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The problem with this is that it is thinking in absolutes during a situation where people are often very willing to compromise their own beliefs just to be able
by sjmm1989 5y ago
The problem with this is that it is thinking in absolutes during a situation where people are often very willing to compromise their own beliefs just to be able to provide an answer.
In normal elections we see this with people who don't like any choice, but don't want to spoil their ballot. So they pick their next best favorite.
This means that if A is removed, people might pick B or C instead just because A isn't there.
People are tricky. Hard to pin down what's exactly going to happen every time. There are distinguishable patterns and such; but ultimately you can't rely on them as if they are infallible.
- contravariant 5y agoAs long as you assume people aren't suddenly going to prefer A to B when C is there and prefer B to A when C isn't then you can safely recalculate the result. Of course people might not necessarily act rationally but you've got to draw a line somewhere, otherwise elections are simply undefined behaviour and talking about properties of elections becomes meaningless.
- couchand 5y agoThe behavior you describe isn't at all irrational: in a nutshell that's the effect that propelled Biden to the White House.
- winkeltripel 5y agoI don't understand your point. In ranking presidential candidates, most left-or-center-leaning voters would rank any and every Democrat above any and every Republican, with Trump as their very last choice. So the presence or not of any specific candidate doesn't change the outcome. They would have voted in whomever the Democrat Nominee was.
- couchand 5y agoThere was lots of reporting in 2020 about Democratic voters who preferred another candidate throwing their support behind Biden based on the idea that he was best positioned to win in the general election.
- sjmm1989 5y agoOkay sure, you have to have some sort of baseline to go by. Some sort of assumption of truth as it were. But, no, you cannot safely recalculate that result, because by and large people are the representation of chaos. undefined behavior is the norm, not defined behavior. Defined behavior is only present in any of our societies because of 'social norms', which is the only reason I relent and say that some assumptions might be possible. But I will not agree that you can 'safely' recalculate that result just using whatever assumptions some person arbitrarily has deemed 'good enough to trust'. That kind of thinking is why most polls are actually wrong, but taken as good enough. (Yes, I'm one of those people who nit picks the randomness of their selection biases.) P.S. All it takes to swing an election in favor of the underdog is a single new revelation. All it takes is for people to suddenly question their previous choices. A & B might be their norm; but people can be swayed to choose C or D if the situation is right. This is why we can't really trust assumptions without some sort of evidence to back them. At which point they stop being assumptions...
- contravariant 5y agoI agree that human behaviour is unpredictable and irrational, but as far as voting systems go I'm happy to argue that if some change wouldn't affect the result assuming people are voting rationally, then there is no cause to invalidate the vote. Otherwise you're just arguing the vote is invalid because it would have ended differently in a rerun, and you have to stop somewhere.