[EM] a response to Andy J.

[Jameson Quinn]

2011/10/31 David L Wetzell <wetzelld at gmail.com>

>
>>> 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...
>

Not a motivation for the Dems, who already are.


>
>> 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.
>

Well, clearly not, because they've explicitly said that Condorcet's LNH
failures are somehow less problematic than Bucklin's. Makes no sense at
all... but even as such, it shows that they're willing to talk nonsense if
it suits them, which is not a die-on-the-hill attitude.


>
> 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...
>

Well, you'd also have to worry about the following:
1. People support using IRV3/AV2 (As Kathy Dopp already did in another
thread)
2. They successfully (and correctly) argue that that's better than IRV3/AV3
for honest results.
3. Then you'd have a serious LNH problem, and all of FairVote's LNH
arguments apply pretty much directly.

JQ
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