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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   34453 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022

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If a plurality of people actually think candidate A is the best on the ballot, then even if candidates B and C split the rest of the vote then I think that's a fair outcome.

De gustibus non est disputandum, I guess. But would you extend the same latitude in return? When others think that "nearly two thirds of the electorate wants a Foo to win and there are two equally popular Foo candidates in the race" should not lead to "therefore the Bar candidate will win", could you at least not refer to that as "stupid[ly]"? Seems kind of smart to me, frankly.

To be clear, what I'm calling stupid is the idea of "my vote is wasted if I vote for a third party". That is untrue and a frustrating myth that people keep perpetuating. What actually wastes your vote is to cast it for someone you don't actually want in office. If you are tactically voting that isn't stupid by itself, though it does break the system if you do that.

It sets up an awful hysteresis in the system, at least. It's a sad fact to me that most Libertarians don't have a shot because most people aren't at all libertarian ... but I do think that Gary Johnson would have had a decent shot against the most-hated and the second-most-hated Presidential candidates of all time, if only the game theory of FPTP didn't boil down to "he can't win because he can't win".

This is akin to saying "FPTP cannot fail, it can only be failed." A system that can only work if the populace ignores strategic considerations, and otherwise outsizedly rewards the people who actually do vote strategically, is already broken.

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