[SEQ RERUN] Stop Voting For Nincompoops

MinibearRex

Today's post, Stop Voting For Nincompoops was originally published on 02 January 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Many people try to vote "strategically", by considering which candidate is more "electable". One of the most important factors in whether someone is "electable" is whether they have received attention from the media and the support of one of the two major parties. Naturally, those organizations put considerable thought into who is electable in making their decision. Ultimately, all arguments for "strategic voting" tend to fall apart. The voters themselves get so little say in why the next president is that the best we can do is just to not vote for nincompoops.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).

This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was The American System and Misleading Labels, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.

Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.

Today's post, Stop Voting For Nincompoops was originally published on 02 January 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Many people try to vote "strategically", by considering which candidate is more "electable". One of the most important factors in whether someone is "electable" is whether they have received attention from the media and the support of one of the two major parties. Naturally, those organizations put considerable thought into who is electable in making their decision. Ultimately, all arguments for "strategic voting" tend to fall apart. The voters themselves get so little say in why the next president is that the best we can do is just to not vote for nincompoops.

In the recent Russian parliamentary elections many leaders of small opposition factions gave their supporters the same advice: ignore your own political preferences, but don't ignore the elections. Please come and vote for any big party except the ruling party. Eventually the ruling party got less than 50%.

As far as I understand, the ruling party got what it wanted: 53% (or something like that) of Parliament seats, which gives it a controlling interest in Russian politics. It got what it wanted by using a proven, time-honored tactic called "voting fraud".

We can probably learn some sort of a lesson from Russian politics, but "your vote counts as long as you cast it wisely" is not it.

8Vladimir_M15y

I haven't followed Russian politics much for the last few years, and I'm just asking for curiosity: do you think the result was due to this appeal, rather than just because of popular resentment that would have been demonstrated anyway? Looking at the figures from Wikipedia, the overall voter turnout appears to be smaller than in 2007, which would suggest the latter hypothesis.