At 05:05 PM 8/15/2005, Simmons, Forest wrote:
Unsophisticated voters might have to rely on the advice of their favorite candidate or some other trusted advisor when they don't have a strong feeling for approval and disapproval.
So, in 1992, had the voting method been Approval, Ross Perot might have said, to Bush "If you will recommend that your voters also approve me, I will recommend that my voters also approve you."
And if Bush had said, "No, thanks," it would have been his responsibility that he lost....
Perot might still have made a recommendation just before the election, if, indeed, he had a personal preference for Bush over Clinton. Or he might have offered the same deal to Clinton....
Any of this would have strengthened the position of the third party. The claim that Approval will strengthen the two-party system is just bosh. It won't kill that system, at least not immediately, but it is difficult to see how it could make things worse. After all, Approval *is* Plurality, only simplified, a point that is worth repeating. It is simpler to count Approval ballots than to count so-called Plurality ballots. (Though this depends somewhat on ballot type and actual counting procedure. Approval does require something more complex than separating ballots into piles, but no more complex than is necessary for any multiwinner election, or, indeed, than any election where ballots have more than one race on them, i.e., most elections.)
(And I'd say the same for IRV, by the way. IRV is not going to automatically change election outcomes, not initially -- except in the relatively few elections where a swing vote makes the decision, common recently but not so common historically -- but in the long run, it should help third parties. A little.)
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