Tag: strategic voting

Member Post

Bryce Carmony
Bryce Carmony
957
 

Political parties have been the scapegoat for all the problems in American politics as long as we’ve had parties. I contest that the problems in our political system do not stem from political parties but from partisan primary elections.  Primary elections are terrible. Here is a list of only a few of the downsides to […]
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Member Post

FreeWifiDuringSermon
FreeWifiDuringSermon
105
 

Every election year, I wake up to the realization that I’m more important than most of you. Not in an ill-defined cosmic-y sense where I’m waiting to be called by destiny to bring order to the galaxy. But in a quantifiable, practical way. I am an Ohio resident, and my ballot is statistically more important […]
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Other Candidates Got Your Down? Hoist Yer Stein!

Midget Faded Rattlesnake
Midget Faded Rattlesnake
9012
 

American Stein HoistPolitics is a dirty game and nobody has to like federal funding of elections to be resigned to the observation that it’s unlikely to go away anytime soon. Given this observation, what might we do with it? The virtue of strategic, rather than principled, voting – or rather, the assertion that strategic voting is, in reality, the only form of principled voting – has many champions among the Ricochetti this year. Nonetheless, even if we grant that the odds of one’s vote being decisive are large enough in swing states that swing-state voters should feel morally obligated to choose between the two lead candidates (those odds are around one in ten million), many of us live in states so far from swing that they’re not even on the playground (our odds are more like one in a billion).

As of this morning, my state has around a 0.2% chance of tipping the election, and is one of 20 states whose voter power index is under 0.1 (a vote in New Hampshire is more than 50 times more likely than mine to decide the election), according to FiveThirtyEight. (If you don’t like Nate Silver’s methodology, feel free to substitute whichever prediction system you trust most.) Meanwhile, Gary Johnson is polling at around 8 percent nationally. Now, it’s common for polling to overestimate the share of votes third-party candidates will get. Nonetheless, if Johnson is polling at 8 percent now, he has a serious chance of crossing the threshold necessary for the Libertarian Party to receive FEC funding, which is 5 percent of the popular vote. Moreover, as @matt.corbett put it in his recent OP,

As a matter of good public choice theory, sitting out or voting third party (or advocating either) is entirely defensible as part of a long-term strategy. The great paradox of voting coalitions is that the least reliable members have the most influence… Influence can only be re-established with credibility, and credibility can only be re-established by action. An election where “your” candidate is openly contemptuous of you and is most likely a loser anyway is the ideal time to protest vote.

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