Why score voting should decrease the importance of money in elections

If score voting were adopted, then it automatically would decrease the importance of money. We first must ask the underlying question: why is campaigning so absurdly expensive? When today's technology makes it easy and cheap to publicize your message? The reason is that

1. if you vote for Ralph Nader, you are, strategically speaking, an idiot. Hence it does not matter that Nader can make his message available, nor whether that message is good – still few will vote for him. Studies showed 90% of voters who regarded Nader & Buchanan as the best US presidential candidate in 2000, voted for somebody else. That's an insurmountable hurdle for everybody like Nader and an enormous distortion of democracy.
2. The reason for that is the plurality voting system's "wasted vote" mathematical pathology...
3. which does not exist with the "score voting" superior system...
4. in which there is no such thing as "vote splitting" and "wasted vote" hence no inherent strategic need for candidates to expensively convince voters they are one of the "2 most likely to win" so that it is non-idiotic to vote for them. Instead, voters can, with no idiocy at all, just score the good candidates high, not caring one whit about how much money they have or how likely or unlikely they are to win.

This all is a fact which the media virtually never talks about. Indeed they virtually never mention the importance of other voting systems even when it is staring them in the face, such as Donald Trump and Arnold Schwarzenegger (/Trump2015.html). In those cases, the entire real story was the voting system, but the media would simply not talk about that actual story. Not even for 1 sentence.

The strategy to stop money-corruption of politics must be 2-pronged: not only try to get money out of politics – a noble idea, but one which nobody has managed to do in 200 years of US history and even if done would be very vulnerable to cheating and backsliding and the fact the FEC almost never enforces even the lame laws we do have – but inherently decrease the importance of money. The latter idea is one almost nobody in the media talks about, and hence almost nobody knows about. (And if money mattered little, then that'd remove the incentive for cheating, partially solving the cheating and non-enforcement problems.)

Some other remarks on cash by Sherman/Smith/Carback

Some other remarks on cash by Rob Lanphier

Return to main page