It’s of interest how one would have voted in the recent 2012 presidential election using the various voting systems that are being proposed by election method enthusiasts. I’ll suggest how a progressive like me might vote optimally in that election using the various methods as a guide.

First, I’ll name a candidate-set consisting of the most well-known candidates the ones who were in debates both televised and on the Internet. This candidate set includes the candidates of four ‘media-banned’ parties. All parties are ‘media-banned’, other than the officially recognized, promoted and endorsed one, the Republocrat party.

As I’ve said, I claim that all of our official public elections are u/a. That greatly simplifies how this progressive Voted optimally and I will share with you my strategy.  As I mentioned in a previous post, it appears to me that Rocky Anderson and the Justice party are a strategic clone of Jill Stein and the Green Party US (GPUS), with the purpose of splitting the Green vote.

Anyone who has heard the debates among the four candidates of the ‘media-banned’ parties or read platform policies and/or candidate statements on the Internet will understand why I don’t include Obama, Romney, Goode or Johnson among the acceptable candidates.

If a progressive agrees with me on that, then Anderson is an unacceptable. Even with methods that don’t have a clone problem, a progressive would be unlikely to regard the Justice party as acceptable, because, once its intentions are in question, there’s no reason to trust it or its candidates to really implement the good policies that they copy in their talk.

Based on the above two paragraphs, then, the only candidate, among the above-listed 6-candidate candidate-set, who is acceptable is Jill Stein. So, here is how I suggest that a progressive voter should have voted optimally in the 2012 Presidential election, using the above-listed 8 voting systems:

That’s because IRV’s u/a strategy is to rank the acceptables in order of winnability, and then rank the unacceptables in order of merit.  Sure, it isn’t easy to say what the order of merit is among the five unacceptables.

But I suggest Anderson as the most meritorious unacceptable, because at least he re-states Stein’s policy proposals, Even if we can’t trust his sincerity, at least he doesn’t espouse or advocate bad policy proposals. Johnson would immediately get us out of Afghanistan, but Goode wouldn’t allow non-congress-declared wars, and so presumably he wouldn’t be opposed to doing the same. None of those six candidates, other than Johnson, proposed the extreme Libertarian policies proposed by Johnson.

But, comparing Johnson to the Republocrats, Johnson’s opposition to unnecessary wars, and his completely non-authoritarian positions make him better than the Republocrats. As for Johnson, he has some extreme Libertarian policies like the elimination of occupational health and safety laws, consumer protection laws, product safety and food safety laws, etc. If we had the desperate and undesirable choice between Johnson and the Republocrats, maybe it would be best to assume that, while the public would accept Johnson’s better policies, they’d almost unanimously reject his worse policies, and they’d therefore never be implemented. That’s why I rank Johnson over the Republocrats in IRV.

TUC’s (and therefore Beatpath’s) problem, even in a u/a election, regarding which acceptables to top-rank, doesn’t occur with this candidate-set, because there’s only one acceptable. TUC’s u/a strategy when there’s only one acceptable) is to top-rank the acceptable, and then rank the unacceptables in reverse order of winnability.

In the IRV poll, after the first FreeAndEqual debate, Johnson, in comparison to Stein, got a lot more transfers from Goode and Anderson. That strongly suggests that there are a lot more people who preferred Goode rather than Anderson. Hence my 2nd-ranking of Anderson.

Of course the fact that Goode was eliminated before Johnson suggests less winnability for Goode, which is why I ranked Goode over Johnson. Less demonstrated winnability likewise is the reason why I ranked Johnson over the Republocrats. Everything that we were hearing suggested that Romney was less winnable than Obama, especially since Romney’s 47% remark.

1. Jill Stein