> > >> 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... > > 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. 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... dlw
---- Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
