Forest Simmons wrote:
Simple answer for the man on the street:I'd be reluctant to use any electoral system that requires voters to vote strategically. Still, within those systems, approval is a huge improvement over plurality or IRV.
Approve the candidate that you would vote for under Plurality, as well as every candidate that you like better.
Civic minded voters can learn refinements of this basic (and perfectly adequate) strategy as easily as they can learn the rules of football and soccer.
Or better yet, look at the results of Washington's 7th District congressional elections in 2000. Said district is a very liberal district, including Seattle proper plus maybe 100,000 people outside of Seattle. In that race, the Republicans didn't run a candidate, so the election became a contest between Jim McDermott (D) and Joe Szwaja (G), a highly qualified Green candidate (for whom I probably would have voted). McDermott won 70%-20%. I think that election provides ample evidence that the electorate as a whole prefers Democrats to Greens.(1) Election outcomes are not the only "results" of elections: ask the Nader supporters in Florida and other swing states who didn't dare vote for him.
And Nader got 10% there, or 25% of the Nader-Gore vote (and surely less than that if the Bush voters had the chance to express second-choice votes, third choice votes, etc.).Why do you suppose that Nader got the greatest percentage of votes in states like Alaska where he was so unpopular, and Bush so popular, that there was no chance of him spoiling things for Gore?
Online polls are meaningless. They do not represent the populace as a whole, or even the Internet-using populace as a whole, because they have self-selecting samples. I think I have also read that Greens are overrepresented on the Internet, but I can't provide a citation. Your example does look plausible, but not with Nader as C.(2) Also, two party politics have conditioned us to think that there can only be two viable candidates.
(3) Primaries are unnecessary under Approval voting; approve as many candidates from your party as you like.
(4) When probabilities are involved, "almost surely" is safer than "surely."
For example, polls may be misleading. It isn't impossible that (according to the polls) the two leading contenders A and B are running neck and neck (49 and 51 percent, say) while another candidate C is actually the favorite of 52 percent of the electorate, but out of favor with the corporate pollsters.
20 A >> (various unapproved) 29 C ... A >> 23 C ... B >> 28 B >>
Since the voters have nothing to lose by approving favorite, under approval candidate C wins, even though every voter (following the basic strategy) approved one of the supposed front runners as well.
Far fetched? An informal Time Magazine Website poll put Nader far ahead of both Gore and Bush for the last several weeks leading up to the presidential election. It was of the form: "Which candidate do you like the best?" rather than "Which candidate do you intend to vote for?"
Let's look at this from a Condorcet perspective. As I believe I established above, Gore would have beaten Nader if they had been the only two candidates. Polls showed that among those who actually did vote Nader, 50% would have voted for Gore had Nader not run, 20% would have voted for Bush, and the remainder would not have voted. That means Gore would have beaten Bush. Neglecting other candidates, Gore would have beaten Bush, and Gore would have beaten Nader, so Gore was the clear Condorcet winner. Technically, you could call Gore a spoiler if Nader also would have beaten Bush in a two-way match-up, but I find that incredibly unlikely--just about all Gore voters would have had to prefer Nader to Bush--and even in such a case, voters preferred Gore to Nader.The "for whom will you vote?" style polls always found Nader near the bottom.
If the last US presidential election had been conducted under Approval, assuming that those who voted for Nader under plurality would approve only Nader, and assuming that more of the disenchanted (effectively disenfranchised) would have turned out to vote, the results could well be Nader 40% approval, Gore 37% approval, Bush 36% approval.
The Time Magazine poll would have put Nader well above this.
Nader was (arguably) right when he said Gore was the spoiler.
Neal Finne
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
"Si je savais quelque chose que me fût utile et qui fût préjudiciable à ma famille, je la rejetterais de mon esprit. Si je savais quelque chose utile à ma famille, et qui ne le fût pas à ma patrie, je chercherais à l'oublier. Si je savais quelque chose utile à ma patrie et qui fût préjudiciable à l'Europe, ou bien qui fût utile à l'Europe et préjudiciable au genre humain, je la regardais comme un crime." -- Montesquieu
---- Election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
