more on voting

I got a reply to my post on voting methods saying essentially, “if Nader makes it through the first round he is more fit to run against Bush and anyone putting Nader is going to put Kerry second anyhow.”

This is a valid critique of the particular example I gave, but not of the actual issue.

Right now we have two parties. I fully expect this to remain true until we see some sort of voting process reform because any third party will necessarily draw more heavily from one party than the other, weakening it. In the political spectrum though there is everything from communists to anarchists. All in all our two parties are not that markedly different. They can’t be. They have to stay near the middle of the bell curve in order to garner enough political support to seriously oppose the other party.

Anyone voting for a third party candidate right now would almost certainly put the main party candidates in the same order. I.e. Green party voters would put Kerry before Bush and libertarians the opposite. In a system with a wider spectrum of positions this would not necessarily be true.

Also, imagine if there was a candidate who was generally attractive to one party, but who had some unpopular opinions on a couple single voter issues like abortion or gun control. One of the things about the Nader campaign is that he has not gotten very much press coverage of his actual positions. His language in general is very straightforward and if this was actually making it into the media more, there are almost certainly be a significant number of people who would not want to see him elected. (Mostly Bush supporters, but we are giving him some hypothetical positions unpalatable to moderate democrats.)

Imagine then that there are lots of democrats who like the idea of him getting elected, but those moderate ones who don’t like him would rather see Bush in office. So the ballots could look like this:

1. 35% Bush, Kerry, Nader
2. 34% Nader, Kerry, Bush
3. 16% Kerry, Bush, Nader
4. 15% Kerry, Nader, Bush

So Kerry gets pushed out in the first round because he has 31% (#3 (16%) + #4 (15%)) which is less than Nader’s 34% (#2) or Bush’s 35% (#1). Kerry’s seconds then get divvied up and Bush wins 51% (#1 (35%) + #3 (16%)) to Nader’s 49% (#2 (34%) + #4 (15%)). This is despite the fact that 65% (#2 (34%) + #3 (16%) + #4 (15%)) of people preferred Kerry to Bush. These numbers are close, but this is not really a fringe case. I just kept them close to try and show realism. This is something that can happen under a variety of circumstances.

Not that I am against instant runoff as an alternative to plurality. I just think that the possible drawbacks need to be known.