[EM] a response to Andy J.

[David L Wetzell]

>
>
>> I guess I don't quite get your point.
>> My point is that given the use of American forms of PR, 3rd parties cd
>> enforce campaign finance transparency laws that would make the use of
>> clones not feasible.
>>
>
> In the Burlington case, imagine you're a Dem voter. You think: "If I can
> keep the Prog from being in the top 3, the Dem wins. So I'll vote for the
> [Dem clone/ UFO party candidate] in 3rd place instead of the Prog." My
> point is that this attempted strategy doesn't actually have to successfully
> put the UFO candidate above the Prog for it to be a problem. Even just
> attempting it brings a risk that the Republican will win - a risk that
> could be self-reinforcing as both Dems and Progs attempted such a strategy,
> perhaps even using the same UFO candidate as a proxy. (And the Republican
> voters could safely encourage this chaos by also bottom-ranking the UFO
> candidate).
>

Or the Progs and Dems could realize, hey, maybe we can become the two
dominant parties here by not doing that sort of thing...

>
> If you're about to argue that Dem voters wouldn't do that and risk
> electing a Republican... remember that that same argument would refute any
> importance at all for the LNH criterion. It may be correct that LNH doesn't
> matter - but that's not how FairVote thinks.
>

I don't know how FairVote thinks.  I think they have a product and they
market it differently towards different audiences.  To electoral egg-heads,
they've pitched LNH as important.  Whether or not 100% LNH is really a hill
they'd be willing to die on is an open question, IMO.

I think I trust that in a system that uses a mix of single-winner and PR
rules that the competition between the top two parties will be less
cut-throat and subject to such a low-blow as clone-spawning.
But the real issue here is the future attitude of FairVote to IRV3/AV3 and
I'm prone to be optimistic on account of the practical value from getting
the vote-counting done faster...
dlw
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.electorama.com/pipermail/election-methods-electorama.com/attachments/20111031/adce1304/attachment-0004.htm>