Say you prefer Nader to Gore to Bush. Do you vote approval for Nader (thus "throwing your vote away" if Gore and Bush are the leading candidates) or do you vote approval for Nader and Gore (thus "throwing your vote away" if Nader and Gore are the leading candidates)?
Yeah, it's better than plurality, but wouldn't it be nice to vote using a system where you can actually express all your preferences in the voting booth rather than having to pick and choose?
I'm not so sure it's impossible. It seems like you could use some public-key approach to verifying that the software you are voting on matches the official build.
I'm a little fuzzy on the ins-and-outs of public key crypto, but it seems like there should be some way of verifying that the software is signed by a key, and that the key matches the offical key.
You can use a digital signature system to verify that the voting machine software has access to the official build, but not that the voting machine software is the official build. All the evil software has to do is run a copy of the good software inside a sandbox or virtual machine and pass any verification commands down. Letting the software be open source (rather than closed source but written by a different company from the hardware manufacturer) would actually make that easier.
It's not a bad idea - systems like this work adequately to block cheating in some online games - but I wouldn't trust an election to it.
Paper scales great since the invention of the optical scanner. Nobody's objecting to the use of electronic assistance in the voting process, we just think that the record of votes needs to be relatively tamperproof paper rather than invisibly alterable RAM.
Take any existing e-voting system, have it print out a paper ballot with the voter's selections, and let those ballots be the final judge of what the vote tally is, and you'll satisfy 90% of people's complaints. Make sure every precinct has enough extra voting machines, printers, paper and ink to handle breakdowns, and you'll satisfy another 9% of the complainers.
This is a perfect example of a urgently needed technology that an Open Source solution would be great for.
It's too bad that's impossible. Your customers can trust open source software, because they can compile and install the software themselves. Voters can't do that, so the best a company can do is publish some source code and make promises that the exact same program will be the only thing running on the voting machines. Since such promises are difficult to verify (see the Diebold machines that got updated with uncertified software for example), you can never be sure that the voting software you're told is open source really is.
To prevent people's votes from being miscounted or uncounted by an electronic system, the only sufficient solution will be a paper trail and/or a cryptographically verifiable receipt. Even then, to prevent electronic systems from adding false votes will require vigilance at every polling booth. Using open source in addition would be nice, but it's neither a necessary nor sufficient solution.
What are your positions on instant-runoff voting and proportional representation? Do you currently, and would you in the future, support any reforms to encourage a greater diversity in our political system?
I believe that I can safely ignore this question, because most of the public is too stupid or ignorant to realize I'm doing so, just as long as I still say something with words like "voting" and "reform". I believe that my opponent will do the exact same thing, and so we can both laugh at the fact that any candidates who would try to fix the flaws US voting system have no chance of winning because of those flaws.
I can share loads of copyrighted material on my webserver if I wanted to. The only difference? It's easier to shut that activity down. Dedicated p2p systems are harder to shut down.
Why? If I download a copyrighted file (or even chunks of a copyrighted file) from your P2P program (with the possible exception of Freenet), I've got your IP address. What more does a webserver give me?
There are some technical differences. The biggest is probably that P2P filesharing systems (except for bittorrent) have built-in searching capabilities, so people can find filez without Google. Since Google exists and doesn't filter out search terms like "Parent Directory" yet, this isn't a big difference.
The real difference is social: it's easier to share files by installing a P2P application while searching for other people's files than it is to share files by installing, configuring, and getting Google to spider a webserver. The Web became respectable before it became popular, so nobody would think of suing Microsoft for all the MP3s you can find in IIS-generated indices. P2P became popular before it became respectable, so Napster got sued into the ground.
For the "Mars Direct" plan, none of the geology (areology?) matters - the "living off the land" breakthrough in Mars Direct is really just "living off the air" to produce fuel and oxygen, we understand the Martian atmosphere pretty well, and small scale fuel production systems will fit on small robotic sample return missions. If we don't understand the surface well enough after multiple sets of robot probes, that's just another excuse to send people there as well.
For the exploration/exploitation of Mars after the first missions, I think the unanswered political questions ("What will prevent this from becoming just another 'flag and footprints' expedition to be canned after a few missions?") will become problems long before any agricultural questions become important. Mars Direct makes some of the same design decisions (expendible heavy lift rockets being the most obvious) that made it easier to reach the moon but much more tempting to stop the Apollo program shortly afterwards.
All that hand-waving is vaguely reminiscent of "Mars Direct" or whatever they're calling it these days. Once upon a time, we didn't have to eat in space because of the absence of gravity. Now, we just hand-wave away radiation damage to the crew and the logistics of setting up a nuclear reactor on Mars to produce fuel for the return journey.
Radiation hazards are discussed on pages 10, 13, 81, 83, 95, and 114-120 of _The Case for Mars_. The fuel production processes are detailed starting on page 148, and end on page 156 with a mention of the power requirements (300 watts, which makes the "nuclear reactor" just another RTG) for a sample return mission. The mass requirements of a fission generator are on page 205. This is just the discussion in the popular non-fiction book; don't be too surprised if the actual studies (the first study by JPL claimed the human mission would be doable for $50 billion; more recent studies by NASA claim $33e9 + $7e9 per mission, and the ESA thinks they could do it for under $22e9 + $6e9 per mission.)
If you have some specific concerns with the proposals, it would be more credible of you to bring them up rather than pretend that these problems haven't been considered at all. Do you really think that a NASA engineer might read your post and exclaim "There's radiation in space! Why didn't I think about that!?"
Have you ever noticed how hard it is to find actual tin foil in the store? Do you realize that most people have been conditioned to think of aluminum foil as equivalent to real tin foil, despite the fact that aluminum is practically transparent to mind control rays?
It isn't a coincidence, my friend. Alcoa is under Their control too...
The best voting method I've seen is Condorcet voting. But even that isn't perfect.
Isn't that what Arrow's Theorem says in a nutshell, that no voting system can be perfect? Condorcet comes pretty close, though, and the places where it fails are all situations like "33% of voters prefer A to B to C, 33% prefer B to C to A, and 33% prefer C to A to B" where it's intuitively obvious that there's no good solution.
All voters really need to know about Condorcet vs. Instant Runoff is that Condorcet prevents the need for strategic voting: for example if you preferred Nader to Gore to Bush, you could safely vote that way without worrying about "throwing your vote away". With IRV, you still have to worry.
What politicians need to know about Condorcet voting is that it vastly reduces the need for strategic nominating: McCain could have run in 2000 without worrying about splitting the Republican vote and throwing the race to Gore, for example.
The support for Instant Runoff Voting over Condorcet confuses me. Do we just need to give Condorcet a less Frenchy name? Figure out a way to make the mathematics more popularly accessible?
and that Nader realized his supporters preferred Gore by a 2:1 ratio) only Nader should have wanted to!
Incorrect.
If you replace the word "Gore" with the phrase "Gore to Bush" in my above sentence, it is entirely correct. I'm sorry I didn't word it so precisely, but I assumed that you would be able to understand the meaning anyway.
I simply want to highlight that - god forbid - maybe the Democrats should look into why they are losing their base, instead of blaming a handful of progressives.
Why they're losing their base is simple: they've lost their most left wing voters to the Green party, and they haven't yet made their politics more conservative to make up for it. Of course, I doubt that this is the "message" that Nader voters were trying to send, but it's the message that a campaign manager with an understanding of game theory will receive: the Democrats can risk alienating more people like those 250,000 moderate voters by becoming more liberal to try and capture 100,000 Nader votes, or they can risk further alienating the Nader voters by doing the opposite and moving their politics towards the Republicans to capture those 250,000 moderate votes.
Its a classic scapegoat routine. Far more registered democrats voted for Bush than voted for Nader - what is so difficult to understand? The Democrats have bigger fish to fry, but they are taking the less painful route by blaming the idealists.
I'm not blaming the idealists, or placing any moral judgements on anyone. I'm making statements of fact: if the idealists had voted pragmatically instead, the 2000 election would have had a different result, and 2/3 of the people who cared about that difference would have preferred it. There aren't any statements of opinion there, much less blame, just clear statements about cause and effect.
If the exit polls are to be believed, 60,000 Floridans made the wrong choice four years ago.
I would argue that 250,000 made the wrong choice... who wins this stupid argument that you posed? Let me know....
There's a difference between your argument and mine. Your argument requires you to second-guess people's motivations, whereas mine simply requires me to believe what people said their motivations were. My argument requires you to believe that 40,000 Nader voters preferred Gore to Bush, which is the result of exit polling. Your argument requires me to believe that 250,000 Bush voters preferred Gore to Bush, which (except for a few butterfly ballot victims) is the result of wishful thinking.
Thanks for the tip - so if we don't want a Republicat in the White House, we shouldn't vote for 3rd parties.
If you don't understand my point, a more useful reply would be in the form of a question, rather than a sarcastic and mistaken rephrasing.
Of course, you may simply disagree with one of my points, that voting for a third party candidate who polls in the single digits on election day won't put that candidate in the White House. In that case, in the spirit of your calling me an idiot-drone and my arguments stupid, let me point out that you're living in a world of make believe! With flowers and bells and leprechauns and magic frogs with funny little hats! The time to express a useful preference for losing candidates is when you're telling poll takers who you want to vote for and when you're telling the news media who you want to see debate, not when you're telling a plurality voting system who you want them to count your vote for.
There's nothing wrong with voting for a third party (reread the section you snipped from my last post), but you need to be aware that by doing so in an election where that third party is far behind in the polls, you simply forfeit your chance to make a choice between the two leading candidates, without any chance of putting your own preferred choice in office.
You're absolutely right: Bush voters wanted Bush to beat Gore, and because Bush ran and they voted for him, they made that happen.
However, most Nader voters wanted Gore to beat Bush, and by voting for Nader they prevented that from happening. Do you see the difference? Either Bush or Nader could have handed the election to Gore by stepping down in Florida, but (assuming that both candidates wanted their voters' preferences to be realized, and that Nader realized his supporters preferred Gore by a 2:1 ratio) only Nader should have wanted to! Those registered Democrats who voted for Bush weren't throwing their votes away, because they really wanted Bush to win (you're allowed to do that, even as a Democrat). 40% of Nader voters weren't throwing their votes away, because (just as you suggested) they really didn't care which other candidate won. But 20% of Nader voters came incredibly close to costing Bush the election by not using their opportunities to express their preference for him over Gore, and 40% of Nader voters did cost Gore the election by not using their opportunities to express their preference for him over Bush.
Don't think I don't sympathize. I'm in Texas voting for Badanarik this election, and if you live anywhere but Pennsylvania, Florida, Michigan, or Ohio I'd encourage you to join me. If you're stuck in a battleground state, though, you've got an ugly choice to make between casting your vote to send a message and casting it to help decide who wins the election. If the exit polls are to be believed, 60,000 Floridans made the wrong choice four years ago. Hopefully it won't happen again this year - if we want to see a non-Republicrat in the White House, it's only going to happen because we vote for state legislators who will end plurality voting, not because we vote for third party candidates who are polling in the single digits.
The first source I found, who ironically is trying to prove that Nader didn't cost Gore the election, has numbers that state otherwise.
If 40% of Nader voters would have voted for Gore, 20% would have voted for Bush, and 40% wouldn't have voted in a 2-way race, then if Nader had resigned from the Florida ballot Gore would have won the state (and hence the election) by nearly 20,000 votes.
But the code works within a drive to try and prevent bad blocks or noisy reads from corrupting your data, it doesn't work between drives. There are companies that do RS error correction between drives (one calls their scheme "RAID X") but I don't know if that's very widespread. You need a lot of independent places to put your data before RS makes sense; for a hard drive or CD where you can put data in hundreds of different physical locations on the disk, or for a P2P system where you can backup data on hundreds of different peers, this makes sense, but even people using RAID arrays are usually doing it with a dozen disks rather than a hundred.
The point being, voting power grows in direct proportion to the likeliness of a tie. The more you divide the election arena, the more likely your one vote will break a tie and directly affect the election's outcome.
No, the more you divide the election arena, the more likely that one vote in a swing state will break a tie and directly affect the election's outcome. That's wonderful for Pennsylvania and Florida, but I live in Texas. Thus, despite the fact that this is an incredibly close election where every vote should count, my vote has essentially no chance whatsoever of influencing the result. The Kerry voters here are just pissing into the wind, and the Bush voters are just adding "bonus points" to his popular vote score without actually increasing the chance of him winning.
Voting power is a zero-sum game. You can't give more of it to one person without taking some of it away from someone else. Obviously the fairest thing to do is to pick a president from the popular vote rather than trying to balance out your resdistributions of power (e.g. clustering voters into winner-take-all states gives an unfair advantage to larger states, but giving more electors relative to the population of smaller states gives some back). Since there's a good chance that Bush may win the popular vote but lose the electoral college, perhaps we'll see some willingness to fix the system after both parties have been recently bitten by it.
We'll need that willingness, because the system will have to be fixed from the top down. If only a few states switch away from winner-take-all electors, those states just abdicate 90% of their voting power, which only makes the system even less fair. It's a prisoner's dilemma situation, and since trying to get 50 states to cooperate voluntarily against their own short-term interests would be like herding cats, it'll probably take a constitutional amendment to fix.
The problem is, if they do not get it under balance, the dollar will plummet, and then loose value as people loose faith in it.
The trick to surviving such a crash is to choose investments that aren't tied to the value of the dollar. We're advising our clients to put everything they have into canned food and shotguns.
Error correction gets a lot more sophisticated than checksums, you know. You can make a Reed-Solomon codec for 8-bit code words with 255 byte encoded blocks having any even number of parity bytes, and the way optimal RS codes work is that you can recover the original data as long as the number of missing code words plus twice the number of corrupted code words is less than the number of parity code words you chose.
So, you divide your data into chunks 225 bytes long. Each byte in a chunk goes to a different peer, and each of the 30 parity bytes also goes to a different peer. Then, even if a dozen peers have simultaneously unsubscribed or crashed and their shares haven't been replicated on new peers yet, you can still recover all your data from the shares that remain.
Maybe the next Gore or McCain will change things
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Open the Debates
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There will be no change until, for some reason, the two major parties both think it's in their best interest. And I can't imagine how that would come about.
If we had run the final 2000 presidential election based on Condorcet or approval voting instead of plurality voting, Nader wouldn't have been a "spoiler" and Gore would have won. If we had run the whole 2000 presidential election based on Condorcet or approval voting, McCain could have run past the primaries without worrying about splitting the Republican vote, and in a vote including both Republicans and Democrats he would have beaten Bush and Gore by a nice margin.
If our two-party system (for which plurality voting is the primary cause and closed debates are just a symptom) was just screwing third party candidates, then I wouldn't expect it to ever change. But popular Democrats and Republicans are feeling the pinch now, too, and eventually some of them may be smart enough to realize why and try to fix it. And once the underlying causes are fixed, it won't matter what the "Official Republicrat Debate Rules" are, because if more than two candidates stood a real chance of winning the election, reporters would be beating down their doors to give all the contenders a forum to speak.
I think that was one of my first "wow" moments with open source: in '97 or '98 I discovered that not only could I recompile my ethernet driver, but when I had a problem with it (Linksys had put out a new card with the same model number but a different chipset) I could email the author and he'd send me a patch.
John Kerry voted for one version of an appropriations bill for Gulf War II, and voted against another. George W. Bush threatened to veto one version of the appropriations bill, and signed another. Because the Bush campaign was the first to figure out how to work half of these facts into a soundbyte, now Kerry is a "flip-flopper" in the public eye.
The success of negative campaigning isn't just the public's fault, either; it's partly because both candidates this time really do suck. I know that for a lot of voters the answers to "Do you want George W. Bush as your president?" and "Do you want John Kerry as your president?" are the same: no! IMHO the Bush campaign is doing a good job keeping the latter question in people's minds, and it's going to win him the election.
Slashdot Mirror
Say you prefer Nader to Gore to Bush. Do you vote approval for Nader (thus "throwing your vote away" if Gore and Bush are the leading candidates) or do you vote approval for Nader and Gore (thus "throwing your vote away" if Nader and Gore are the leading candidates)?
Yeah, it's better than plurality, but wouldn't it be nice to vote using a system where you can actually express all your preferences in the voting booth rather than having to pick and choose?
I'm not so sure it's impossible. It seems like you could use some public-key approach to verifying that the software you are voting on matches the official build.
I'm a little fuzzy on the ins-and-outs of public key crypto, but it seems like there should be some way of verifying that the software is signed by a key, and that the key matches the offical key.
You can use a digital signature system to verify that the voting machine software has access to the official build, but not that the voting machine software is the official build. All the evil software has to do is run a copy of the good software inside a sandbox or virtual machine and pass any verification commands down. Letting the software be open source (rather than closed source but written by a different company from the hardware manufacturer) would actually make that easier.
It's not a bad idea - systems like this work adequately to block cheating in some online games - but I wouldn't trust an election to it.
Paper doesn't scale well.
Paper scales great since the invention of the optical scanner. Nobody's objecting to the use of electronic assistance in the voting process, we just think that the record of votes needs to be relatively tamperproof paper rather than invisibly alterable RAM.
Take any existing e-voting system, have it print out a paper ballot with the voter's selections, and let those ballots be the final judge of what the vote tally is, and you'll satisfy 90% of people's complaints. Make sure every precinct has enough extra voting machines, printers, paper and ink to handle breakdowns, and you'll satisfy another 9% of the complainers.
This is a perfect example of a urgently needed technology that an Open Source solution would be great for.
It's too bad that's impossible. Your customers can trust open source software, because they can compile and install the software themselves. Voters can't do that, so the best a company can do is publish some source code and make promises that the exact same program will be the only thing running on the voting machines. Since such promises are difficult to verify (see the Diebold machines that got updated with uncertified software for example), you can never be sure that the voting software you're told is open source really is.
To prevent people's votes from being miscounted or uncounted by an electronic system, the only sufficient solution will be a paper trail and/or a cryptographically verifiable receipt. Even then, to prevent electronic systems from adding false votes will require vigilance at every polling booth. Using open source in addition would be nice, but it's neither a necessary nor sufficient solution.
What are your positions on instant-runoff voting and proportional representation? Do you currently, and would you in the future, support any reforms to encourage a greater diversity in our political system?
I believe that I can safely ignore this question, because most of the public is too stupid or ignorant to realize I'm doing so, just as long as I still say something with words like "voting" and "reform". I believe that my opponent will do the exact same thing, and so we can both laugh at the fact that any candidates who would try to fix the flaws US voting system have no chance of winning because of those flaws.
What color was the chicken flesh originally?
In Australia we don't have the right to free speech. Instead we have what we aren't allowed to do defined by laws, and anything else we're free to do.
We used to have that in the United States, too. It was called the Tenth Amendment.
I can share loads of copyrighted material on my webserver if I wanted to. The only difference? It's easier to shut that activity down. Dedicated p2p systems are harder to shut down.
Why? If I download a copyrighted file (or even chunks of a copyrighted file) from your P2P program (with the possible exception of Freenet), I've got your IP address. What more does a webserver give me?
There are some technical differences. The biggest is probably that P2P filesharing systems (except for bittorrent) have built-in searching capabilities, so people can find filez without Google. Since Google exists and doesn't filter out search terms like "Parent Directory" yet, this isn't a big difference.
The real difference is social: it's easier to share files by installing a P2P application while searching for other people's files than it is to share files by installing, configuring, and getting Google to spider a webserver. The Web became respectable before it became popular, so nobody would think of suing Microsoft for all the MP3s you can find in IIS-generated indices. P2P became popular before it became respectable, so Napster got sued into the ground.
For the "Mars Direct" plan, none of the geology (areology?) matters - the "living off the land" breakthrough in Mars Direct is really just "living off the air" to produce fuel and oxygen, we understand the Martian atmosphere pretty well, and small scale fuel production systems will fit on small robotic sample return missions. If we don't understand the surface well enough after multiple sets of robot probes, that's just another excuse to send people there as well.
For the exploration/exploitation of Mars after the first missions, I think the unanswered political questions ("What will prevent this from becoming just another 'flag and footprints' expedition to be canned after a few missions?") will become problems long before any agricultural questions become important. Mars Direct makes some of the same design decisions (expendible heavy lift rockets being the most obvious) that made it easier to reach the moon but much more tempting to stop the Apollo program shortly afterwards.
This is just the discussion in the popular non-fiction book; don't be too surprised if the actual studies thought about them as well.
Yeah, yeah, I can see the preview button just fine...
All that hand-waving is vaguely reminiscent of "Mars Direct" or whatever they're calling it these days. Once upon a time, we didn't have to eat in space because of the absence of gravity. Now, we just hand-wave away radiation damage to the crew and the logistics of setting up a nuclear reactor on Mars to produce fuel for the return journey.
Radiation hazards are discussed on pages 10, 13, 81, 83, 95, and 114-120 of _The Case for Mars_. The fuel production processes are detailed starting on page 148, and end on page 156 with a mention of the power requirements (300 watts, which makes the "nuclear reactor" just another RTG) for a sample return mission. The mass requirements of a fission generator are on page 205. This is just the discussion in the popular non-fiction book; don't be too surprised if the actual studies (the first study by JPL claimed the human mission would be doable for $50 billion; more recent studies by NASA claim $33e9 + $7e9 per mission, and the ESA thinks they could do it for under $22e9 + $6e9 per mission.)
If you have some specific concerns with the proposals, it would be more credible of you to bring them up rather than pretend that these problems haven't been considered at all. Do you really think that a NASA engineer might read your post and exclaim "There's radiation in space! Why didn't I think about that!?"
Have you ever noticed how hard it is to find actual tin foil in the store? Do you realize that most people have been conditioned to think of aluminum foil as equivalent to real tin foil, despite the fact that aluminum is practically transparent to mind control rays?
It isn't a coincidence, my friend. Alcoa is under Their control too...
The best voting method I've seen is Condorcet voting. But even that isn't perfect.
Isn't that what Arrow's Theorem says in a nutshell, that no voting system can be perfect? Condorcet comes pretty close, though, and the places where it fails are all situations like "33% of voters prefer A to B to C, 33% prefer B to C to A, and 33% prefer C to A to B" where it's intuitively obvious that there's no good solution.
All voters really need to know about Condorcet vs. Instant Runoff is that Condorcet prevents the need for strategic voting: for example if you preferred Nader to Gore to Bush, you could safely vote that way without worrying about "throwing your vote away". With IRV, you still have to worry.
What politicians need to know about Condorcet voting is that it vastly reduces the need for strategic nominating: McCain could have run in 2000 without worrying about splitting the Republican vote and throwing the race to Gore, for example.
The support for Instant Runoff Voting over Condorcet confuses me. Do we just need to give Condorcet a less Frenchy name? Figure out a way to make the mathematics more popularly accessible?
Incorrect.
If you replace the word "Gore" with the phrase "Gore to Bush" in my above sentence, it is entirely correct. I'm sorry I didn't word it so precisely, but I assumed that you would be able to understand the meaning anyway.
I simply want to highlight that - god forbid - maybe the Democrats should look into why they are losing their base, instead of blaming a handful of progressives.
Why they're losing their base is simple: they've lost their most left wing voters to the Green party, and they haven't yet made their politics more conservative to make up for it. Of course, I doubt that this is the "message" that Nader voters were trying to send, but it's the message that a campaign manager with an understanding of game theory will receive: the Democrats can risk alienating more people like those 250,000 moderate voters by becoming more liberal to try and capture 100,000 Nader votes, or they can risk further alienating the Nader voters by doing the opposite and moving their politics towards the Republicans to capture those 250,000 moderate votes.
Its a classic scapegoat routine. Far more registered democrats voted for Bush than voted for Nader - what is so difficult to understand? The Democrats have bigger fish to fry, but they are taking the less painful route by blaming the idealists.
I'm not blaming the idealists, or placing any moral judgements on anyone. I'm making statements of fact: if the idealists had voted pragmatically instead, the 2000 election would have had a different result, and 2/3 of the people who cared about that difference would have preferred it. There aren't any statements of opinion there, much less blame, just clear statements about cause and effect.
I would argue that 250,000 made the wrong choice... who wins this stupid argument that you posed? Let me know....
There's a difference between your argument and mine. Your argument requires you to second-guess people's motivations, whereas mine simply requires me to believe what people said their motivations were. My argument requires you to believe that 40,000 Nader voters preferred Gore to Bush, which is the result of exit polling. Your argument requires me to believe that 250,000 Bush voters preferred Gore to Bush, which (except for a few butterfly ballot victims) is the result of wishful thinking.
Thanks for the tip - so if we don't want a Republicat in the White House, we shouldn't vote for 3rd parties.
If you don't understand my point, a more useful reply would be in the form of a question, rather than a sarcastic and mistaken rephrasing.
Of course, you may simply disagree with one of my points, that voting for a third party candidate who polls in the single digits on election day won't put that candidate in the White House. In that case, in the spirit of your calling me an idiot-drone and my arguments stupid, let me point out that you're living in a world of make believe! With flowers and bells and leprechauns and magic frogs with funny little hats! The time to express a useful preference for losing candidates is when you're telling poll takers who you want to vote for and when you're telling the news media who you want to see debate, not when you're telling a plurality voting system who you want them to count your vote for.
There's nothing wrong with voting for a third party (reread the section you snipped from my last post), but you need to be aware that by doing so in an election where that third party is far behind in the polls, you simply forfeit your chance to make a choice between the two leading candidates, without any chance of putting your own preferred choice in office.
Besides, if you really want to vote idealist
This should probably be a Slashdot FAQ:
Q: "Why does the rest of Slashdot hold inconsistent opinions?"
A: "Because it has more than 2 users."
You're absolutely right: Bush voters wanted Bush to beat Gore, and because Bush ran and they voted for him, they made that happen.
However, most Nader voters wanted Gore to beat Bush, and by voting for Nader they prevented that from happening. Do you see the difference? Either Bush or Nader could have handed the election to Gore by stepping down in Florida, but (assuming that both candidates wanted their voters' preferences to be realized, and that Nader realized his supporters preferred Gore by a 2:1 ratio) only Nader should have wanted to! Those registered Democrats who voted for Bush weren't throwing their votes away, because they really wanted Bush to win (you're allowed to do that, even as a Democrat). 40% of Nader voters weren't throwing their votes away, because (just as you suggested) they really didn't care which other candidate won. But 20% of Nader voters came incredibly close to costing Bush the election by not using their opportunities to express their preference for him over Gore, and 40% of Nader voters did cost Gore the election by not using their opportunities to express their preference for him over Bush.
Don't think I don't sympathize. I'm in Texas voting for Badanarik this election, and if you live anywhere but Pennsylvania, Florida, Michigan, or Ohio I'd encourage you to join me. If you're stuck in a battleground state, though, you've got an ugly choice to make between casting your vote to send a message and casting it to help decide who wins the election. If the exit polls are to be believed, 60,000 Floridans made the wrong choice four years ago. Hopefully it won't happen again this year - if we want to see a non-Republicrat in the White House, it's only going to happen because we vote for state legislators who will end plurality voting, not because we vote for third party candidates who are polling in the single digits.
The first source I found, who ironically is trying to prove that Nader didn't cost Gore the election, has numbers that state otherwise.
If 40% of Nader voters would have voted for Gore, 20% would have voted for Bush, and 40% wouldn't have voted in a 2-way race, then if Nader had resigned from the Florida ballot Gore would have won the state (and hence the election) by nearly 20,000 votes.
But the code works within a drive to try and prevent bad blocks or noisy reads from corrupting your data, it doesn't work between drives. There are companies that do RS error correction between drives (one calls their scheme "RAID X") but I don't know if that's very widespread. You need a lot of independent places to put your data before RS makes sense; for a hard drive or CD where you can put data in hundreds of different physical locations on the disk, or for a P2P system where you can backup data on hundreds of different peers, this makes sense, but even people using RAID arrays are usually doing it with a dozen disks rather than a hundred.
It's called Condorcet Voting, and unlike IRV it's supported by mathematicians.
The point being, voting power grows in direct proportion to the likeliness of a tie. The more you divide the election arena, the more likely your one vote will break a tie and directly affect the election's outcome.
No, the more you divide the election arena, the more likely that one vote in a swing state will break a tie and directly affect the election's outcome. That's wonderful for Pennsylvania and Florida, but I live in Texas. Thus, despite the fact that this is an incredibly close election where every vote should count, my vote has essentially no chance whatsoever of influencing the result. The Kerry voters here are just pissing into the wind, and the Bush voters are just adding "bonus points" to his popular vote score without actually increasing the chance of him winning.
Voting power is a zero-sum game. You can't give more of it to one person without taking some of it away from someone else. Obviously the fairest thing to do is to pick a president from the popular vote rather than trying to balance out your resdistributions of power (e.g. clustering voters into winner-take-all states gives an unfair advantage to larger states, but giving more electors relative to the population of smaller states gives some back). Since there's a good chance that Bush may win the popular vote but lose the electoral college, perhaps we'll see some willingness to fix the system after both parties have been recently bitten by it.
We'll need that willingness, because the system will have to be fixed from the top down. If only a few states switch away from winner-take-all electors, those states just abdicate 90% of their voting power, which only makes the system even less fair. It's a prisoner's dilemma situation, and since trying to get 50 states to cooperate voluntarily against their own short-term interests would be like herding cats, it'll probably take a constitutional amendment to fix.
The problem is, if they do not get it under balance, the dollar will plummet, and then loose value as people loose faith in it.
The trick to surviving such a crash is to choose investments that aren't tied to the value of the dollar. We're advising our clients to put everything they have into canned food and shotguns.
Error correction gets a lot more sophisticated than checksums, you know. You can make a Reed-Solomon codec for 8-bit code words with 255 byte encoded blocks having any even number of parity bytes, and the way optimal RS codes work is that you can recover the original data as long as the number of missing code words plus twice the number of corrupted code words is less than the number of parity code words you chose.
So, you divide your data into chunks 225 bytes long. Each byte in a chunk goes to a different peer, and each of the 30 parity bytes also goes to a different peer. Then, even if a dozen peers have simultaneously unsubscribed or crashed and their shares haven't been replicated on new peers yet, you can still recover all your data from the shares that remain.
There will be no change until, for some reason, the two major parties both think it's in their best interest. And I can't imagine how that would come about.
If we had run the final 2000 presidential election based on Condorcet or approval voting instead of plurality voting, Nader wouldn't have been a "spoiler" and Gore would have won. If we had run the whole 2000 presidential election based on Condorcet or approval voting, McCain could have run past the primaries without worrying about splitting the Republican vote, and in a vote including both Republicans and Democrats he would have beaten Bush and Gore by a nice margin.
If our two-party system (for which plurality voting is the primary cause and closed debates are just a symptom) was just screwing third party candidates, then I wouldn't expect it to ever change. But popular Democrats and Republicans are feeling the pinch now, too, and eventually some of them may be smart enough to realize why and try to fix it. And once the underlying causes are fixed, it won't matter what the "Official Republicrat Debate Rules" are, because if more than two candidates stood a real chance of winning the election, reporters would be beating down their doors to give all the contenders a forum to speak.
I think that was one of my first "wow" moments with open source: in '97 or '98 I discovered that not only could I recompile my ethernet driver, but when I had a problem with it (Linksys had put out a new card with the same model number but a different chipset) I could email the author and he'd send me a patch.
John Kerry voted for one version of an appropriations bill for Gulf War II, and voted against another. George W. Bush threatened to veto one version of the appropriations bill, and signed another. Because the Bush campaign was the first to figure out how to work half of these facts into a soundbyte, now Kerry is a "flip-flopper" in the public eye.
The success of negative campaigning isn't just the public's fault, either; it's partly because both candidates this time really do suck. I know that for a lot of voters the answers to "Do you want George W. Bush as your president?" and "Do you want John Kerry as your president?" are the same: no! IMHO the Bush campaign is doing a good job keeping the latter question in people's minds, and it's going to win him the election.