From Ballot Access News:

All four ballot measures to institute alternative voting systems passed on November 7. Oakland, California, passed IRV for city office by 68%. Minneapolis passed IRV for city office by 65%.

Two more advanced forms seem to have passed narrowly. In Pierce County, Washington (that state’s 2nd most populous county, which contains Tacoma), all partisan county offices will apparently no longer have partisan primaries. Instead, there will be a single election in November, using IRV. Although ballot access will be easy for all candidates, party labels will be restricted to those candidates who had won their party’s nomination by convention, in advance of the election. Pierce County now more closely approximates the systems used by Ireland and the Australia than any other jurisdiction in the U.S. 

Finally, Davis passed advisory measure J (with 55%), which provides for Single Transferrable Vote for multi-winner offices such as City Council-at-large. Like all California elections for city office, Davis uses non-partisan elections. However, Davis will now apparently share the characteristic of Cambridge, Massachusetts, under which an organized minority of voters can place a candidate on the city council if that minority comprises approximately 25% (in Cambridge the threshold is lower than 25%, because Cambridge elects more members to its city council).

I’d be surprised if he wasn’t confirmed, but in the interest of basic history, here’s some good info on him:

    During contentious Senate confirmation hearings in October 1991 - which are bound to come up again - Gates’s role in cooking intelligence information during the Iran-Contra scandal was revealed. It was during those hearings that senators found out about a December 2, 1986, 10-page classified memo written by Thomas Barksdale, the CIA analyst for Iran. That memo claimed that covert arms sales to the country demonstrated “a perversion of the intelligence process” that is staggering in its proportions.

    The Barksdale memo was used by Gates’s detractors to prove he played an active role in slanting intelligence information during his tenure at the agency under Reagan. Eerily reminiscent of the way CIA analysts were treated by Vice President Dick Cheney during the run-up to the Iraq war three years ago, when agents were forced to provide the Bush administration with intelligence showing Iraq was a nuclear threat, Barksdale said he and other Iran analysts “were never consulted or asked to provide an intelligence input to the covert actions and secret contacts that have occurred.”

    Barksdale added that Gates was the pipeline for providing “exclusive reports to the White House,” intelligence that was “at odds with the overwhelming bulk of intelligence reporting, both from U.S. sources and foreign intelligence services.”

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