[EM] Re: IRV vs. Plurality

[Forest Simmons]

On Sat, 6 Sep 2003, Joe Mason wrote:

> On Sat, Sep 06, 2003 at 04:40:58PM -0700, Rob LeGrand wrote:
> > I like it.  My only worry is that the candidates themselves might be far
> > less willing to compromise than the voters.  In the California
> > gubernatorial "race", Bill Simon pulled out to avoid drawing votes away
> > from Schwarzenegger, but he's an exception.  Most of the candidates are
> > running despite not having any chance of winning, and many of them (Arianna
> > Huffington, Tom McClintock, Peter Camejo, etc.) are likely to take
> > significant votes away from the frontrunners.  A candidate would seem to
> > care much more about his own, even slim, chances than about who ends up
> > winning.  When I ran for state rep in Texas, I wouldn't have considered
> > voting for one of my major-party opponents even if I had vastly preferred
> > one to the other.  (I didn't.)
>

Let's say you were one of three major contenders. If the proxy votes
controlled by you were not pivotal, then there could be little or no
instrumental benefit to voting for one of your opponents.

On the other hand, if your proxy votes were pivotal, then with holding
your approval from one of the leading candidates is de facto support for
the other: you cannot be neutral in that case.


> There are secondary targets when running beyond winning the whole thing,
> though - ISTR the US having a threshold at 5% of the votes for a party
> to get better consideration in the next election, for instance, and less
> formally there are single-issue parties who merely want to gather votes
> they can point to during negotiations or publicity campaigns to show how
> many people support their cause.  I suspect many of the California
> governor candidates just want to see how much they can get, perhaps to
> kick-start a political career.
>
> I'd think people would be much more willing to compromise in an Approval
> situation, or if they weere still able to use non-proxy votes for pride
> or publicity.

Good points.

I was thinking how this version of Candidate Proxy might have played out
in the 2000 US presidential election.

I think many voters who preferred Nader to Gore would have approved both.

Most of those who actually voted for Nader (like myself) in the actual
election would probably have granted him proxy power in a Candidate Proxy
election.

At the beginning of the Election Completion Convention, in all likelihood
Gore would have been ahead in the approval count.

Given this, there would still be two possibilities depending on whether or
not Nader had enough proxy votes to swing the win to Bush.

If not, then he should just approve himself on behalf of the proxies.
That's what the proxies would expect and overwhelmingly want in that case.

If he did have the power to swing it to Bush, then he would use his
leverage to find out which of the two leading candidates offered the
greater concessions to Green Party interests.  He should give the win to
the candidate with the best offer, all things considered (including
wisdom, trustworthiness, credibility, etc.)

Note that in this position Nader cannot be neutral.  Using his proxy votes
to approve only himself is knowingly giving the win to Gore.

Forest