Comment by whoooboyy
2 days ago
Try telling people you voted third party because of a deeply held conviction about not electing corrupt politicians. You will be told you are evil, that you've got an unreasonable/impossible purity bar, that you don't really believe in that deeply held moral conviction actually, that you are worse than the people who voted for the other guy, that you are a utopian idealist, etc etc.
Don't get me wrong, I did vote third party and I will continue to do so if the Dems put up candidates like Harris and Biden. But don't expect most people to be willing to weather the storm of vitriol they'll receive for holding a high bar for their politicians.
It's more that voting third party in a first-past-the-post voting scheme is systemically pointless.
Parent poster said to stop voting for bad candidates. I said you would be mocked/judged/told off for doing so. And here we are.
Well you should mostly do that in the primaries, when you are down to two, pick the least evil one.
What I said is factually true, neither mocking, judging nor telling you off. If you believe saying something like, don't look at the sun or you'll hurt your eyes (and then you look at the sun and say that your eyes are burnt) is telling you off, then we have different definitions of the phrase.
It obviously isn't since the UK, for example, has fptp for general elections and far more than two parties.
Parliamentary systems are not comparable to presidential ones when it comes to voting systems.
This problem is only magnified when you consider our voting system. Any ranked voting system inherently runs into Arrow's Impossibility Theorem, which makes what we have right now not exactly democratic. The solution would be to switch to something like approval voting but good luck getting that going.
i had a chance to visit arrow at his palo alto condo circa 2014. his theorem is nice and all, but it only makes sense to apply it to social welfare functions, not voting methods. yes, the correct social welfare function is just the utilitarian sum of all voters' individual utilities.
https://www.rangevoting.org/UtilFoundns
once you know that, that's the function you use in your VSE metrics. then the performance of the voting method is measurable without having to think about any specific criteria.
https://www.rangevoting.org/PropDiatribe
It's been a while since I've studied the details of voting systems, but it seems like Approval voting just moves the spoiler effect into how people vote - ie strategic voting. Personally I think the possibilities of circular ties under Ranked Pairs is oversold.
Society is well acquainted with the concept of a tie, and whatever tiebreaker procedure we define probably won't factor into voter strategy all that much (that is, it will be less of an effect than the people who don't understand they can vote for more than one candidate)
> it seems like Approval voting just moves the spoiler effect into how people vote
that's orthogonal. ranked voting methods already have (arguably more severe) response to strategic voting AND ALSO can fail IIA even with no strategy applied, just by changing an irrelevant alternative.
> Personally I think the possibilities of circular ties under Ranked Pairs is oversold.
what does that even mean? we have VSE figures that measure the combined effect of all failures, including when the Condorcet winner isn't the favorite candidate of the electorate (not the social utility maximizer). https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/vse-graph.html
that's not under or oversold, it's just measured performance.
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