it’s possible to get a candidate who wins by plurality, but that’s no worse than first-past-the-post. Heck, if all the voters only rank one candidate, it is first-past-the-post. How many times under first-past-the-post voting has a candidate won with a mere plurality of votes? Ranked choice can’t do worse than that for matching the will of the majority.
Overall, ranked choice voting cannot be worse than first-past-the-post, and will help make things much better.
(I go into more detail about the Alaska election here: https://ethicsalarms.com/2022/09/02/labor-day-weekend-ethics-warm-up-9-2-2022-which-are-the-pod-people-and-which-are-the-fascists/comment-page-1/#comment-817693)
Does that make sense?
If memory serves, something like 60% of Alaskans voted for Republican candidates — but the Democrat was elected. How can that possibly reflect the will of the electorate? It better reflects the confusion of the electorate.
I fail to see what is wrong with our traditional ways to resolve these issues. If no one gets a majority of the votes, take the top two and have a runoff. Simple, straightforward, and you’re not forcing voters into a multiple choice exam. Alternatively, call the leading vote getter the winner or, as they do here, require that the leader get at least 40% of the vote or face a run off.
In my opinion ranked choice voting makes the voting process a cumbersome, complicated affair that few understand. And, judging from the politicians pushing its adoption they clearly feel that, yes, it can be gamed to their advantage.
I do believe that our system of one man, one vote is better than a system of one man, many votes.
Ranked choice voting and runoff elections are functionally identical except that with ranked choice voting the runoff votes are collected at the same time as the first round of votes. (Knowing who was eliminated before you cast your runoff vote doesn’t improve the decision compared to an RCV ballot.) If a runoff election doesn’t violate “one man, one vote” then neither does ranked choice voting. And it doesn’t; each person still gets one vote. It’s just that each person’s vote has more information in it. Or, if you prefer, each person gets one vote per round of elimination, and they submit them all at once.
In an earlier discussion, Jack brought up an advantage that runoff elections have over ranked choice voting: if your favored candidate is eliminated, you have time and motivation to research the remaining candidates before voting in the runoff, where before you might not have considered it worth the effort. I concede this point. I would argue that runoff elections have the disadvantage of requiring people to take time out of their day again (and maybe a third or fourth time) to vote, but if we had Final Five voting with runoff elections instead of ranked choice voting, I would still consider that a vast improvement over the status quo.
I’m confused as to what kind of confusion you think is happening that would cause people to vote for someone they don’t want to elect. Do you think that it’s more likely that people somehow misunderstood the concept of “first choice, second choice, third choice” than that many people whose first choice was the Republican Begich preferred the Democrat Peltola over the Republican Palin? I’m not that familiar with the candidates, but from the general attitude towards Palin that doesn’t surprise me at all.
My worst case scenario isn’t people misunderstanding the ballots. Anyone capable of misunderstanding an RCV ballot is also capable of misunderstanding a regular ballot and invalidating it. My worst case scenario for Final Five voting (assuming the median human doesn’t get any stupider) is that four of the candidates each get 25% of the vote, and the fifth candidate who gets eliminated was everyone’s second choice. If it gets to that unlikely point, that means we’ve continued to fail to do the work of democracy as citizens who talk between communities and reconcile our values and goals for the country.
On the main question, I have no idea whether Democrats were actively trying to game to NH primary. However, what I have seen for the past year is that they have been actively trying to subvert the whole GOP nominating process by all the lawfare they’ve engaged in against Trump.
They’ve pretty much guaranteed that Trump will be the nominee, in the expectation that Biden would beat him in the general election. The irony here is that he may actually win the election in November.
Wasn’t that their strategy in 2016?
…I was about to complain about them not having any imagination, but then I realized something. The Democratic Party doesn’t care if Trump wins. They still get paid. Politicians deal in empty words, counterproductive policies based on those words, scapegoating based on the failures of those policies, and fearmongering based on the chosen scapegoats. If the scapegoats run away, the process stops working. Politicians want the scapegoats to stick around and look scary.
A cornered human will fight. Politicians get humans to corner each other, and then pay the politician to protect them by continuing to corner the other.
Trump makes people feel cornered. He’s good for business. Democrats have to keep him in the ring–he’s been the best heel they’ve had during these past few seasons.