California’s “Trojan Horse” Voter Ballot

Public Choice Theory

Public Choice Theory  was the brainchild, born in the mid-20th century by two professors, James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock.  These two men were libertarians whose goal in the name of “freedom” was to diminish the  American government to a skeleton level and wipe out its bureacracy in favor of the private sector economy.

Tullock and Buchanan curried favor with wealthy conservative American donors who helped them hold lavish seminars in Florida during summers. The seminars were free for judges and law students. Here Tullock taught judges his theories of economics and politics.

In this century, Tullock’s  dream of converting judges in Florida has reached fruition in the current Supreme Court and the federal courts that we are now seeing.

The Public Choice Approach

Public choice is also called preference voting. Tullock proselytized public choice voting. His words spread among American universities and even over to the pond to a Russian college. Under the moniker of Ranked-Choice voting was recently used in Maine elections.

Gordon Tullock, like Steve Bannon in our century, realized that public choice voting was a way that political minority groups could gain power over majorities.

While economists and finance professors were teaching about “rational man’s self-interest” and “Mr. Market” back in the 1960’s, Tullock and Buchanan, like Steve Bannon realized that people are more likely to be moved by their feelings than by any rational thinking when spending, investing or voting.

As a result, public choice theory was designed to let people express their feelings about political issues. Steve Bannon stirred up people’s feeling against Eric Cantor, Republican House Majority Leader, and Steve got Cantor kicked out of public office.

And James Buchanan, Gordon Tullock, and Steve Bannon used “weighting” to measure how strongly people felt about a candidate.

For example, public choice ballots might let the voter cast three votes as they wished. Thus, if they really wanted that one candidate they would vote all three points for that person. If not, they could give the other two points to one or two of the other candidates in the race.

The way this works to help minorities to gain power over majorities is if those independent voters and majority voters decide to choose second or third candidates rather than use all three votes for one candidate. Doing this waters down the power of majority and independents votes.

Those in the more fervent minority would choose one candidate to cast all three of their votes for, all the while taunting majority party members as being one-issue voters for choosing only one candidate.

This is how a minority party might even enable itself to become the majority party. But wait! There’s an even more mercenary motive in their promotion of public choice voting.

The Costly California SCAM Ballot

On the California recall ballot, this is how the ballot works. If the no vote for recalling Governor Gavin Newsom gets the majority, he stays in office. If Newsom doesn’t get a majority, then there are 46 candidates on the other side of ballot to vote for.

Honestly! If the Yes vote for recall wins why not just run a second election. Why put so many  candidates on the recall ballot!!! This is a monster public choice approach with paper pamphlets full of pages and pages voters must wade through!

And in BIG LETTERS on the blank side of the second page of the ballot  it says “VOTE BOTH SIDES OF BALLOT in English and two other languages.`This is what makes it a Public Choice ballot. The voter can have two votes: one for Gavin Newsom and one 1 of  46 other candidates.

The current minority party runner-up  to Gavin Newsom in California is Larry Elder, a right wing conservative radio host. He is the one that the libertarian right wing is planning on running for office in a future election for governor. This ballot is a test of how popular Larry Elder and all the other mostly Republican candidates on the ballot could be in California if they run in future elections.

The sting is that it costs us, the California taxpayers, millions of dollars so that Republicans can get the election research data that Republicans need to run candidates in future elections.

In conclusion, most voters are unaware of how public choice voting undermines majority rule in government. It does this by throwing out the traditional one person one vote rule in our elections. And that watered down mess it makes is the real danger here.

Using public choice ballots in states, combined with voter suppression by Republican-run legislatures, and not being able to rely on U.S. Judges and courts for redress, we could easily see a transition in our state and national governments in the 2024 elections—a transition that occurs as smoothly as the Taliban took over Afghanistan.