Hey you idiot third party voters!

The BBQ Pit
81

The difference being that smart Republicans cross over and send checks and material aid to Nader and the Greens, so as to disrupt the opposition.

I’m not complaining mind you, I’m jealous.
Again, these problems are an artifact of our voting system. Approval voting, instant runoff elections et al basically eliminate them. I would be a tiny bit more sympathetic to the US Greens if I had seen a serious attempt at electoral reform. You could start with a single state - say New Jersey - and lobby to have the representatives elected via proportional representation. It wouldn’t even require a constitutional amendment, since the states decide such things.

Or you could push for approval voting at the municipal level: just demonstrating that such things can work for a few years would help.

Instead I see precious little effort along these lines, which leads me to think that too many Green supporters are posturing.

82

I’m not suggesting blindly voting for a party line. I’m saying that a willingness to vote for a viable candidate who will get elected and will support part of your agenda is a better strategy that refusing to vote for any candidate who you are not in complete agreement with. Especially if your willingness to consider voting for him causes the candidate to alter his views.

Suppose you represent a group that has three goals: you want more money spent on public education, better environmental standards, and the legalization of marijuana. You go to talk to Candidate Smith who’s running close in the upcoming election.

Smith: Well, your group has 15,000 voters. Public education’s popular. I’ll lose 2000 voters from the anti-tax crowd but that’s okay. The environment’s a little more controversial. I’ll lose 8000 votes from the business crowd for passing higher standards. But overall I’ll come out ahead with your votes. But marijuana’s a deal breaker. If I support legalization, I’ll lose 30,000 votes. So sorry, I can’t agree with you on that one.
You: If you don’t support our entire platform, we won’t support you. We’ll nominate our own candidate and he’ll get all 15,000 of our votes.
Smith: Good for him. But there’s 800,000 voters in this district. I guess I’ll just have to take the 30,000 votes I’ll get from the anti-marijuana voters. Plus the 10,000 anti-school and anti-environment voters by supporting them.

So you had a chance to get more money for schools and enviromental laws enacted. But you refused to compromise and ended up getting nothing. Was that a victory? As I said before, you sometimes have to make a decision about whether your principles are supposed to just make you feel good about yourself or whether you’re supposed to actually do something with them.

History would say you’re wrong. As I wrote above, conservatives have embraced the strategy I’ve described and they have acheived some of their goals. Not all of them - for example, abortions haven’t been made illegal but they have been able to get new limits set. And everytime there’s a new election, they can bring up a new list of items they want.

83

Actually, under the current system, a consequentialist voter gets more bang for his buck by voting for a third party. The odds that a vote for a major party will swing an election are so small as to be effectively non-existent (especially as, in the event that the actual margin of victory is one vote, that fact will be impossible to objectively determine, and the election will be decided in the courts).

OTOH, there’s a slightly less negligible chance that a vote cast for a third party will roll over the odometer on its vote total, from, say, 4,999,999 to 5,000,000, or from 4.4999% to 4.5000% (rounded up in some reports to “5%”), thus marginally increasing the prestige of said third party and, theoretically, dragging the platforms of the major parties in the desired direction.

84

Nice work VarlosZ.

Ok, but…

The margin of victory matters. So providing the viable party with a safer margin can make a difference. That’s doesn’t negate your point: it’s just something else to consider. (As Nemo points out though, the voters with the most influence are not the principlists, but those who swing. So in a safe district, a threat to bolt to a 3rd party might help.)

I was going to draw a distinction between advocating for a third party and voting for a third party, with the former potentially of greater influence. But I’m not buying it: for most people their .000001 of influence in the ballot box probably outweighs their .000000001 influence with other voters.

So we’re back to the paradox of voting. A single voter can basically do as he damn well pleases. Yet 3000 voters can swing an election, which I would argue far outweighs prestige effects for third parties.

Well, I’d wonder whether our hypothetical voter has thought hard enough in this case.

The Green Party shifted the US in a conservative direction. What they might have done instead is follow the political club route. I allege that the League of Conservation Voters, the National Rifle Association, AIPAC and the Club for Growth have been far more effective in pursuing their goals. Simply tracking elected officials, distributing checklists of voting records and making endorsements can be pretty effective, even aside from PAC donations.

85

To be clear though, this prestige effect does not involve the third party achieving power in office, or gaining any chances of achieving power in office.

86

Well, sorry but it sounds to me that that is exactly what you’re suggesting - that we should “hold our nose and vote for candidates we don’t really like that much”, just because they’re better than the other guy. Your willingness to do that does not give a party incentive to listen to you. They’re more likely to look for ways they can appeal to people who are leaning towards the other guy - which means drifting even further away from whatever positions might have made them palatable to you in the first place.

You’re wrong, as a factual matter, to say that left-wingers didn’t have a go at your strategy. The Democratic Socialists of America, who are the US affiliate to the Socialist International, worked within the Democratic Party for years. When I was flirting with them in the mid 1980s their literature made a passionate argument as to why the best strategy for leftists was to play the two-party system and try to push the Dems to the left. They got absolutely nowhere with this and judging by the information on their website now they’ve clearly had a change of heart. Wonder why?

I can’t speak for conservatives, but my own principles are not met by the achievement of a few minor victories here and there. I want to see fundamental structural changes in American society and its relationship with the world, which is something neither of the two main parties has any interest in. They’re both capitalist imperialist parties. One promotes a more humanitarian capitalism and imperialism, but the distinction is ultimately superficial. Voting for a Democrat over a Republican is voting to paint over the cracks in the existing foundation rather than build a better foundation. There may, at times, be a good reason to do this, but when there is it’s a purely pragmatic or tactical reason, not one based on principles.

87

The way I see it, the United States is in a state of irreversible decline. My vote in November will be about as meaningful as pissing on the Great Fire of London. The country may go to hell a little more slowly under one candidate than the other, but in the long run it doesn’t make much difference. If we’re lucky, maybe we’ll just sink to the level of the third world and become the world’s biggest banana republic. If not, we can expect a collapse much like the Soviet Union, except a lot bloodier. I’ll vote Libertarian, as I’ve been doing since 1980, not because I’m a stouthearted Libertarian, but because I do agree with the Libs on a few issues, and I want the record to show that somebody was opposed.

As the old joke goes, I feel so much better since I gave up hope.

88

Then you’re totally missing my point. I’ve repeatedly said that you should only vote for a candidate if he’s willing to support at least part of your principles and act on them. So he is listening to you. If he doesn’t, then drop him and vote for the other guy. If you do this, the candidates will start coming to you.

As I’ve said, you have two choices. You can sit there and do nothing and hope that the changes you want will somehow arise spontaneously without any effort from you. Or you can get involved and start working on making those changes happen even if it’s by taking one small step at a time.

89

Well, no, this is not actually true. Assuming quasi-transitivity and acyclicity of preferences (not usually heroic), winner take all first past the post possesses almost all of the desirable formal properties of preference aggregation rules.

This is also incorrect. Other western democracies face grave trade-offs with their voting rules. Some countries accept the massive collective irrationality of runoff voting (relaxation of the irrelevance of independent alternatives) or the hazards of proportional representation (small winning coalitions having disproportionate amounts of power). Next to the monsters of runoff voting and proportional representation, first past the post winner take all look downright fantastic.

At least this part of your analysis is true. People who do not vote strategically misapprehend utterly the strategic problem of voting. It is not a form of self-expression. It is not like getting a nose piercing or joining the communist party. It is a choice over delimited outcomes that are rankable. If you think your favorite outcome is sufficiently improbable, vote for your second lest your least favorite be selected.

The phenomenon of the spoiled election is pretty well understood. Supporters of third parties in the US mostly dodge this matter.
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Approval voting has some interesting formal properties, but you have to relax the unrestricted domain requirement to make them really work.

90

Maeglin: I may be confused. What’s a good cite? Online is better of course, but an offline reference would be ok.

The Salvadorans and the citizens of Nicaragua would have preferred not to be bombed by Reagan’s proxies.

Historically, the economy has performed demonstrably worse during Republican administrations. Cite. (But I can’t claim causality there, pending a confirmed theory.)

To say the Democratic and Republican parties are the same is just silly: if nothing else the reversal in the finances of the US government over the past 8 years shows this. Indeed, even Green Party fans don’t believe this chestnut: as seen in this thread, if you accuse them of being closet Republicans they become indignant or even enraged. Now I don’t blame them for having such a strong reaction. But if they really believed that the 2 majors were truly identical, I’d expect a different, milder, sort of response.

91

Cite for what, exactly? The first place I would go offline is to Austen-Smith & Banks, Positive Political Theory I.

What makes majority rule basically meet the criteria of the General Possibility Theorem is that preferences have to be single peaked. I think Dunan Black pointed this out, but I am going on memory here.

92

Show me a fundamental difference between the way that the Democrats and the Republicans have worked within the State Legislature to get budgets done on time?

Out of the past twenty-five years, two budgets were passed prior to the April first deadline. That’s the same number of times than the budget was over one hundred days late.

And that is fucking unacceptable.

No qualification there. Nothing to soften it. No mitigating statement.

That is fucking unacceptable.

It is an unseen tax on every person in the state. It makes formulating local budgets in a timely manner impossible. And at least once the fucking state Comptroller sued local school districts because they hadn’t submitted their budgets prior to their legislated deadline. While the fucking state budget, upon which they were waiting for hard figures for local school aid, was still not passed!

IMNSHO the State Senate and the State Assembly share equal blame for this shameful state of affairs.

The Dems control the Assembly absolutely. Nothing approaches the floor of the Assembly without the support of the the Assembly leader. And come budget negotiations time - the only member of the Assembly with any say in the matter is the Assembly leader. And the Democrat controlled Assembly assents to this abortion every fucking year.

The Repubs control the Senate absolutely. Nothing approaches the floor of the Senate without the support of the the Senate leader. And come budget negotiations time - the only member of the Senate with any say in the matter is the Assembly leader. And the Republican controlled Senate assents to this abortion every fucking year.

Pardon me, but I don’t see any fucking difference between these two parties when it comes to the ONE lousy issue that I see as the absolute minimum acceptable standard for legislative competence: Passing the state budget on time.

Oh, those two times that the state budget did get passed on time? The election cycle before that, the various independent parties got something like 5% of the state wide vote in various legislative elections.

One can argue that the votes for the independents had no effect upon the bastards in Albany. But I am not alone in thinking that they saw those numbers and decided that they had to do something about removing the single largest cause for voter discontent. And actually got their shit together enough to pass on-time state budgets.

ETA: I would also like to point out that I see no reason to believe that changing which party controls which house will matter a single iota of difference. They’ll just clean out the stormtrooper boots and use them for themselves.

93

Actually, I am trying to devise something of a Turing test for our state government. If you cannot observe whether or not we have a state government but can only observe the outcomes, is there any way to conclude a priori that we even have any state government at all?

I doubt it.

94

I was hoping for a solid merging of empirical studies and theoretic results. Maybe it’s yet to be written.

95

The DSA experience runs counter to your last sentence.

Umm, yeah. Not voting for Democrats = doing nothing. That’s the silliest false dichotomy I’ve heard in a long time.

I’ve been guilty of a lot of things in my life, but “sitting there and doing nothing and hoping that changes will spontaneously arise without any effort from me” is not one of them.

96

I don’t really have a dog in the fight this year (Obama looks like a sound choice to me, even though the Presidency is definitely going to be a baptism of fire for him, and in any case, divine intervention wouldn’t prevent him from winning Hawaii).

I will say that you’re trying to convince voters not to go to a third party, completely making up facts about 2000 isn’t going to help.

Gore was about as right-wing as Presidental candidates got. He fully supported corporation-enriching programs like NAFTA and GATT, was fully behind the Defense of Marriage Act, supposed Star Wars, and, for all his talk, hasn’t exactly had an envronmentally friendly lifestyle (as most conservatives will be glad to point out). His choice for running mate, Joe “God! God god god godgodgod! Goooodddd!” Lieberman wasn’t exactly a pillar of hippie liberalism either. Aside from that, he had absolutely zippo charisma and virtually no grasp of the the words that came out of his mouth. Remember him taking the initiative on a program that would result in the creation of the Internet?

There was absolutely nothing about the man that convinced me that he would be even a small improvement over Dubya. Stuff your 20/20 hindsight. If he wasn’t willing to present himself as a viable candidate, there was no reason for me to consider him one.

And despite all that, he still was the rightful winner of the election! (Remember, it was only stopping of the manual recount that kept him out. I believe a certain liberal filmmaker pointed this out a few years back.)

Blaming Nader for Gore not being in the White House means completely ignoring reality. Not the way to win liberal votes.

P.S. - If the Democrats now would like to convince voters that they’d be much better than Dubya, reversing some of his administration’s policies would be a good place to start. Is there even any talk whatsoever about ending this black hole of cash and lives that is Iraq? Rebuilding New Orleans? Shutting down Gitmo? Plenty to work with here.

97

This is not an empirical question. Whether or not a preference aggregation rule is “good” at turning individual preferences into a social preference depends on whether it meets certain formal properties that we consider desirable. These are demonstrated theoretically not empirically.

The fact that the outcomes are suboptimal says more about the substance of our individual preferences than it does about our electoral rules.

It doesn’t take any kind of “solid merging”. It takes a little discrete mathematics.

98

And the conservative takeover of the Republican Party shows that I’m right and it can be done.

It’s not enough to do something. You’ve got to do something that works. You’ve said that the government isn’t responding to whatever it is you’re doing to influence it. So what you’re doing isn’t working. Voting works. And if you want to have an influence in what the government is doing, you have to influence the people that run the government. Those people are Democrats and Republicans.

99

Very well, I’ll vote for McCain.

Thank you for showing me the error of my ways.

100

My friends, we’ve got 'em just where we want them. :smiley:

Maeglin: For some reason, I’m struggling to wrap my head around your argument, starting with post 89: please let me know if I’ve misunderstood or am misinformed.

With that in mind:

The social choice lit on voting centers on Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem. Voting schemes can only satisfy a subset of the criteria, and much theoretic work involves finding appealing ways of weakening a couple of them (transitivity seems to be a big target).

But that seems tangential (though I may be missing something important). Critiques of plurality voting focus on the split ballot, which plurality voting is susceptible to and the other systems are not. The fact that plurality voting will give a result consistent with a subset of Arrow’s criteria doesn’t seem relevant.

And once the split ballot problem goes away Duverger’s law no longer applies, or so I imagine.

  1. Can you point to a election showing massive collective irrationality with regards to runoff voting?

  2. Strictly speaking, proportional representation can give disproportionate influence to tiny interests: Israel has this problem with small religious parties. But that’s easily fixed with a super-proportional scheme. Demand that a minimum vote share (say 5% of the ballot as in Germany) be required to win representation in Parliament. There are other tweaks that can give the larger parties superproportionate power, while still granting voice and influence to the marginal groups.

I don’t know what the unrestricted domain requirement is.