Warren wrote: > I have news for you. The concept of "strategic voting" is entirely > about caring more about vanishingly small gains in utility than about > honesty.
It's not vanishingly small if you think about it from a team perspective. Teamwork is part of human nature. The cavemen probably teamed up to hunt woolly mammoths. Modern voters probably use similar teamwork-like thought processes. I hypothesize that many voters associate themselves with some team (a party or a political orientation). Then, they consider how they should vote as a team, to get the best outcome for themselves and the team. The chance of one voter making a difference is vanishingly small. But the chance of all the Nader voters acting together making a difference in Florida 2000 was quite large - the main uncertainty being how many voters were in each "team." Many Nader supporters realized that there was no chance that Nader could win - hence not much reason to vote _for_ him - but there was a considerable risk that if they all voted for Nader, they would get the worse outcome of Bush winning. So most of those Nader supporters who went through that thought process voted for Gore. The very act of voting makes a lot more sense if you look at it from a team perspective. From an individual voter's perspective, the expected benefit from voting is not worth the cost. But when you look at it from a team perspective, where the probability of winning for the major parties is about 50% for each, voting makes a lot of sense to the teams. ---- Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
