Submitted by ADefiniteDescription t3_yor0ro in philosophy
AzLibDem t1_ivgnu80 wrote
Reply to comment by spaceofreason in The ethics of voting for the 'lesser of two evils' by ADefiniteDescription
It's actually worse.
Since there is a finite pool of available voters, removing your vote from a viable candidate, either by not voting or voting third party, is basically a default vote for the candidate you would least want elected.
TheRoadsMustRoll t1_ivlcpw6 wrote
>...voting third party, is basically a default vote for the candidate you would least want elected.
not if the third party candidate is the person you most want elected.
if you are only voting for the most viable candidate then you would only have voted for the winners regardless of their policy positions. and those politicians would never see the affect of changing their policies or reacting to new information because they'll be (irrationally) branded the most likely candidate to win.
FranksRedWorkAccount t1_ivleq8c wrote
Just to not have to be ambiguous lets say you are left wing politically. If you choose to vote third party because the Democrat is okay but not good enough and a Republican wins your third party vote doesn't prove the democrats need to go even harder left. They are more likely to move to the right which will make them more competitive with the other major party, the Republicans. Third party voting in the US isn't even going to register as a protest vote but instead push the closer of the two party members farther away from you.
TheRoadsMustRoll t1_ivlqgsb wrote
sorry. i'm confused about what you are saying.
but most of these 3rd party scenario tropes tend to rely on the outcome to justify or un-justify the means. you won't know who will win in advance.
i.e. people voting for nader in 2000 had no way of knowing how many of their votes it would take away from gore. some of those people wouldn't have voted if it weren't for nader and many of them were the same that always vote for the green party anyway. if nader had won all of the gore voters would have been sneered-at as if they might've thrown the election. and in the next cycle, when people had the chance to toss out bush, they didn't. no split votes. bush served 8 years on his own political capital.
FranksRedWorkAccount t1_ivlznwu wrote
Biden, trump and bernie are running for office. If you vote Bernie instead of Biden on principle and trump wins the supposed lesson that Biden would learn is that he needs to be more leftist to get those bernie voters to back him next time (this doesn't really work for individuals but for parties at large. again I am simplifying) So the next election comes up and Biden is supposed to pitch more left to get the Bernie voters and the Biden voters. That is supposedly what happens when people make a third party protest vote.
But what I am suggesting is that there is just as much of a chance for Biden to try to be more centrist, thus lean to the right more, to steal votes away from Trump and allow him to win with or without the Bernie voters.
AzLibDem t1_ivleyyq wrote
>not if the third party candidate is the person you most want elected.
I specified viable candidates. If your candidate has no chance of winning, it's the same as not voting.
TheRoadsMustRoll t1_ivln71t wrote
>If your candidate has no chance of winning, it's the same as not voting.
that means one would have been a fool to have voted for Hillary in 2016 or Trump in 2020 since they had no chance of winning.
all of those votes for the losers throughout history were the same as not voting?
how are people supposed to know in advance of the election that they are voting for losers?
Shufflepants t1_ivpfa1p wrote
No. You're speaking in absolutes when the person you replied to said "no chance", which means near zero probability. Because you don't know the outcome ahead of time, but you can still reasonably predict no third party candidate will win. Hillary did have a chance. Indeed, she won the popular vote.
You're trying to weirdly pretend like we both:
A) don't have any predictive power about the likelihood of a third party candidate winning.
B) Have complete predictive power about who will win between the two main candidates.
But we have neither of those. We do know that no third party candidate has any chance of winning. And we do know that both of the candidates from the main two parties have a reasonable shot at winning, but that it will be close, and therefore voting for one of the main two does stand a shot at affecting the outcome.
Voting third party only makes sense in a different voting system like ranked choice. The Nash Equillibrium for a first past the post, single vote system where we have access to limited information about voting patterns of others and engage in repeated elections is for two dominant groups/parties/candidates to emerge that vie for control. Go learn some game theory.
TheRoadsMustRoll t1_ivpi738 wrote
a black man won in 2008. never happened before. it was unlikely at best.
but he won twice.
you'll live in a world where the unlikely never happens. i'll live in the real world where it does.
Shufflepants t1_ivpjdxv wrote
>you'll live in a world where the unlikely never happens
No, I'm living in a world where there is a wide range of probabilities and where I'm taking into account all available data instead of just basing the probabilities on a single factor. We had mountains of polling data both before and after the democratic primaries on people's willingness to vote for Obama, and it was far from impossible. But after he won the democratic primary, the conditional probability for him winning shoots way up.
You're living in some weird world where there's only one degree of "unlikely". If something has less than a 50% chance of happening, it's "unlikely". Sure, maybe Obama had a less than 50% chance of winning. But any third party candidate has less than a 0.000000005% chance of winning. It's not just "unlikely" it's "implausible", it's "nearly impossible", or in colloquial terms it is impossible.
If you wanna bank of nearly impossible outcomes because they might happen, go buy lottery tickets.
Shufflepants t1_ivpfzng wrote
>how are people supposed to know in advance of the election that they are voting for losers?
Because we have past data on voting patterns. We have countless examples of third party candidates failing to get even a single electoral vote. We also have plenty of survey data and mountains of other evidence that points to the fact that many voters just vote for whoever has the R next their name every time or whoever has the D next to their name every time. We do have evidence that there are voters who aren't fixed in their voting patterns, and who sometimes vote R, sometimes vote D, and sometimes vote third party; but these non-fixed voters do not represent a large enough proportion of voters to be able to elect a third party on their own. So, we KNOW with very high certainty that in order to win, you MUST win either the voters that only vote D or the voters that only vote R, while also capturing some of the voters that aren't fixed. Therefore, we can rightly conclude that any non-R or non-D candidate has virtually zero chance of winning; more surely than one's chances of winning the powerball.
TheRoadsMustRoll t1_ivphszp wrote
>Because we have past data on voting patterns.
that helped us figure out who would win in 2016?
based on past voting data no black person should ever be voted for because they've only won once in the history of the country.
that's ridiculous. things change. if you discard changes in favor of past mediocrity then you'll always have the same results you always had.
Shufflepants t1_ivpi5dv wrote
>that helped us figure out who would win in 2016?
Yes, it helped us know that no third party candidate had any chance of winning. And it helped us know that both the R and D candidate had a reasonable chance of winning.
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