[EM] Spoilers

[MIKE OSSIPOFF]

> >> For example, if (flight of fantasy time) Nader
> >> had had unanimous first choice support, but
> >> the international capitalist conspiracy
> >> suppressed this information

I wouldn't say "conspiracy". If you owned a corporate empire whose
profits would be adversely affected by a Nader presidency, or even
by any increase in public awareness of the things that Nader talks
about, might you not want to ensure that the newspapers that you
own won't mention him, except to give him occasional adverse coverage,
and to ensure that the tv stations that you own will mention him
as rarely as possible, while continuing to drum it into the viewers
that there are only "the 2 choices"? You can call that conspiracy
if you want to, but that lends an aura of implausibility. Let's just
call it looking out for your interests. The biggest wealth concentrations 
often own big pieces of lots of kinds of things,
including media. As a mogul, it would obviouly be to your advantage
to own some mass media.



>and made him
> >> appear to have only 10% first place support in
> >> the polls, then he would be an apparent third
> >> party. In an approval election being
> >> apparently third would suppress the quantity
> >> of approval he got.

Sure, but, as I said when I first answered the Mickey, Goofy,
Roadrunner message, Nader's winnability over the Republican would
be revealed in the election count results, and next time people
would know that they don't need the Democrat to beat the Republican.

Noam Chomsky has pointed out that the public are typically more progressive
than their leaders are, and that the individual typically believes that
it's only s/he that has those heretical progressive inclinations,
accepting as the norm the positions that the mass media present as the
norm.

By accident perhaps, Plurality does an excellent job of covering
up people's genuine preferences among candidates. Approval or Condorcert 
would change that, and it would make a big difference.

>
>That's what I was thinking with the (purely
>fictitious) Goofy-Mickey-Roadrunner example.
>
> >> In your example, Road Runner was an apparent
> >> third party, (and Mickey voters voted
> >> accordingly), but (in the measure of "sincere
> >> approval") was actually a frontrunner. In
> >> practice, in large elections, polls are good
> >> enough to make apparent third parties very
> >> rare.

Polls in the U.S. ask whom you'd vote for if the election were today.
They don't ask who is your favorite. That would be an improvement.
Pollsters have been caught falsifying poll results to affect an
election in some particular way.


>
>What about when the numbers are so close to the
>transition from apparent third to real third that
>the polls can't distinguish?  It sounds like that
>would be the time when stratetic voting would be
>most likely to produce a funny result.

That's when IRV fails, of course. IRV is like a vacuum cleaner that's
guaranteed to break down before you get a room vacuumed. The
vacuum salesman says, but it works _great_ on the 1st part of the carpet 
that you begin on!"

With Approval, it isn't so much how close Favorite & Middle are
to eachother. Say Favorite, Middle, & Worst were known to be about
equal. Then you, as a Favorite voter, should vote for Middle.

The question is whether Favorite has a majority, or will be outpolled
by Worst. As I said, that's not such an easy thing to be wrong about.

And if the available information convinces everyone wrongly about that,
the kind of error it will cause will be the election of Middle.
Errors are undesirable, but a brief Middle presidency doesn't have
the disaster potential of the extreme ways in which IRV tends to err.

And then before the next election, whoever mistakenly compromised on Middle 
will
know they didn't need to, based on the vote totals of Favorite & Worst.

>
>Oh, and Mike, if you've gotten down this far, I
>really appreciated what you wrote about the
>subject, but I'm not responding because there was
>so much material.

By all means don't respond. There's no need to respond unless you
disagree, and not necessarily even then. I wrote it as a reply,
but not for the purpose of getting anyone to respond.

Mike Ossipoff


_________________________________________________________________
Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com