« Eureka Conversation | Main | Trigeneration »
July 31, 2006
The Bullet Voting Dilemma
Several people have told me I should be encouraging people to bullet vote for me. For those of you that don't know of the concept, basically you tell people to only vote for you even though they have multiple selections. The theory goes that if you are in a race where people are voting randomly, you end up with a relatively standard distribution of votes. By having your supports vote only for you, you rob the other people on the ballot of the standard distribution of votes allowing you to beat them because your bullet votes put you over the top.
While this tactic can work, I'm not sure that it's exactly sporting. First it gives the appearance that the party is weak because if everyone does it, you end up with what appears to be low turnout for the race. Like in the race for the DCC seat I'm seeking, there were nearly 10,000 under votes. The highest performing candidate got about 6900 votes. That screams that there was a massive amount of this bullet voting going on. Anytime I talk to someone about voting for me, I always tell them to just pick the last three names on the list. That includes the two new guys, Stan Janor and myself, plus the female incumbent Christine Davenport. I have a rule about always trying voting for Democratic women (I voted for Christine and Sandi Parrish last race as I mentioned before). So unless I get new information to make me think otherwise, she's got my vote this time as well. This seems like a more useful approach to the problem.
It will probably cost me the election, but it seems like a lot better approach than to have more under votes than votes on the books. I'd rather see Democratic Unity and lose, than to make us seem weak as a party. Let's leave that kind of stuff where it belongs, in the Republican playbook.
Read more over at Wikipedia.
Posted by Jamison at July 31, 2006 12:29 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.daffodillane.com/movabletype/mt-tb.cgi/6710
Comments
I'm with you. This practice doesn't seem very fair. If you're supposed to vote for 3 people, then you should vote for three people. Otherwise it's just a bit deceptive I think.
Posted by: Dianne at July 31, 2006 10:39 PM