The None of the Above Chorus:

[Forest Simmons]

On Thu, 26 Apr 2001, Bart Ingles wrote:

> 
> NOTA may be feasible if the office to be filled is considered optional,
> so that if NOTA wins (or at least wins repeatedly), the office is left
> vacant.  But in that case, the office doesn't sound very important in
> the first place, and probably should be abolished.
> 
> When the filling the office is a necessity, then I can't see much value
> in NOTA. 

Forest: I'm starting to agree with you.  NOTA is more valuable as an
approval cutoff marker than anything else.  So let's change the name to
MAC, Minimum Acceptable Candidate, or Minimum Approvable Candidate, and go
from there. 

In other words, I'm suggesting that we abandon using this fictitious
candidate as a way of scuttling elections, and start using it as a point
of reference that allows voters to calibrate their preference ballots to
increase the signal to noise ratio. 


> Repeating my earlier argument as succinctly as I can, if you
> have a good method which doesn't discourage good candidates, then
> repeating the election will just deplete the pool of willing candidates,
> making it less likely the office can ever be filled with each repeated
> election.  Or else it will be filled at random by voters who are tired
> of repeating the election.
>