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[ GELFAND'S WORLD ](https://www.citywatchla.com/gelfand-s-world)
# Miracles Have Happened
November 12 2026
Written by Bob Gelfand.
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GELFAND'S WORLD - It’s a week later, give or take a couple of days, and miracles have happened. The election of Scott Colom as United States Senator from the state of Mississippi is a generational change. A Black Democrat defeating a white Republican in what has been recognized as the most confederate and racist of American locations is the biggest miracle of the election season. Mind you the victory was accomplished due to a number of factors that all came together at one moment: Mississippi currently has about one-third of its population as African-American and was voting in a once-in-a-lifetime Blue Tsunami. But a little arithmetic shows how things have changed: It took a lot of white votes to get Colom’s vote total above that of his opponent. A back of the envelope calculation suggests that something like one-fifth of white voters must have marked the square for Colom in the privacy of the voting booth. However you want to view things, it must be recognized that the hoods have come off and a piece of ground that once celebrated human slavery has become much freer.
Things have changed. Back in the Civil Rights era, freedom advocates were routinely attacked, inspiring the Reverend Jesse Jackson’s famous homage to three civil rights workers whose murdered bodies had been recovered from a river. Several dozen African-American churches were bombed and burned as late as the 1990s, representing a long history going back to the 1950s. White terrorism was a constant part of life in the deep south, particularly since the advent of the modern Ku Klux Klan inspired by the film Birth of a Nation.
And all this time, Mississippi has been a name and a word that – justly or unjustly – symbolized white supremacy as a political and cultural sentiment. For much of its history, the view was accurate.
So November 11, 2026 is a historic date in American history, a day in which the words of Lincoln and King and Jesse Jackson are gradually coming to fruition. It’s been an interesting couple of years – a time in which Georgia, South Carolina, and Mississippi have elected Democrats of the non-segregationist bent to the United States Senate, signifying that the era of Strom Thurmond and so many others is receding into the mists of the past.
**Alaska and the Ranked Choice Voting Conundrum**
Alaska uses a system known as ranked choice voting. For those who are interested, here is the one-paragraph summary of Alaska’s version. (If you get bored easily, just skip it.)
The top 4 finishers in the primary get advanced to the general election. Democrat Mary Peltola and Republican Dan Sullivan were the favorites. Under the rules, there were two more candidates on the ballot. One of them is also named Dan Sullivan (although with a different middle initial) which resulted in much complaint from the president, but that is a different story. In the general election each voter was allowed to vote for his first, second, third, and fourth choices by assigning the number 1, 2, 3, or 4 to each candidate. If you wanted to vote for the incumbent senator (Republican Dan Sullivan) you would assign him the number 1. You could assign the number 2 to any other candidate, and so forth. The theory behind ranked choice voting is that you can support a third-party candidate by voting him as number 1, knowing that you are not throwing away your vote because you can assign incumbent Dan Sullivan or challenger Mary Peltola number 2, and so forth. Proponents of ranked choice voting argue that this system motivates candidates to take fewer extreme positions because they are looking to accumulate second place votes along with their first-place votes. Now here is where it gets just a bit complicated: At the end of the vote count, the election officials add up all the votes and see if any one candidate got more than 50 percent. If there were 200,000 total votes, it takes 100,001 to win. If nobody got that 50% plus one, then ranked choice goes into effect. According to Alaska’s voter information site, the next step is to take the 4th place finisher and assign all his second-place votes to whichever candidates received them. Thus, if voters for candidate number 4 included 1000 people who assigned a number 2 to Mary Peltola, then those 1000 votes are added to her total, while all the number 2 votes cast for Dan Sullivan go to him. The election officials then count all the votes for the remaining 3 candidates (the lowest ranking candidate now being eliminated) and see if any candidate now has that magic 50% plus one. If there is still no majority vote winner, they do the same process for the third-place candidate, which results in only two candidates remaining in the race, with the winner getting elected.
It seems a little complicated, but it is unambiguous, in the sense that there is only one way to carry out the process and it leads to either a win for one candidate or a tie between the top two.
I raise the issue of ranked choice voting because there is an active group of people who tried to get this system installed in the Los Angeles City Charter during the recent round of Charter Reform. It didn’t happen, but it is worth discussing whether it is a good idea. And for that discussion, I’d like to point out that for Democrats, the current system in Alaska could bite them in the ass.
Suppose the top two candidates finish very close in the first round. Now imagine that the third-place finisher gets a lot of number 2 votes for Peltola, whereas the fourth place finisher (Dan Sullivan) gets a lot of number 2 votes for the other Dan Sullivan.
The problem is that in one scenario, only the extra votes from fourth place Dan Sullivan will count. This would happen if the second round yields a winner, in which case the votes from the third-place finisher are not used.
The result of this scenario is that Mary Peltola finishes in first place after all the ballots are counted but could finish in second place after ranked choice counting is invoked.
This does not necessarily mean that ranked choice voting is unfair – it is just different. The argument gets even more complicated if you want to think about voters who vote one way knowing that ranked choice is the rule but would vote differently if it were not being used. There is a pretty good argument that California Democrats coalesced around Xavier Becerra in the primary to ensure that at least one Democrat made it to the runoff. In a ranked choice system, votes might have been scattered around half a dozen Democratic candidates, with Becerra getting all those number 2 votes.
**Tidbits on the National Level**
This celebratory arch that Trump wants to erect has a couple of problems. Besides the fact that it obtrudes on the national cemetery, there is another critique to be made: It is dull and derivative. Considering that the Arc de Triomphe in Paris is already 190 years old, and the Arch of Titus in Rome is 1945 years old (let’s just round it off to two thousand years), we are not exactly doing anything original here. Why not try something a little more original? Oh yes, we already did – the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument come to mind. The Smithsonian and the National Archive collections are in the same area. The proposed arch is just a less artistic version of the original versions.
I notice that for the nth time, Donald Trump has responded to a political attack with a deeply personal insult. In this case, he went after congressman Massie, who had tried to impeach Pete Hegseth. The president called the congressman a “Total Loser” in a tweet. It’s not a very original comment, or even the makings of a workable jest. It’s just coarse and crude and about the level of a high school bully. It demeans the office of the presidency. Come to think of it, it’s what a real loser says.
As to the impeachment vote itself, there is something to be said in favor of the action taken by the House of Representatives the other day. Notice that the Republicans did not vote it down, which they presumably could have. Instead, they referred the motion to a committee. This would actually have been the proper result had anybody really wanted to go forward with an impeachment. The committee could take the time to hold hearings and draw up articles of impeachment to present for a formal vote. That’s what happened with the two impeachments of Donald Trump in his first term.
Notice that the new congress could take up the process once again, this time with upwards of 250 Democratic votes in the House.
*(**Bob Gelfand** writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [amrep535@sbcglobal.net)](mailto:amrep535@sbcglobal.net)*
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