Michael Allan > Sent: Monday, October 03, 2011 9:31 AM > ABSTRACT > -------- > An individual vote has no effect on the formal outcome of the > election; whether the vote is cast or not, the outcome is the > same regardless.
These statements worry me - surely they contain a logical flaw? If these statements were true and every elector responded rationally, no-one would ever vote. Then the outcome would not be the same. I am not "into logic", but I suspect the flaw is in some disconnection between the individual and the aggregate. When A with 100 votes wins over B with 99 votes, we cannot say which of the 100 individual votes for A was "the winning vote", but it is clear that is any one of those 100 votes had not been for A, then A would not have won. At best, if one A-voter had stayed at home, there would have been a tie. If one of the A-voters had voted for B instead, the outcome would have been very different. Or am I missing something? I do appreciate that there can be a disconnection, large or small, between the outcome of an election and the consequences in government (policy implementation - or not), but the statements quoted above were specifically about elections per se. That's why I'm puzzled. James Gilmour ---- Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
