this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2024
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[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 days ago (1 children)

The spoiler effect is at best a bad hypothesis

No, it's well understood, and very clearly exists. Here is an example using randomly generated voters ans candidates:

Election report for election "Plurality 2 Candidates"
Total people: 1047

Kruger - 112 votes - WINNER
Sahl - 111 votes

Election report for election "Plurality 3 Candidates"
Total people: 1047

Sahl - 109 votes - WINNER
Kruger - 93 votes
Maikol - 91 votes

The problem is that these are in effect venn diagrams. There will always be overlap, and that's the problem. That's what leads to election results being changed by the entrance of an irrelevant candidate (the spoiler effect).

and has never been proven to effect actual votes.

That's because the spoiler effect most easily happens in races that are already close, because we don't do much actual real life testing with actual elections because of the uncountable number of variables, and because doing it the python data science way is significantly more meaningful because of the aforementioned number of variables problem.

People voting third party just would not vote if there was no third party option.

If that's really true, then this whole idea about the democratic party trying to earn the votes of green voters is bunk. Either there is no overlap, in which case it's bunk. Or there is overlap, in which case we have a spoiler effect.