[EM] To Bill Lewis Clark re: stepping-stone

[Bart Ingles]

Forest Simmons wrote:
> 
> I know that most Nader fans preferred Gore over Bush, and that's why they
> didn't vote for Nader.  The small percentage of Nader fans that actually
> voted for him were probably thinking more like Mike and I do.

I seem to recall that in FL, the pre-election polls were showing Nader
at around 5%.  His actual results were around 1%.

If, for simplicity, we assume that none of the Nader voters preferred
Bush over Gore, and also assume that the relative utilities are linearly
distributed, then the 80% of Nader supporters who voted for Gore all
rated Gore at least 20 on a scale of 0 to 100 (assuming Bush is 0 and
Nader is 100).

The remaining Nader voters, who refused to vote for Gore, would all have
rated Gore as < 20.

If we modify our first assumption so that only half the actual voters
preferred Gore to Bush, however slighly, then maximum rating for Gore in
this group would have been around 11 out of 100.

If we were to use a letter grade, using A-B-C-D-F to denote the
quintiles, then these voters would have given Gore an "F" in either case
(or at best an "F+" in the first example).

Approval voting would no doubt have made it easier for some of this
one-percent group to support Gore, but to argue that all of these votes
should have counted toward Gore just seems wrong to me.  And again,
because the Reform and Libertarian votes would have favored Bush, I'm
not convinced it would have helped Gore anyway-- it may have gone
against him.

Bart