Interesting post from my wife's paisan, Roy Cordato.
He writes about the strangeness of the NY 23 ballot. Very cool, very interesting. Excerpt:
Here is what the voter saw when he or she went in to the voting booth.
Democrat--Owens
Republican--Scozzafava
Independence--Scozzafava
Conservative--Hoffman
Working Families--Owens
My guess is that this peculiarity alone could account for the fact that Scozzafava received over 5 percent of the vote, more than the margin of difference between Owens and Hoffman.
Remember, Scozzafava had DROPPED OUT of the race, but her name is listed twice on the ballot, because of New York's "fusion" laws.
5 comments:
I thought you believed in third parties? Fusion laws allow third parties to organize without being a so called "spoiler."
South Carolina currently allows fusion voting.
In North Carolina, the Democratic party eliminated fusion voting to disenfranchise blacks and the emerging Republican party.
I'm quite surprised you're not more familiar with fusion voting.
Voters deserve more choices.
Never said I was not familiar with fusion nomination, pumpkin.
I *am* surprised that the name is listed separately for each party. If that is what you mean, then you are right and I was just ignorant.
I thought that the ballot would list the parties (Repub, Indep) and then the name.
But, I was wrong. Not for the last time, I'm sure.
That would defeat the point. Then you would have no tally of which party won votes for the candidates, and no accountability for those candidates.
Bush - Republican
Bush - Conservative
Gore - Democratic
Gore - Progressive
If Bush wins 70% of his votes from the GOP and 30% from the Conservative party, he'd better fraking listen to the conservative party. If Gore gets 98% of his votes from the Democratic party then maybe he can afford to skip a Progressive event every once in a while.
Additionally, let's pretend that Libertarian endorsed candidates regularly pick up 5% percent of the vote. They can, with fusion voting, use that to encourage candidates to support Lib positions in order to earn their nomination.
I said that wrong.
Let's pretend that the Libertarian line gets 5% percent of the vote.
Libs would then have leverage to sway either the Democratic or Republican front runners, by offering one of them their line.
I think it is expecting a bit much to talk as if paper ballots should reflect a candidate withdrawal that was a mere four days before the election.
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