[quote=Prime95;127274]The 3 or 4 times I've voted for a third party candidate I wanted to waste my vote. My goal was to send a message to my party: "If you want my vote back, nominate a more palatable candidate next time".
[/quote]
Right! And I don't think that can be termed as a waste as you wanted to make a point with your vote and you made it.

If there was a preferential system in place, you could have sent the same message by not filling in a second choice. On the other hand, if you truly wanted Presidents in the order, say: Perot, Bush sr., Clinton, then the preferential system would have served your purpose too.

[quote=Prime95;127274]The 3 or 4 times I've voted for a third party candidate I wanted to waste my vote. My goal was to send a message to my party: "If you want my vote back, nominate a more palatable candidate next time".

IMO, the only way voters can send a wake-up message to their party is to let the other party win an election - a short-term loss for a hoped-for long-term gain.[/quote]Amen to that.

[quote=Mini-Geek;127272]Do you really think people would vote for a candidate they hate (even if, in their opinion, he/she is the lesser of the two evils), just because they're not informed that there's a 3rd party? Do you think enough people would be like that that a 3rd party will never win?[/quote]Absolutely... I agree with R.D. -- but it's not people "being like that", it is the process that leads up to that decision point.

The existing nomination process effectively precludes this possibility, although Ross Perot did make it interesting for a while in 1992. The process makes it virtually impossible that the likes of [URL="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Kucinich"]Dennis Kucinich[/URL] or [URL="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Keyes"]Alan Keyes[/URL] (both ridiculously poorly qualified) would become the nominee, since the voters are explicitly trying to pick someone who is [I]electable[/I]. There are lots of votes trying to make a point about this that or the other, but the process in the end winds up with a centrist candidate (for that party at that time).

Can anyone envision a scenario whereby the Donkeys & Elephants pick two candidates that are so horrendously objectionable that more than 33% of the electorate chooses someone else entirely? Could this 33% be distributed in a way that would be electorally meaningful? Despite having nearly 19% of the popular vote in 1992, Perot managed a grand total of zero electoral votes.

It's difficult to envision a 3rd party candidate winning without it being preceded by the other two parties completely disintegrating -- at the same time.
[quote=garo;127268]Your logic escapes me.[/quote]Well, it escapes me at times too, so I won't take offense. :smile:

Current system -- If I'm Obama/Clinton, Nader scares me. He might take away "my" liberal votes, so I better figure out a way to co-opt as many of "his" votes as I possibly can by giving serious consideration and stump time to whatever issues cause Nader to gain traction. This will cause me to really second-guess how far to the right I can safely swing.

Preferential system -- If I'm Obama/Clinton, I am much less concerned with Nader. I've got a pretty good sense that the less fanatical Nader voters will put me 2nd on their vote anyway, so I can shift my focus to the right, trying to carve out centrist voters that might otherwise vote for McCain.

To me, the dynamic is completely different -- and not to the benefit of Nader's constituents with the latter system.

Ok, I see your point now. But you can also argue that main-party candidates play on the fear of voters of letting the worst candidate (from their POV) win and therefore don't shift their positions by much anyway. TBH, I think that on fundamental issues, the positions of most candidates are the same. They're all corporate flunkies with the exception of perhaps Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich.

[quote=garo;127285]Ok, I see your point now.[/quote]Does that mean you captured my logic? :razz:

It seems there is a quasi-consensus among most of the respondents here to the effect of:

1) Yes, Nader's candidacy in 2000 probably cost Gore the election;

2) That was - for various counterintuititive reasons - a good thing;

3) If Gore wanted to win, he should've made himself more electable, more sexy, more Clintonesque, etc.

I agree Gore was and is a rather pizzazz-less personality, but to me the bottom line is that had it just been him versus Bush, strict head-to-head, he would have won a narrow but IMO well-deserved victory. Why should he have to become an electoral superstar just because some unelectable gadfly guaranteed to siphon off a small predictable-demographic fraction of voters decides to run?

With regard to some of the electoral-mechanics discussion, my 2 main thoughts are:

a) I like the instant-runoff idea;

b) I think the electoral college is a ridiculous anachronism - the ultimate form of disenfranchising all the voters who voted for the losing candidate in a given state, no matter how narrow the loss. One person, one vote, total 'em up, who ever gets the most, wins - why on earth is that not to be preferred?

George specifically mentions the idea of trading a short-term "bad" for a long-term "hoped-for good" - so getting back to the specific case of Nader 2000, a few questions in this regard:

- Did *any* long-term good come from Nader's 2000 candidacy, to help counterbalance the resulting "8 years of Bush/Cheney"?

- Did you see a better Democratic candidate in 2004?

- Were any of Nader's hot-button pet causes helped? [Note that Gore's pro-environmental stance is not due to Nader's influence, except perhaps in a "well, thanks to this a**hole, I'm out of a job, might as well write a book and make a movie about global warming, since I can't influence that debate the way I wanted to, as president...", if-life-gives-you-lemons fashion].

- Did the electoral process become in any way better as a result?

I see absolutely no good as having come from Nader's run in 2000, but a whole heap of bad from 8 years of Dubya. Please help, Third-party-fans: show me the upside, demonstrate to me the subtle long-term good.

I'm wondering if the allure 3rd-party candidates - even ones who have no hope of winning the election - are an example of this phenomenon:

[url=http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/26/science/26tier.html]NYTimes: The Advantages of Closing a Few Doors[/url]: [i]Studies shed light on the human penchant for keeping too many options open[/i]
[quote][b]Findings: The Advantages of Closing a Few Doors[/b]
[i]
By JOHN TIERNEY
Published: February 26, 2008
[/i]
The next time you’re juggling options — which friend to see, which house to buy, which career to pursue — try asking yourself this question: What would Xiang Yu do?

Xiang Yu was a Chinese general in the third century B.C. who took his troops across the Yangtze River into enemy territory and performed an experiment in decision making. He crushed his troops’ cooking pots and burned their ships.

He explained this was to focus them on moving forward — a motivational speech that was not appreciated by many of the soldiers watching their retreat option go up in flames. But General Xiang Yu would be vindicated, both on the battlefield and in the annals of social science research.

He is one of the role models in Dan Ariely’s new book, “Predictably Irrational,” an entertaining look at human foibles like the penchant for keeping too many options open. General Xiang Yu was a rare exception to the norm, a warrior who conquered by being unpredictably rational.

Most people can’t make such a painful choice, not even the students at a bastion of rationality like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where Dr. Ariely is a professor of behavioral economics. In a series of experiments, hundreds of students could not bear to let their options vanish, even though it was obviously a dumb strategy (and they weren’t even asked to burn anything).[/quote]

[quote=ewmayer;127328]b) I think the electoral college is a ridiculous anachronism - the ultimate form of disenfranchising all the voters who voted for the losing candidate in a given state, no matter how narrow the loss. One person, one vote, total 'em up, who ever gets the most, wins - why on earth is that not to be preferred?[/quote]

1) If it was simple majority, no candidate would give the concerns of Iowa -- or most of the "flyover states" -- any consideration whatsoever. The battle would be waged over the concerns of those in the major population centers, rather than having to carefully consider the entire nation. This is exactly the reason why we have 100 Senators whose representation has nothing whatsoever to do with population distribution. It is no anachronism, but was a deliberate step to offset potential "tyranny of the majority" issues. It was a means to ensure the relevance of the agrarian states in the original colonies, and it still serves that function.

2) Imagine if Florida 2000 were writ large -- across all 50 states and territories. We'd be counting hanging chads in Guam. Not good.

Even if one rejects the arguments in #1, we should at least have an electoral system of some sort. I can see the argument against "winner take all" within each state, but strictly going by popular vote is asking for trouble.

[QUOTE=tallguy;127333]1) If it was simple majority, no candidate would give the concerns of Iowa -- or most of the "flyover states" -- any consideration whatsoever. The battle would be waged over the concerns of those in the major population centers, rather than having to carefully consider the entire nation. This is exactly the reason why we have 100 Senators whose representation has nothing whatsoever to do with population distribution. It is no anachronism, but was a deliberate step to offset potential "tyranny of the majority" issues. It was a means to ensure the relevance of the agrarian states in the original colonies, and it still serves that function.[/quote]
The primaries could still be done in a way that ensures smaller states get attention. As far as the election-at-large, why shouldn't the major population centers get the most attention? If that's where most of the population lives, what's wrong with that? Especially in light of the huge population shift from rural to urban areas in the past several centuries, do you still think it's necessarily a good thing for the candidates to spend a disproportionate amount of their time in tiny villages in Iowa and New Hampshire? [I'm not saying that's necessarily a bad thing, but am looking for a more rational argument-in-support-of than "it's a charming anachronism."]

[quote]2) Imagine if Florida 2000 were writ large -- across all 50 states and territories. We'd be counting hanging chads in Guam. Not good.[/quote]
Since you use the 2000 election as an example here, let's consider what that might have looked like with a straightforward popular-vote-based system: Gore wins by over a half-million popular votes. All arguments by Bush that a recount is needed - in florida or anywhere else - fall on deaf ears, since such a large disparity to be bogus would require massive vote fraud on a national scale. The [alleged] shenanigans of one party-influenced secretary of state in Florida get overwhelmed by the totals from the other 49 states, i.e. a small bit of single-state electoral "noise" no longer gets amplified into a national multiweek-long soap opera. End of story. Sure, it's *possible* that things could be close enough even on a national level that recounts might be needed, but much less likely due to the much larger sample size. And it's certainly much less likely for the overall result to be influenced by the machinations of a few corrupt people.

[quote]Even if one rejects the arguments in #1, we should at least have an electoral system of some sort. I can see the argument against "winner take all" within each state, but strictly going by popular vote is asking for trouble.[/QUOTE]
The first statement here is a non sequitur - "even if my argument for X is wrong-headed, X is still needed." The second sentence is similarly nonsensical, in light of the fact that you used a perfect example of the kind of dysfunctionality and disenfranchisement-of-the-many-by-the-machinations-of-the-few inherent in the current system to argue that a system based on straightforward vote-counting of the largest possible sample size would somehow be *more* prone to kinds of *local* "noise" issues we have at present.

To use a scientific-measurement analogy, you seem to be arguing to the effect of [i]"Look: I took 50 separate measurements of signal X, in the presence of experimental noise. Most of them were within acceptable noise levels, but a couple were really noisy. If I simply averaged all 50 measurements together, imagine how much worse things would be!"[/i] When in fact, the very opposite is true.

[QUOTE=ewmayer;127347]am looking for a more rational argument-in-support-of than "it's a charming anachronism.[/QUOTE]

How about "it makes election night fun"? Imagine how boring election night would be if all we did was watch the nationwide vote total update all night long. Instead we eagerly wait for the calling of each of the 50 statewide elections.

[quote]a straightforward popular-vote-based system: Gore wins by over a half-million popular votes.[/quote]

Tallguy is rather asking you to imagine what a 534-vote nationwide difference would look like. An entire nation of bug-eyed election officials examining hanging chads. This would happen far less frequently than an individual state being too close to call, but much uglier to resolve. [IMO: that would be real fun to watch!]


P.S. Note to non-citizens: Debating the merits of the Electoral college is a pointless exercise as a constitutional amendment to change it will never pass. The smaller states won't vote for it as it reduces their influence.

[QUOTE=Prime95;127349]Note to non-citizens: Debating the merits of the Electoral college is a pointless exercise as a constitutional amendment to change it will never pass. The smaller states won't vote for it as it reduces their influence.[/QUOTE]

How about "debating the merits-or-lack-thereof of the EC makes election threads fun"? :)

Getting back to candidates with an actual chance of getting elected - Saw this on a financial message board:
[quote]Just took my daughter to an Obama rally, and it was quite an event. He is part preacher and part politician, and much of the crowd kept saying "That's right" and similar endorsements throughout his speech. The enthusiasm he generates is incredible, and I can't imagine him not winning the election. And although I'm a lifelong Republican, I must admit I am considering an Obama vote, mostly because I think our country so badly needs an inspirational leader, even if he is going to help almost everyone but me (felt that way at least), while raising my taxes. Sorry for the OT rambling, but if you get a chance to hear him, it is worth the time to witness part of history in the making.[/quote]

"Sending a message" - voting for losing candidates
 

Re: "sending a message" by voting for a nonviable candidate

The Dallas Morning News advocates just that today in "Editorial: We recommend Mike Huckabee" at [URL]http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/opinion/editorials/stories/DN-huckabee_02edi.ART.State.Edition1.464b62c.html[/URL]

(I'm just citing the editorial as a current example, not endorsing it.)

Realchange.org website
 

Anyone familiar with the [url=http://www.realchange.org/]Realchange.org[/url] website - are they considered credible and unbiased?

I ran across the site while doing some background on Nader-for-prez - while they have plenty of stuff on most of the other candidates, they really rip Ralphie a new one.