[EM] Election Reform

[Forest Simmons]

Thanks, Martin, I'll incorporate both of those suggestions.

Forest

On Fri, 9 Mar 2001, Martin Harper wrote:

> two points.
> 
> Forest Simmons wrote:
> 
> 
> > By way of comparison the Approval ballot would look like this:
> > 
> > Candidate | Oval
> > -------------------
> > Bush      |  ()
> > -------------------
> > Gore      |  ()
> > -------------------
> > Nader     |  ()
> 
> Oval? Surely "approve" would work better?
> 
> 
> > In fact, why just talk about future elections?  The assumptions we made
> > would not be too far fetched for last November's election if it were to be
> > repeated with preference ballots, CR ballots, or Approval Voting with
> > ordinary ballots. No where did we assume that Faction 3 was larger than
> > the few percent it would take to spoil majority first place for each
> > corporate candidate. Nader accomplished that even without election reform.
> 
> Well, it *could* be correct, or it might not. I can't see many people 
> voting Rep/Green/Dem, for example. I think this weakens your argument 
> because people will use their intuitions about the last elections, 
> rather than looking at your hypothesis, and I suspect many of their 
> intuitions will be that Nader wasn't a serious contender. (In 
> particular, the oil tycoons of this world).
> 
> Then again, if oil tycoons are unlikely to be reading the newsletter... ;-)
> 
>